


An Eagle Among Lions

by AMX004_Qubeley



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Aliens (sort of), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Androids (sort of), Angst, Basically Flashpoint with Edelgard instead of Barry Allen, Body Horror, Conspiracy, Dimitri has two Crests, Double Agents, Edelgard joins the Blue Lions, Edelgard/Dimitri role swap... but only one way, F/F, I call him "Mayonnaise Dimitri", It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, Lost Technology, Paranoia, Pining, Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Secret Organizations, Spoilers for Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Spoilers for Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Time Travel, Triple Agents?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:13:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 39
Words: 541,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24608248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMX004_Qubeley/pseuds/AMX004_Qubeley
Summary: The morning after her and Byleth's wedding, Emperor Edelgard von Hresvelg wakes up in her old bedroom in Garreg Mach to discover that she has brown hair, only one Crest, ten happy and healthy brothers and sisters, and a bad habit of sleeping through her professor's lectures. Hubert is unusually cheerful, Byleth teaches the Blue Lions, and nobody has heard of the Flame Emperor. Instead, a figure known as the Hurricane King and his sinister cohort the Death Knight stalk the monastery.No sooner has Edelgard sought out out this new world's Byleth than she finds herself standing in the eye of a storm of continent-spanning conspiracies centered on a young man with snow-white hair — one that will engulf Garreg Mach, the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, the Adrestian Empire, and Edelgard's own family as it carries the roaring winds of war across Fodlan. A threat from a past so ancient it predates even Fodlan's oldest and murkiest myths is stirring, threatening to tear time itself asunder — and it may be her only way back home.
Relationships: Blue Lions Students & Edelgard von Hresvelg, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Edelgard von Hresvelg, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Marianne von Edmund, Edelgard von Hresvelg & Edelgard von Hresvelg's Siblings, Edelgard von Hresvelg/My Unit | Byleth, Hapi & Edelgard von Hresvelg, Ingrid Brandl Galatea & Edelgard von Hresvelg
Comments: 2758
Kudos: 1041





	1. The Past Is a Foreign Country

**Author's Note:**

> Art by [Kira/Kuroi](https://twitter.com/Kirakanjo?s=09)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard loses Byleth, Hubert is unsettling, Ferdinand is a blowhard, and Bernadetta is a universal constant.

Edelgard von Hresvelg, Emperor of Adrestia, was a woman who always looked to the future and always planned the shortest possible route to it. That was how she had crushed the Knights of Seiros, ended the thousand-year tyranny of the Immaculate One, and unified the continent of Fódlan under her banner in only five and a half years. But as she lay in bed entwined with her wife—the woman who had once been her professor, then her military adviser, and was now her empress-consort—on the night of their marriage, she wished that this present would stretch on for all eternity.

The wedding of Emperor Edelgard and Byleth Eisner had not been not an ordinary emperor’s wedding, for Edelgard was anything but an ordinary emperor. She wished to create an egalitarian society, and a great leader had to lead by example—and that was why, instead of a lavish ceremony and reception in the Imperial Palace attended by, more or less, the entire government (and plenty of nobles from neighboring lands), she had opted for a small ceremony attended only by her friends at Garreg Mach Monastery.

If Edelgard had had her way, the ceremony would have been as short, swift, and efficient as the swing of an axe, but in the end, she was glad that she had tasked Byleth with planning the whole affair. It had been Byleth’s idea for Dorothea to serenade them with an aria from a little-known romantic opera in the courtyard flanked by rosebushes. It had been Byleth’s idea for Ferdinand to give a toast and Hubert to be Edelgard’s groomsman. It had been Byleth’s idea to have herself and Edelgard read their vows (leaving poor Edelgard to improvise) at the Goddess Tower where they had met in the middle of the night after the ball all those years ago, with Mercedes officiating; and it had been Byleth’s idea for them to all hold still for what must have been nearly twenty minutes between _I do_ and their first kiss as married women, sweating in the hot and muggy summer air, while Ignatz put to canvas the rough sketch for a painting.

And their revelry had lasted well into the night. All of her friends had been there. Even Lysithea, though she was still recuperating from an experimental procedure to remove her Crests and could hardly walk without Linhardt and Hanneman assisting her; even Petra and Ashe, who’d spent the past few months in Brigid escorting imperial diplomats; even Marianne and Jeritza, the two most notorious loners in all of Fódlan, had emerged from their respective separate seclusions to attend. Caspar had drunk more than anybody thought was possible for a man of his stature, even managing to impress Manuela. Annette had nearly set the whole monastery alight trying to assist the cooks. Ferdinand and Hubert had gotten into a cordial duel over some trivial matter that eventually brought them both to the monastery’s long-disused dormitories for what some suspected would be an altogether different kind of ‘duel.’

Long, long after the sun had set, Edelgard and Byleth had slipped away from their friends and headed to the dormitories, and in the same bed where Edelgard had slept as a student all those years ago, the two of them had shared the first night of the rest of their life together.

In all her life, Edelgard had never been so happy as the moment she had fallen asleep with her face firmly nestled in the chest of the woman who, whenever the choice to stand at her side came up, always said _yes._

The next morning, she woke up to sunbeams streaming over her face and found herself lying in her old bed, staring up at her old ceiling, listening to birdsong flutter through the window. And she was in bed alone. Byleth was nowhere to be found.

Bleary, groggy, head pounding, Edelgard lifted herself into a sitting position. She felt oddly light, unencumbered by the weight of age and lingering scars of battle. She’d had a persistent ache and tension in her shoulder ever since she’d wrenched it trying to drag Byleth out of Fhirdiad as it burned, for one, and now that shoulder felt completely loose and free. It didn’t actually feel like she had a hangover at all. It also didn’t feel as though she’d danced all evening until her feet had started to bleed. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and cracked apart her parched and dry lips that had cleaved together in her sleep.

She scanned the room. The bed was soft, but plain, the floor lined with hardwood panels and a crimson rug, the walls wood and stone. She could swear she’d traced the same pattern of stones and mortar lining the walls and the same knots and whorls of oak lining the ceiling during every sleepless night back in the old days. And on the desk in the corner sat a mountain of books and a pile of handwritten pages that she swore hadn’t been there last night—and the very same worn, black-feathered quill pen she would write her letters home with and the eastern porcelain tea set she had been given by her father.

She headed toward the desk and took a look at the quill pen and the tea set. Curious… she’d brought these back with her to the palace. They shouldn’t be here, unless Byleth had for some reason brought them along (who knew what that wonderful woman was thinking sometimes?).

“Profes—er, Darling?” she faintly called out, feeling her wife’s absence strongly. _Her wife._ It was strangely thrilling to think of her using the words _her wife_ after so many years spent pining. “Where have you gone? I would expect this of myself, honestly, but not of…”

There was a knock on the door, jolting her out of her musings. Edelgard, assuming Byleth was waiting behind the door to jump out at her and surprise her, eagerly headed for it.

 _“Lady Edelgard, are you awake?”_ Hubert called out from beyond the door, his voice muffled.

Edelgard’s hand stopped an inch away from the doorknob. Something felt wrong. “Hubert? What are you doing here? Where’s… what’s going on?”

 _“It is Thursday, Your Highness,”_ Hubert explained matter-of-factly. Something felt wrong about his voice. The pitch, the timbre, was all dead-on, and yet he sounded unusually… bright.

And besides, hadn’t yesterday been a Sunday?

Unease making a knot in her stomach, Edelgard put her hand to the doorknob and made to twist it, but stopped.

Her hand. Her bare hand. The sleeve of her pajamas—wait, _these_ weren’t the pajamas she’d worn to bed last night; she hadn’t seen, let alone worn, these nightclothes in _years—_ slipped down her forearm to reveal her bare wrist. No scars. Not a trace of the cruel experiments Those Who Slither had inflicted on her. Just perfectly smooth skin, pinker and more flushed than she’d ever remembered it.

Something was very, _very_ wrong here.

She pushed past that unease and opened the door, finding Hubert looming over her. He was even wearing his old Officer’s Academy uniform, a black jacket with gold piping and trim over a white dress shirt, matching jodhpurs, black calf-high boots, and an ornamental saber sheathed at his hip.

She had to laugh. Somehow, he even _looked_ younger—not quite so lean and hard-bitten around the face, the shadows under his eyes not so deep or so dark. In fact, he looked positively bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. “Who roped you into this, Hubert? Was it Dorothea?”

He wrinkled his nose. “That upstart commoner?”

A little bit of a nervous flutter seized her heart. “It is a funny prank, I will admit, but I would like to see my wife now.”

Hubert had never looked so utterly befuddled. “…Wife?” he asked, his lips slowly tracing the words as though they were from a foreign tongue.

That flutter became a panicked beating. What was going on here? The wedding had been yesterday—he’d been her _groomsman,_ for heaven’s sake! Edelgard took a step back, hugging her arms. “This is not funny anymore, Hubert. What is going on here?”

“What is going on here,” Hubert replied, “is that the Professor is going to have you disciplined if you are late for class again, Lady Edelgard.” He crossed his arms.

“‘Professor?’ We aren’t in class anymore,” she said. “We haven’t been for years. Now, why don’t we end this charade? I’m sure you’re champing at the bit to get back to Enbarr and begin our campaign against Those Who Slither in the Dark—”

“What in the Goddess’ name are you talking about?” Hubert asked again, his brow furrowing.

Edelgard was even further taken aback. This was wrong, very wrong—and that man standing before her, though he had Hubert’s sallow complexion and beady yellow-green eyes and raven hair, was _not_ Hubert von Vestra. “‘The Goddess’ name?’” she repeated. “You’re an _atheist,_ Hubert.”

Hubert staggered backward and clasped a hand over his heart as though he’d been shot. Betrayal was written all over his face, his mouth agape. “How could you accuse me of something so heinous, Lady Edelgard?”

“What’s going on here?” Edelgard shot back. “Who are you? What day is it?”

“Thursday, my lady—” Hubert stammered, taken aback.

“What _year?”_ she snapped.

“It is the fourth Thursday of the Verdant Rain Moon,” Hubert replied, his brow wrinkling further, “Imperial Year… 1180? Lady Edelgard, have you hit your head on something? Do you need me to take you to the infirmary?”

“No, I’m… fine,” Edelgard sighed. “I will get ready for class posthaste.”

“Perhaps you should check yourself in. You do not seem well.”

“No, I’ll be right out.” She took the door and slowly closed it on him, then locked it. She hadn’t traveled backward in time, had she? The very idea was absurd! This had to be an elaborate prank of some sort—something the entire Black Eagles Strike Force had conspired on. And it must have been Byleth’s idea, too. Whatever this was, she supposed she could play along with it—for now. There was no need for her to be distressed.

Edelgard went to her dresser drawers and found her uniform. Funnily enough, though, it wasn’t the uniform she remembered. As head of the Black Eagles, she’d worn a much more ornate uniform than her classmates—black shorts and boots, red tights, an ornate black blouse, and a waist-high cape of crimson silk clasped over one shoulder. But this uniform was simpler. Knee-high black boots, a white blouse, and a black high-waisted skirt, with a strap that went across her chest from shoulder to hip to hold a sheathed ornamental saber at her side. She had a black jacket she could wear over her blouse as well, but it was the middle of summer, so it was too hot to wear it.

This was a dream, she told herself. She was dreaming that she was back in school and there was probably an exam today that she hadn’t prepared for. And she would probably go to class only to realize that she hadn’t put on her underwear and the exam was on wind magic. She’d had those dreams too many times before, although they were far less frightening than her usual nightmares, and she knew that such dreams were common among her peers as well.

She hit her knee on the edge of her armoire and bit her tongue on the yelp she would have let out. The pain stung and throbbed, and there was an angry red scrape across her kneecap.

This wasn’t a dream, she told herself.

She rifled through the rest of her drawers to confirm that her usual uniform was nowhere to be found, and with a resigned sigh, dressed herself. When she was done, she picked up a comb and took the hand mirror from her desk—

Only to recoil in shock at the sight of herself in the mirror, dropping it to the floor and shattering it.

Instead of a twenty-four-year-old silver-haired emperor with a stern face hardened by years of battle, she had seen staring back at her an eighteen-year-old girl, her face fair and soft, with hair a glossy, lustrous, beautiful light chestnut brown.

* * *

The evidence before Edelgard, the sight of Garreg Mach as it had been before the war, was incontrovertible. As incontrovertible as the face that had greeted her in the mirror. She _had_ traveled backward in time.

After she had declared war on the Church of Seiros, Edelgard’s first military campaign had been to capture Garreg Mach Monastery. Her reasons for doing so had been myriad. First, Garreg Mach had represented the seat of the church and the archbishop’s political power—to claim it for herself was to strike a demoralizing blow against her enemy right off the bat. Second, it had provided a powerful tactical advantage as a base of operations: Garreg Mach was in the exact center of Fódlan, and thus from it one could strike at any other part of the continent with relatively equal ease. Third, the monastery stood on steep ground surrounded by mountainous terrain and had thus for nine hundred years been thought of as utterly unassailable to the extent that no one in history had ever even _tried,_ and so to take it had been to show the world that Edelgard could do the impossible. Fourth, the idea of literally attacking and dethroning the Goddess had amused her.

Fifth, though, and perhaps most importantly (though she had never admitted it publicly), she had come to know Garreg Mach as her home. In fact, this place had, in a way, been more of a home to her than the Imperial Palace in Enbarr. That was why she had gotten married there.

The truth was that she had loved Garreg Mach. In her world and her future, this place was a crumbling remnant of its former self, occupied only by Imperial soldiers and battered by repeated sieges, but she had plans to restore it and reinstate the Officer’s Academy as part of her reformist work.

Because she so loved this place, to see the sun-kissed grounds so pristine, the walls and towers and monuments so taken care of, the lawns and courtyards so well-kept, and to see the classes bustling with students from all over the continent, made Edelgard feel weak in the knees. A part of her wanted nothing more than to run from one end of the monastery to another again and again, crisscrossing it every which way, soaking up every detail to indulge her nostalgia. Perhaps she would even deign to visit the cathedral.

But of course, she had class to attend, and it didn’t seem this strange so-called Hubert would take to her running off.

She couldn’t get used to the smile on Hubert’s face as he walked her to the Black Eagles classroom. There wasn’t a dour bone in his body, unlike the Hubert he knew. For the original Hubert, even when he was in high spirits, an aura of darkness clung to him, and everyone feared his sinister demeanor. He had suffered, too, when Edelgard had suffered, and he had pledged himself to bloody his hands for her sake—to take all of the darkest burdens of her cause for himself he could stand.

But in a world where Edelgard still had brown hair and lacked the scars of her imprisonment, Hubert was just an average vassal to royalty. A common nobleman lacking the tortured soul she knew him for. Edelgard had often wondered and had once asked what kind of person Hubert would have been if he had not had to devote himself fully to her cause. Now she was finding out. As it turned out, the answer unsettled her.

This man was _wrong._

She wondered, were her siblings still alive? If those monstrous experiments had never happened, then…

The thought raised a lump in her throat. She could _see_ them again. She could remember their faces—she could find out what they would have looked like if they’d grown up. The thought simultaneously excited and terrified her.

She kept wondering about her past. If she hadn’t ever been subjected to those experiments in this world’s past, then had she even been taken to Fhirdiad? Had Hubert ever left her side? Was her uncle really her uncle, or was he still Thales? How could she get answers to these questions without people thinking she was daft or suffering from amnesia?

Amnesia… there was a thought. What if she pretended to have amnesia and asked Hubert to tell her everything he knew about her? She supposed she’d missed her chance for it, though, unless an opportunity arose for her to give herself a nearly life-threatening concussion, or at least the appearance of one, in his presence.

Her musings abruptly ceased when she entered the Black Eagles classroom and found herself faced with her old classmates. These past six years, she’d grown to know them all as friends, trusted companions, her vaunted Black Eagle Strike Force. But here, they were all strangers. Next to this strange, almost-cheerful Hubert, she couldn’t help but wonder just how different _they_ would be compared to what she knew.

The first sight that greeted her was that of Ferdinand von Aegir standing at the head of the class, clad in a unique uniform that sported red knee-high breeches, a long black coat, and a waist-high crimson half-cape clasped to his shoulder and draped over one arm. His carrot-red hair stood out against the much deeper red of his ensemble. She knew from that image that this was not the eager young nobleman who’d always sought to prove himself against her. This was someone who didn’t _have_ to.

 _“Ferdinand?”_ Edelgard gasped, awestruck at the sight of _him_ standing where she had once stood. _He_ was the head of the house, not her? That explained why _her_ uniform was so plain…

Ferdinand grinned. “Ah, hello, Lady Edelgard. I am glad to see you have arrived early for once,” he said as he returned to his own desk at the front of the classroom—the desk Edelgard had always sat at when she’d been a student here. Seeing him there was unsettling.

Another wave of disorientation surged through her like nausea, but she looked around for a free seat. Most of her classmates, to her relief, didn’t seem unlike their old selves, at least not the way Hubert and Ferdinand did. Linhardt was still pretending not to be asleep and doing a bad job of it. Bernadetta was still hiding under her desk with a book over her head as though it could render her invisible. Caspar was still fidgeting. Petra was still sitting with rapt attention and a ramrod-straight spine, her hands clasped in front of her, even though the lesson hadn’t started yet, and Dorothea was idly filing her fingernails.

Edelgard took the empty seat next to Dorothea, settling uncomfortably next to her and wondering how different this one would be to the fierce (sometimes _too_ fierce) egalitarian she knew and loved.

“So now you deign to grace us commoners with your presence, huh, Edie?” Dorothea muttered bitterly at her.

“E-Excuse me?” Edelgard retorted, shocked at her tone. Dorothea had had a chip on her shoulder about nobility back in these days, to be true, but she’d never been so hostile to _her._ There had always been a sort of playful dismissal in Dorothea’s nickname for her, a way of deflating her aristocratic bearing and equalizing her, but it had never sounded so _venomous._ Dorothea tended to save her venom for the noblemen.

Dorothea went back to filing her fingernails.

Edelgard looked around the classroom again and noticed Hubert taking a seat at Ferdinand’s side. Ferdinand, ever the bolder of the two, leaned into him and gave him a quick peck on the cheek.

Shocked, she blinked and rubbed her eyes. Had she really just _seen_ that? Sure, she had known for years that Hubert and Ferdinand both had a crush on each other—she’d helped Dorothea and Mercedes trick them into their first date, after all—but that hadn’t blossomed until well into the war. As students together, they had _loathed_ each other.

She supposed that a nicer and less traumatized Hubert would get along better with Ferdinand right from the start, and probably wouldn’t have been so sexually repressed. While to Edelgard, his existence was wrong, he did seem to have a happier life in this world. The thought made her almost feel _guilty,_ somehow, as though it had somehow been _her_ fault that her world had forced different and more painful circumstances upon him.

Things couldn’t get any stranger. But thankfully, Professor Byleth was on the way, and surely _she_ would know what was going on. Byleth was… special. Edelgard had always had the feeling that she could somehow see the future as clearly as anyone else saw the past. Surely _she_ of all people would remember who she was— _would_ be. Surely she would see Edelgard and know her as her wife. She _had_ to.

The professor walked into the classroom—but it wasn’t Byleth.

Professor Hanneman, gray-haired, mustachioed, monocled, with a gray tweed coat draped over his shoulders, walked to the front of the class and cleared his throat. “Good morning, students,” he said. “Ah, Princess Edelgard. Nice of you to join us for once.”

Edelgard looked at the rest of the students. No one seemed to think anything was out of the ordinary. _“Dorothea,”_ she whispered once Hanneman had slipped deep into a lecture about the magic and mysteries of Crests—of _course_ he worked his obsession into every lesson— _“Has Professor Hanneman_ always _been our professor?”_

Dorothea looked at her as though she’d grown a second head. “…Yes?” she answered.

_“Where does Professor Byleth—”_

_“Princess Edelgard?”_ Hanneman’s sharp and stern voice rang out, snapping Edelgard to attention.

“Yes, Professor,” she said, sitting up straight and clasping her hands on her desk.

“When you deigned to show up for class, I almost expected you to pay attention for once,” he scolded her, prompting a barely-suppressed snort of laughter from Dorothea. “I see I was foolish.”

“I was listening,” Edelgard lied. In truth, Hanneman’s lesson had gone in one ear and out the other. She wasn’t even sure how long he’d been talking. She quickly studied the diagram he’d been drawing on the blackboard. Troop movements, it looked like, and straight from the history books. This was the battle that had ended the War of the Eagle and Lion: Loog and Kyphon’s decisive victory on the Tailtean Plains.

She knew this lesson backward and forward. Byleth taught it better. On top of that, she’d _relived_ it—in her war against the church, she’d slain Dimitri on that very same battlefield. Though the battle had been a miserable slog, it had been endearingly poetic to behead the King of Faerghus and bring an end to his kingdom at the same place where his ancestor had claimed his victory centuries earlier.

Hanneman gave her a stern nod and went back to blathering. Edelgard wanted to bury her face in her hands. What kind of a student _was_ she in this world? Someone with a penchant for skipping class and sleeping through lectures, apparently? She felt insulted and ashamed by this world’s version of herself.

Well, that was going to change. While she was here, she might as well turn this world’s Edelgard’s life around.

But this lecture was so _boring._ Hanneman was a physician and a scholar first and foremost; all he could do on the subject of military education was teach from a musty textbook. Byleth had _lived_ battle, had been a mercenary for years before coming to Garreg Mach, and she always had perspectives and insights the books had lacked.

“And so,” Hanneman said, “when the Faerghus Resistance Army flanked the Imperial Army on both sides, victory for Loog and Kyphon was assured, though the Imperial Army continued to fight for half a day before they were surrounded and General Leo announced his surrender—”

Edelgard put up her hand.

“Yes, Your Highness?” he asked, taken aback.

“Victory for Loog and Kyphon was _not_ assured,” she pointed out. “Victory is never assured until your enemy has surrendered. General Leo gave up too soon.”

“He gave up when his enemy had him surrounded and outnumbered,” he said.

“No, he could have kept fighting. There was an opening in Faerghus’ ranks he could have exploited. Their offensive capabilities were weakest where their forces were thinnest—”

Hanneman tapped at the blackboard. “Ah. You mean here, I presume?”

“Yes.”

“Here, where Loog and Kyphon themselves were positioned?”

“Yes. Look at how overconfident they were, maintaining their section of the formation almost entirely single-handedly. If I had been there, I would have directed my troops in a wedge formation and overwhelmed them, exposing Loog and striking a demoralizing blow against Faerghus.”

He chuckled. “Perhaps you should spend less time fantasizing about alternate histories and more time studying, Your Highness. Can anyone else enlighten Lady Edelgard as to why Kyphon and Loog’s position was unassailable? Linhardt?”

Linhardt lifted his head and opened his eyes. “Loog had a Major Crest of Blaiddyd and Kyphon a Major Crest of Fraldarius,” he mumbled before bowing his head again and going back to sleep.

Edelgard rolled her eyes, crossed her arms, and pouted. It was always all about Crests with these people.

As the lecture dragged on, she found it harder and harder to pay attention (and it had been hard enough to begin with). Hanneman was just so _uncreative_ in his thinking. She knew that such poverty of imagination was relegated only to his classroom—in his own private studies, he was quite brilliant; Edelgard had actually trusted him to devise a way to remove her and Lysithea’s two Crests because of that. But he was only teaching these students so that he could have the resources for his own research, and it showed—he had no passion and barely knew more than his own students. He did the bare minimum to keep his tenure.

When at last the morning lecture ended, the class broke for a brief lunch and returned to practice drills in the woods just outside the monastery’s walls (except for Bernadetta, who had not-so-mysteriously gone missing). Edelgard had been confident that like her memories of her tactical experiences, six years of training and fighting had also carried over along with her memories of her world and future. She was right—but only partially. She knew everything intellectually, knew the proper stances and forms, but putting them into practice left much to be desired. This body was much younger, much less battle-hardened (and, due to her apparent laziness, much less well-honed even than she’d remembered it being at this age), and on top of that, she lacked all of the muscle memory she had built up over her years of fighting. She knew what to tell her body to do, but her body was not trained to do it—it simply couldn’t follow her orders.

She certainly wasn’t the Flame Emperor in this world. But then, she asked herself, if she wasn’t, then who _was?_ Ferdinand? Unless he dyed his hair, he certainly didn’t look like he’d taken her place in the sinister schemes of Those Who Slither in the Dark.

Was there _even_ a Flame Emperor in this world? Did Those Who Slither in the Dark even exist at all?

At last, the drills came to an end, and on Edelgard’s way back to the dormitories, Ferdinand stopped her. “Ah, Edelgard, dear,” he said, “may I speak with you?”

Edelgard reluctantly agreed and stopped in her tracks. All the fresh bruises this weak body of hers had accumulated already ached fiercely as she stood in place. “Yes? What is it, Ferdinand?”

Had he just called her _dear?_

“I was very heartened to see you this morning. So our talk the other day has made an impact, then?”

“Yes, I won’t be late anymore,” she said, hoping she was making a correct guess about the nature of her ‘talk’. It felt strange answering to him; while Ferdinand had always been quite outspoken with her and had never been afraid to speak his mind when he disagreed with her (much to Hubert’s chagrin), he’d never spoken to her like _this._

“I am glad to hear it. And especially glad to hear you speak up in class today! I always knew you could do well if you simply applied yourself instead of doing the bare minimum. In fact, you had some creative ideas today.”

“Oh?”

“We could have used that out-of-the-box thinking in our mock battle with the other houses a few months ago,” Ferdinand sighed. “I hope to hear more of them from you. Now that we have squared away the matter of your truancy, though, I would like to speak to you about your decidedly-middling test scores.”

“E-Excuse me?” Edelgard asked, not accustomed to being berated by him. “Middling? You mean average?” Average wasn’t bad, she thought. At least this world’s Edelgard wasn’t a _complete_ idiot if she was managing to get average test scores without attending classes.

“Yes,” he admitted, “but we are nobles! We are by definition _above_ average, as Lorenz and I have often remarked to each other. I knew you must feel useless,” he told her, “seeing as you are ninth in the line of succession for your father’s throne, and Burkhart had perfect scores when he attended this academy…”

Edelgard tried to hide her shock. _Burkhart?_ Had he just said _Burkhart,_ as in _Burkhart von Hresvelg?_ That had been her eldest brother’s name! And if she was ninth in line, that meant exactly what she’d suspected earlier this morning—her siblings _were_ alive in this world. At least, all the ones older than her.

She could have fainted right then and there. She already felt lightheaded. She had a _family_ here. This world’s Edelgard hadn’t had to start from scratch to make a new one out of her classmates…

Ferdinand went on. “…and it is hard to measure up with that—Goddess knows I am doing my best, and even _I_ sometimes despair it is hopeless—but that is no reason to put in so little effort. You are a _Hresvelg,_ Edelgard!”

“Hmm,” Edelgard said, not listening.

“If you need tutoring, I would be happy to help,” Ferdinand said. “As the old saying goes, after all,” he said with a good-natured laugh, “the sun never sets on a Hresvelg-Aegir friendship!”

Edelgard snapped back to attention. “No, no—I will be fine. I just… haven’t been applying myself,” she admitted. It felt so strange to apologize for something she hadn’t even done and didn’t remember doing anyway. “I will try harder from here on out.”

“Thank you,” Ferdinand said heading for the door. “As head of the Black Eagles, of course, I feel personally responsible for your academic conduct; I would not dream of disgracing your father by allowing a daughter of his to underachieve.” He put a hand to his chest. “Or, of course, my future wife.”

“And she would be…” Edelgard teased out, though as soon as the words fell from her lips she became terrified that she already knew the answer.

Ferdinand’s smile vanished and a frown tugged at his lips instead. “Edelgard, are you okay? Do you need to see Professor Manuela?” he asked, his brow furrowing.

“Ah. My apologies. I… hit my head on something yesterday,” she said, “and, well… some things have been hard to remember. Perhaps you could fill me in—”

“Ah, of course I can fill you in, dear!” His smile returned in full force. “We are to be married next Garland Moon!”

“What?”

“It was a condition of the truce between my father and yours that brought an end to the Insurrection of the Seven all those years ago. My, that must have been quite a blow to your head!”

_“What?”_

“It is funny to think about. We are only engaged, and already the arrangement has brought our fathers so much closer together. They say His Majesty never makes a decision without first asking for Prime Minister Ludwig’s ear, and I cannot wait to carry on that spirit of cooperation with Burkhart! To think I will be the Emperor’s brother-in-law through our union…”

_“What?”_

“Edelgard, what is wrong? You are gawping like a fish. The news could not have been _that_ surprising.”

Edelgard tried to stop gawping. “I—I do apologize, Ferdinand. I was simply… My memories just came flooding back to me—all those fun times we had together.” She swallowed a lump in her throat and tried to quell her nausea. It wasn’t that she disliked Ferdinand—well, perhaps she disliked _this_ Ferdinand, but she certainly didn’t dislike the one she knew—but the thought of marrying him, let alone being _forced_ to marry him, didn’t give her a warm and fuzzy feeling, to put it lightly. “Thank you.”

“Think nothing of it, my dear.” He leaned forward; Edelgard nearly feared he would try to kiss her, but instead he simply patted her gently on the shoulder. “Now, if you will excuse me, I must speak with Bernadetta about her antisocial tendencies. They are not healthy.”

Edelgard headed after him. “Why don’t I?” she asked. People like Ferdinand, Ingrid, and Caspar, she recalled, had often been too rough with Bernadetta at the academy—dragging her out of her room, carrying her off against her will, and so on—but Edelgard had learned long ago to be softer around her, kinder, to let out her compassion from beneath her cold and stoic armor. Bernadetta always assumed the worst of people (and considering her father, who could blame her?) and so to reach out to her required only showing her one’s best. Whatever reputation she had in this world, she was sure she could overcome it and help her friends using the knowledge she had gained from six years of learning and fighting at their sides.

“Well, it is _my_ responsibility,” he said. “You do not have to concern yourself with—”

“I’m sure you have plenty of better things to do,” she said. “You are, after all, head of the Black Eagles.”

“Yes. That is right. I am.” He rapped his knuckles against his chest and smirked. “And I have to speak with Linhardt as well regarding his narcoleptic tendencies. And Caspar regarding his fidgeting. Oh, yes, and I agreed to tutor Petra regarding the intricacies of Fódlanish grammar—”

Perhaps he could have rubbed it in a bit more, Edelgard thought. “Yes, yes, I see, you have quite a lot of micromanaging to get to,” she muttered under her breath. So this was what Ferdinand would be like if he were utterly devoid of humility. The original Ferdinand had a swelled head as well, to be fair, but at least he had two feet firmly planted on the ground, and on the occasions that he didn’t, Dorothea was more than happy to _drag_ him down to it. As it turned out, Ferdinand was a man who needed to be second-in-command to someone for his own good.

“What was that?”

“Nothing. One more thing,” she asked him. “What class does Professor Byleth teach, again?”

She was almost afraid that Ferdinand would turn to her, cock his head like a dog, and ask, _who?_

What he said instead, though, was almost _worse._

“Professor Byleth? Why, the Blue Lions, of course!”

The Blue Lions. Dimitri. Edelgard’s heart felt like paper that had been crumpled into a ball. So this was a world where Byleth hadn’t chosen the Black Eagles… hadn’t chosen _her._

Her wife hadn’t chosen her.

“Do you know where she might be?” she asked, trying to keep her voice from cracking.

“The Blue Lions left for eastern Faerghus just last Sunday to clean out a group of bandits in Conand Tower,” he said. “It is a few days’ march there and back; unless they encounter unexpected trouble, they should return by tomorrow. Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” Edelgard said, shaking her head. “Thank you, Ferdinand. I will see you in class tomorrow.”

With that conversation behind her and questions buzzing incessantly in her head like flies, she headed for Bernadetta’s room.

Please, she begged the universe as she knocked softly on the door, let _someone_ in this world be _normal._

 _“Go away!”_ Bernadetta squeaked at her, her voice muffled by the door.

So far, so good. “It’s me, Edelgard,” she said, realizing as soon as the words left her mouth that those words probably didn’t mean much to her. In her world, Bernadetta had always admired her, and the two of them had grown closer because that admiration had driven her to seek to better herself, as difficult as it was. What reason did Bernadetta have to admire her in this world?

The door opened just a crack, enough for Edelgard to see a thin strip of violet hair and pale skin and the cross-section of a worried gray eye behind it. That was heartening.

“I’m here to keep Ferdinand from bothering you,” she said to Bernadetta.

The door creaked shut again. “He—h-he wants to _bother_ me?”

“You and everybody else, apparently. Of course, he thinks he’s _helping._ I don’t think someone as gregarious as him will ever understand that some people _enjoy_ being alone.”

Silence. Edelgard got the impression she’d said the wrong thing. This would be so much easier if she had any of this world’s Edelgard’s memories to rely on. How could she know if she had said something to upset her earlier? This was like putting together a puzzle while blindfolded and wearing mittens. And that wasn’t even taking into account that if this world’s Bernadetta was a totally different person, then nothing Edelgard knew about her world’s Bernadetta would help her.

This whole situation made her head hurt. She wanted nothing more than to wake up in her own bed back at the palace and be with her wife.

Her wife who was currently teaching Dimitri instead of her.

Edelgard didn’t think of herself as a very possessive person, but that hurt. Irrational as it was, it almost felt as though she’d already found her wife cheating on her after one night of matrimonial bliss!

“I understand,” Edelgard said to her. “Ferdinand won’t leave _me_ alone, either. Why don’t we both hide from him together? In the greenhouse, perhaps?”

_“You… aren’t here to scold me this time, Your Highness?”_

_This time?_ At least that was a clue she could use. “Of course not. It was wrong of me to do so earlier. I’m sorry.”

_“Ferdinand put you up to this, didn’t he? He’s gonna jump out as soon as you pull me out of my room!”_

Bernadetta was a person who required patience. Because of her tendency to jump to conclusions—and always the worst case scenarios—anyone who wanted to reach out to her had to be willing to belabor their points. Edelgard had learned so much about patience, and so much about kindness, and even _humility,_ from being Bernadetta’s friend; now it was time to put those lessons to use.

“No one is going to do that. Ferdinand’s off being a busybody to someone else right now.”

_“It’s a trick! You’re just lulling me into a false sense of security, aren’t you?”_

Edelgard sighed. She’d forgotten just how far Bernadetta had come since they’d first met, and seeing her regressed all the way back to her old self was disheartening.

She sat down next to the door and leaned back against it. “I’ve reflected on what I last said to you,” she lied, “and realized I was mistaken. I’ll talk to Ferdinand for you and I’ll see to it he knows that how you spend your time outside of class is nobody’s business but your own.”

 _“Really?”_ Bernadetta answered. _“Y-You can_ do _that?”_

“Of course I can,” Edelgard said. “Did you know that he and I are arranged to be married? It is a wife’s job to whip her husband into shape, after all; I’m going to need all the practice I can get.”

 _“My father always said it was a wife’s job to do as her husband said,”_ Bernadetta meekly replied.

 _I know,_ Edelgard wanted to say. “Your father sounds like a blustering, blithering idiot.”

Bernadetta laughed. _“I didn’t know you and Ferdinand were supposed to get married.”_

 _Neither did I until five minutes ago,_ Edelgard wanted to say. “I am about as pleased with the arrangement as you would be.”

Bernadetta laughed again.

“Say, Bernadetta, do you like carnivorous plants?”

 _“Huh? H-How did you know about that? Did you sneak into my room while you were cutting class? Ugh, I_ knew _it—I should just stay here all day—”_

“No, no, not at all,” Edelgard said. “I merely asked because, well… they’re my favorite plants, and I thought we might have other things in common.”

_“Don’t laugh.”_

“I won’t. I promise.”

_“Really?”_

“Really.”

_“I sew little dolls of pitcher plants in my spare time.”_

Edelgard nodded. Back in her world and her time, she had one of them on her writing desk. “May I see them?”

_“No!”_

“Fair enough. What do you like about carnivorous plants?”

_“Oh, everything—they look so weird, but in a sort of beautiful way, and they eat just like us, except they just wait for their food to come to them instead of going out and getting it!”_

Edelgard had to put a hand to her mouth so she wouldn’t chuckle, knowing that Bernadetta might think she was laughing _at_ her instead of _with_ her. “That’s what I like about them, too. They don’t care if people prefer flowers. They’d rather be beautiful in their own way. They don’t shape themselves for other people’s consumption.”

_“Yeah.”_

“Do you want me to bring you some food from the dining hall?”

Bernadetta was silent for a bit, as though she were consulting with herself. _“No, that’s okay. I’ll just sneak into the kitchen tonight when everyone else is gone.”_

Classic Bernie. “Okay, then,” Edelgard said. She stood up and stretched her legs. “I’m glad we talked.”

_“Me, too! I—I always thought that since you were a princess, you were, uh… scary?”_

Edelgard smiled. “Well, I’m also an incorrigible slacker, apparently, so apparently I’ve just slacked off on being scary.”

Bernadetta laughed. _“W-Well don’t work any harder at it! Uh—I-I mean, not like I’m telling you what to do, Lady Edelgard, Your Highness—I’m sorry!”_

There was a scuffling sound from behind the door, then silence.

Edelgard headed to the dining hall for dinner, took a slice of cake back with her to the dormitories, left it outside Bernadetta’s door, and knocked, then hurried away, lingering just far enough from the door that when Bernadetta looked outside, noticed the treat, and dragged it hungrily back into her room, she wouldn’t see her.

Her spirits bolstered by her positive interactions with at least one of her classmates, though still torn between two distinct kinds of homesickness, Edelgard returned to her empty quarters. And then, when she was sure she was alone, she cocooned herself in her bedsheets in a vain attempt to ward away the oncoming loneliness that awaited her. What she wouldn’t give to be back by Byleth’s side…

Then the thought struck her—if _she_ had taken this world’s Edelgard’s place… then had this world’s Edelgard taken _her_ place in exchange? There was so much work she had to do in her world, in her future: so many reforms to put in place, so many systems to abolish and replace—and what if a teenage slacker who knew nothing of hardship had taken her place in that world?

A leaden weight sunk in her stomach. Her Byleth, Ferdinand, and Hubert, wherever and whenever they were, must have been going through hell right now. She had to find a way back to them.

* * *

The next day, she woke up and to her dismay, she was still alone and not, as she’d idly hoped, in the embrace of her wife. Sleeping alone had never hurt so much before as it did now. And even though in this world, the young girl whose place Edelgard had taken had probably slept free of night terrors, her memories did not know that. Her sleep was fitful and restless, punctuated by dreams of slithering tails and nibbling teeth, and she had no one at her side to act as a balm to soothe her troubled mind.

As soon as she had free time between another one of Hanneman’s dreadfully boring lectures and the class’ training drills, Edelgard hurried to the gates of Garreg Mach and waited for the Blue Lions to return from their mission in Faerghus.

She still remembered that particular mission well when it had been _her_ class assigned to it and not Dimitri’s. That had been the first time her classmates had seen the true horror behind Heroes’ Relics and the brutal Crest system firsthand, witnessing the death of a man who had been turned into a beast in every way including physical for want of a Crest… If she hadn’t already been radicalized long before then, seeing the son of a noble family reduced to a literal beast due to the misfortune of his birth certainly would have done the trick.

As soon as the class returned to the monastery’s gates, Edelgard pushed her way through the crowd to greet them, hoping that Byleth would recognize her.

The class arrived tired, mud-spattered, and bedraggled, all with haunted looks in their eyes. Several of the students among them were people she remembered joining her cause and becoming members of the Black Eagles Strike Force, fighting on her side through the bloody war; the rest she remembered seeing dead, some by her own hand, in that same war.

And Byleth Eisner stood at the head of their convoy, her gray jacket slung over her shoulders like a cape, the Sword of the Creator sheathed at her hip, her feathery seaweed blue-green hair brushing her neck and shoulders.

There she was, the woman Edelgard knew as Empress-Consort Byleth Eisner von Hresvelg, her gaze blank and unfamiliar—there was not a glint of love or even recognition in her azure eyes.

Edelgard’s breath caught in her throat.

Byleth didn’t know her.

Her wife didn’t know her.

Edelgard kept staring at Byleth until she passed her by, hoping to see something, _anything,_ anything of the woman she had married. She didn’t look a day younger or older than she had on the night of their wedding—not even a single hair on her head was different—but the eyes, those lovely azure eyes, held no brightness within them. They were not the eyes Edelgard had stared into when she’d taken Byleth’s hands and said, _I do._

It had only been a few days ago that Edelgard had last seen her clad in an ivory white wedding gown with a crown of embroidered eagles (Bernadetta’s handiwork) nested in her hair to match Edelgard’s own crown, her cheeks flushed and eyes shining. By comparison, this Byleth was practically a living corpse, and the sight of her made Edelgard’s heartache anew.

And then the rest of Byleth’s students, the Blue Lions, passed her by. Silver-haired Ashe wore a shaken look as though he’d seen a ghost, his face speckled with more than just freckles, one arm and one leg wrapped in a splint; he shared a horse with Ingrid. Sylvain had the Lance of Ruin slung over his shoulder, its spiny spearhead drenched in red blood and black ichor, and in stark contrast to his usual far-too-outgoing attitude looked as cold and standoffish as his counterpart Felix.

And then Edelgard caught sight of Annette holding hands with Mercedes von Martritz, kind and gentle Mercedes, whose once-sandy blonde hair was as white as snow and whose once-rosy complexion was pale as a ghost just as Edelgard’s had been. And behind the two of them, flanked by his omnipresent vassal Dedue Molinaro and by Gilbert Pronislav of the Knights of Seiros, was Dimitri, who was just as pale and ghostlike as Mercedes, his hair—hair that had once been as yellow and lustrous as gold—dyed the same wintry white.

This world _did_ have Those Who Slithered in the Dark, Edelgard realized, and it _did_ have a Flame Emperor—and he was Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, prince of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus.


	2. The Winds of Change

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Flayn's disappearance prompts some odd behavior from Seteth and even odder behavior from Edelgard, Edelgard meets the Blue Lions, and the Hurricane King makes his entrance.

Summer was dying; a cold wind that threatened the onset of autumn was starting to blow from the north, heralding the dark schemes and plots Edelgard knew were unfolding yet no longer had any place in.

Flayn was missing, and this time, the Flame Emperor had nothing to do with it. In this world, the Insurrection of the Seven had been handled much more amicably, and after a year spent in Fhirdiad with her uncle, Edelgard had been taken back to the palace not to be experimented on and transformed into a living weapon, but to resume her normal life along with all her siblings. If Dimitri’s pale visage was any indication, Those Who Slither in the Dark had set their sights not on the Adrestian Empire, but on the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus.

How strange it felt to be irrelevant, to be idle, to know that the schemes of Those Who Slither had skipped past her entirely. She had no grand purpose, no delicate machinations which required her attention, and no throne to prepare herself for. She was the idle, useless middle child of a royal family with, it seemed, no particular ambitions.

She’d always wondered what an idle life would be like. Being the first—and only—heir in line for the imperial throne, plotting and scheming with the very same monsters who’d ruined her life, waging a war against half the continent were all responsibilities she couldn’t afford to abandon. Responsibility enough to drown in. She had to shoulder those burdens for the sake of her siblings, for the sake of a better world, and if she had no time for leisure aside from what little she could bear to set aside, then so be it.

Now she was facing a glut of free time and hardly knew what to do with herself. Training and keeping up with her studies surely hadn’t occupied so little time when she had originally been a student here, had it? Although it was tedium and agony to have to retrain her body and relearn her muscle memory from scratch (how embarrassing it was to flop around like a beached fish during drills!), she could all but sleepwalk through everything else.

It was enough to make her feel _guilty_ for abandoning her world and her duties, even if she hadn’t exactly _chosen_ this. Perhaps some almighty force in the universe had gotten sick of hearing her complain about her workload and decided to deal her an ironic punishment. She didn’t believe in the Goddess Sothis, but she couldn’t discount the possibility altogether that _something_ was out there (and it was a sadist).

She felt an itch too deep underneath her perfect skin (her _too_ perfect skin) to be scratched, and for some reason Flayn’s disappearance weighed heavily on her mind. Perhaps it was only natural that she felt guilty, though, as she _was_ currently spending the morning with Hubert in the cathedral.

Hubert in the cathedral. His knees on the polished stone tile floor in front of the altar. His hands clasped in prayer. His head bowed. Edelgard found herself having to bite her tongue to keep herself from laughing at him. When she returned to her own world and her own future, she would have to tell her Hubert all about his pious pushover of a past self… or perhaps she would just tell Byleth and keep it their little secret.

So as not to worry him, she folded her hands in mock prayer. Even if the Goddess did exist, she had nothing to say to her. Not after what she and so many others had suffered through.

As Hubert prayed and Edelgard pretended to pray, Seteth’s worried voice drifted from the room to the side of the apse, the south transept where the statues of the four saints stood. _“Flayn!”_ he called out. _“Flayn, if you are in here, please… I am not mad at you…”_

Hubert set his hands in his lap and shook his head. “That poor man. He has been like that for days, I hear. I do hope Flayn turns up soon—there is no telling what the unsavory types in the world might do with her. If they merely hold her for ransom, we will be lucky. Starvation, mutilation, dismemberment, vivisection, all manner of tortures mental and physical…”

Now he was starting to sound a bit more like the Hubert Edelgard knew. “Does the church have so many enemies?” she asked him.

“Ah, perhaps not,” he replied, shaking his head. “But there are stories… stories of a wicked black knight stalking the town, carrying off the faithful and devout in defiance of the Goddess. The Death Knight, they call him—a behemoth riding a pale horse and wielding a wicked scythe, his presence heralded by only the sound of his raspy death rattle echoing through the air… Ah, but I do get carried away, don’t I?” he asked, a slight self-effacing smile tugging on his lips.

“It’s endearing. Somehow, I think I could listen to you talk of such morbid topics from sunup to sundown.”

“Heaven forbid you indulge my anxieties,” he said, wringing his hands. “Lady Edelgard, I don’t think I have ever told you this before, but… when your uncle spirited you away to Fhirdiad, I had no idea where you had gone. My heart felt as though it had been ripped from my chest; my arms and legs as though they had been severed. I ran off to find you, fearing you ransomed or dead or worse, and it took three days before my father’s men found me and brought me home.”

 _I know,_ Edelgard wanted to say to him. He’d only been ten years old at the time. “I’m sorry,” she said instead. “It’s enough to make me wish you’d never been made my vassal.” She’d told him that before—or rather, she’d told the Hubert she knew—and she would have been irritated by having to repeat herself, but knowing she could say the same thing to Hubert and get the same result, at least in this situation, was a welcome reprieve.

“Ah, but it is an honor to serve a scion of His Majesty,” he said.

“Even a shiftless layabout such as myself?” she asked. “Surely you would rather be concerning yourself with one of my older and more promising siblings.”

Hubert shook his head. “I am afraid I simply enjoy your company. Besides, back then, I prayed to the Goddess every night for a year that you would come back safe and sound. When you did, I swore to her that I would never leave your side.”

“Oh.” This amount of sentiment coming from Hubert was unsettling. So this was what he would have been like if his faith hadn’t been so thoroughly shattered all those years ago. “And a promise you made to the Goddess means that much?” Edelgard asked him.

“If you cannot keep a promise to Sothis, then how can you keep your promises to mere mortals?” Hubert asked her in return. “Perhaps you should try promising something to her as well, Lady Edelgard. In any case, I hope that Seteth’s prayers are answered as mine once were.” He rose to his feet and offered her his hand. “Lady Edelgard, shall we go to class?”

Edelgard looked around the cathedral. It was still early in the morning; the light streaming through the tall stained glass windows, though dyed in a rainbow of colors as they traced the images of saints onto the floor, was still the warm, soft light of sunrise, and only a handful of people occupied the cathedral’s vast interior. There was someone she had expected to find here at this hour of the day, someone who had come to the cathedral every morning even in the midst of war, but she was nowhere to be found.

“If you are late again, Ferdinand will have words for both of us.” Hubert sighed. “I don’t wish to quarrel with him.”

“Is my truancy straining your relationship with him?”

He grimaced and tugged at his collar, his face reddening. “…Yes.”

“Well, then,” she said, taking his hand and pulling herself up, “let us depart.”

Seteth rushed past them, haggard and disheveled from head to toe, his usually neatly-pressed blue uniform rumpled and dirty; Edelgard could swear she could see the unusually pointy tip of one of his ears poking through his green hair, and a few days’ worth of stubble had grown beyond the well-groomed confines of his chinstrap beard.

Edelgard felt a pang of sympathy resting in her heart as she watched him hurry down the aisle. Seteth and Flayn, though allied with the church, had been by all means good and kind people. She hadn’t faced them herself during the war, but Byleth had told her that the two of them had surrendered to her in the first battle of the war and had made good on their promise to retreat from the war altogether, which surely indicated some kind of honorable nature.

She recalled when _she_ had been the one behind Flayn’s kidnapping. It had been Solon’s idea, and Edelgard, stupidly, had handed the Death Knight over to him without knowing fully what he’d intended to do with him. By the time news of Solon’s plan had reached her, she’d had no choice but to play her role as the Flame Emperor and make her debut in front of her professor and her students—dirtying her hands with the sin of Flayn’s abduction. The guilt still bit at her. She couldn’t help but picture Flayn in their clutches, locked up in the darkness, frightened, alone, her blood dripping into receptacles—had she gotten any scars from the experience, Edelgard wondered, like her own?

She hadn’t even known what they’d _wanted_ from her anyway. Blood samples from someone with a major Crest of Cethleann couldn’t have been _that_ important to them. Her and Hubert’s leading theory had been that the whole thing had just been a smokescreen so that Those Who Slither could slip Kronya into the school. All that worry and terror, all for the sake of forcing Edelgard to babysit an obnoxious, murder-happy overgrown child.

Hubert tugged on Edelgard’s sleeve. “Er… Lady Edelgard? Shall we leave?”

Edelgard hadn’t realized she’d been standing still. She was still watching Seteth as he hurried for the cathedral’s doors.

She had to do something.

There was a chance, however slim, that Flayn was being held in the same place as she’d been in Edelgard’s world. If that was the case, then how could she tell Seteth without making herself seem suspicious?

She looked up to the altar, took a deep, shuddering breath, and let out a piercing scream and dropped to the floor.

 _“Lady Edelgard!”_ Hubert cried out, falling to his knees beside her and taking her by the shoulders as her scream’s echo bounced off the cathedral’s cavernous ceiling and buttresses.

Edelgard shoved him aside and leaped back up, sprinting toward Seteth. Every eye was on her, every one of the handful of clergy and students gathered here staring slack-jawed. Seteth whirled around to face her; she nearly knocked him head over heels, hooking her fists into his lapels and shaking him like a dog’s chewtoy. _“I know where she is!”_ she shouted in his face.

 _“Lady Edelgard?”_ Seteth’s brow furrowed. “What has gotten into you—”

 _“I know where she is! I know—I—Flayn! Flayn, I kn—”_ She gulped down lungfuls of air, staring up at him with wide, mad eyes. _“The Goddess, she—I-I was praying and I saw—I saw_ her, _Seteth…”_

“Edelgard, calm yourself,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders and trying to gingerly extricate himself from her.

“I saw her—the Goddess Sothis—I saw her and heard her, and she said to me—she said—a-and I saw…” Edelgard panted for breath, playing the madwoman, worming her fingers into his shirt and gripping him all the tighter as he tried to push her back. “A revelation… a revelation from the Goddess! Dark… underground… tight tunnels, bones all over the walls… he took her… the reaper…”

Worry creased Seteth’s brow. _“What?”_

“She’s here,” Edelgard gasped. “Underground… bones in the walls…” She rolled her eyes up, fluttered her eyelids, then closed her eyes and went as limp as she could, collapsing into his chest. While she couldn’t quite faint on command, she could put on a good act.

Hubert rushed to her side and took her from Seteth. “Help me take her to the infirmary,” Seteth told him, handing her off; with all the care expected of a royal vassal, Hubert picked her up and carried her bridal-style out of the cathedral and across the long bridge that spanned the ravine with Seteth at his side.

“Lady Edelgard,” he whispered to her, thinking she couldn’t hear him, “if this is some novel, albeit blasphemous way to skip class, Ferdinand and I will be _very_ cross with you.”

* * *

Edelgard pretended to be unconscious long after Hubert and Seteth had taken her to, she presumed, the infirmary. Hubert whispered his assurance into her ear that he was going to inform the class that she was in the infirmary; Seteth announced that he was going to collect Professor Eisner and the Blue Lions. Only once both their footsteps had faded into silence did she dare crack open her eyes, and only then just to make sure they really _had_ taken her to the infirmary and not to a dungeon or worse, to Archbishop Rhea’s audience chamber (old habits, such as paranoia, died hard).

She still laid down on her cot, silent and unmoving, though every part of her had to suppress the urge to toss and turn and writhe with anxiety. Byleth was coming here. She was ashamed to admit to herself that she had found herself pointedly avoiding her these past few days—not that it was particularly difficult, since she knew well all of Byleth’s old haunts from their days at the academy.

For heaven’s sake, she’d fought a _war,_ Edelgard scolded herself, and yet the thought of looking the woman who was supposed to be her wife in the eyes was too much for her to bear. Such was the downside of being so madly in love with someone, she supposed. In her world, in her past, she’d spent her time here with a heart of ice, but Byleth had slowly melted that ice away. She hadn’t realized until the last battle in Fhirdiad just how _warm_ it had gotten, though.

And of course, the Edelgard she’d replaced had never needed to keep her heart frozen in the first place.

The door swung open again to the tune of a symphony of muffled footsteps tapping on the floor outside the infirmary.

 _“I’m sorry for interrupting your class, Professor Eisner,”_ Seteth was saying, _“but with the rest of the Knights of Seiros searching the town…”_

 _“I understand, Seteth,”_ Byleth answered coolly. _“It’s no problem. I’ll consider it just another field trip.”_

Edelgard lifted her head and squinted. “Where am I…?” she mumbled, trying to sound as disoriented as possible.

“It is alright, Edelgard,” Seteth assured her, crouching at the side of the cot. “You are in the infirmary. Do you remember what happened in the cathedral this morning?”

She nodded blearily, then shot upright. _“Flayn!”_ she cried out. Her hand found Seteth’s wrist and gripped it tightly, her thumb pressing into the hollow hard enough to feel his pulse. “I… I saw her…”

“Where did you see her?” Byleth asked, her brow furrowing.

Edelgard fought every part of her that wanted to look her in the eyes. “I… the Goddess, she spoke to me… and showed me…”

“A revelation from the Goddess?” Mercedes interjected, a hushed sense of awe coloring her soft, breathy voice, and it was then that Edelgard realized that the rest of the Blue Lions were behind Byleth—including Dimitri with his eerie white hair.

These past few days, Edelgard had been collecting information on Dimitri as best she could without making herself look like a hopelessly uninformed idiot. From what she could tell, several years ago, the Blaiddyd royal family had been attacked and kidnapped while traveling through Duscur. All were dragged from the caravan and spirited away, leaving only King Lambert’s severed head and a single surviving knight as a testament to the grisly event. After nearly two years of searching, the Knights of Seiros had found Prince Dimitri wandering the mountain range that bordered Duscur and Faerghus alone, emaciated and flea-bitten like a mangy dog. They said his hair had turned stark white from the shock of his father’s murder.

Edelgard knew better.

And she also knew that Mercedes was likely his prototype, just as Lysithea had been hers back in her world. Poor Mercie _,_ who had already suffered so much due to her Crests _without_ being subjected to such nightmarish torture…

Dimitri’s cold, icy eyes, frostier than Edelgard had ever remembered them due to the paleness of his skin and hair, met hers. Edelgard felt her stomach churn. The last time she had stared into those eyes, they had been staring up at her from a severed head lying on the mud-stained ground, blood and viscera trailing from the ragged edges of his neck where the bony, spiny edge of Edelgard’s axe Aymr had ripped through flesh and bone with equal ease.

Just as it had in death, his mouth hung ever so slightly agape as though in dull surprise at the sight of her.

“Hardly hard evidence,” Felix grumbled, “but it’s not as though we’ve turned up any other clues.”

Seteth held up his free hand—the one Edelgard didn’t have a death grip on—to silence the students. “Please, let her continue. Edelgard, tell me what you saw.”

“Bones in the walls,” she repeated, her voice slow and level, as if entranced. “Darkness beneath the earth; tight, winding tunnels; skulls leering out from amid the stones…”

“That sounds like…” Ashe mused, his milky skin turning an even paler shade that made the band of freckles across his cheeks and nose stand out.

“An ossuary,” Dimitri said, shifting uncomfortably where he stood. “Seteth, are there catacombs beneath Garreg Mach?”

Seteth’s shoulders slumped. “Who knows what is beneath this monastery? Anybody with intimate knowledge of its construction died at least nine hundred years ago. There are rumors of an entire city under our very feet, if you could believe such fantasy…”

“I know how to get there,” Edelgard said.

“Then lead the way,” Byleth said.

Edelgard looked to Dimitri, trying to measure the look on his face. He wasn’t hiding his discomfort well. If her suspicions were correct and he was this world’s equivalent to the Flame Emperor, then he would have to break away from the group at some point to go after his pet Death Knight. Or perhaps he wouldn’t—if he only knew one way into the catacombs and it was the same way Edelgard herself had used all those years ago.

“Yes, lead the way,” Seteth said, helping Edelgard off the cot. She pretended to need his help.

“And to think I thought _I_ had a natural talent for chasing girls,” Sylvain quipped. Ingrid elbowed him in the ribs and scowled at him.

Edelgard led Byleth and Seteth on, tracing her own steps from years ago across the monastery, into its most shadowy corners. The Blue Lions followed behind them in a nervous cluster. Keeping a close eye on Dimitri, Edelgard wondered when he would break away from the group and what excuse he would use to do it. When it had been her behind the Flame Emperor’s mask, she’d made herself scarce as soon as possible and entrusted Hubert to cover for her, but Dimitri seemed to be putting it off as much as possible.

Unless she was wrong about him. Maybe his equivalent to the Flame Emperor would not be making an appearance today. Or maybe it wasn’t him at all.

Then, with a faint and feeble outcry, Mercedes collapsed, her knees buckling and legs crumpling beneath her. It was such a familiar sound, gut-wrenching in what it signified to Edelgard.

Annette gently cupped a hand around the back of Mercedes’ head and lifted it as the rest of the group came to a halt and circled around her. “Oh, no, Mercie… are you alright?”

Mercedes shakily nodded and wiped away the thin line of crimson blood that had trickled from one nostril down her lip and over the contour of her chin. She propped herself up. Edelgard knelt down next to Annette at her side, her heart stirred by the sight of an old friend in need.

Mercedes’ violet eyes, which looked even more vibrant in contrast to her pale skin and snow-white hair, were hazy and bloodshot. As she reached out to pat Annette’s hand, her fingers shook. Edelgard recognized those symptoms. Lysithea had been the same way for months before Linhardt and Hanneman had conducted their operation on her to remove her Crests—and it was then that Edelgard remembered that Mercedes was a young woman, not an adolescent like her peers; if she was anything like Lysithea, then twenty-two was likely close to the end of her artificially shortened lifespan. She had been Edelgard’s prototype, after all, not expected to live past her mid-twenties (while Edelgard herself had been told she would likely pass away at just shy of thirty years).

“Oh, Mercie,” Edelgard found herself whispering, staring at the amalgamation of two of her close friends from the Black Eagles Strike Force with pathos wrenching her heart.

“Don’t worry about me,” Mercedes said, struggling to prop herself up. She coughed and wheezed, speckling her pale hand with flecks of blood. “I just… need to lie down for a bit. You go on without me.”

“I’ll take you back to the infirmary, Mercie—” Annette began.

“Allow me,” Dimitri said, scooping her up off the ground. “You all go on ahead. I’ll get Professor Manuela.”

Edelgard kept a suspicious eye on him while he retreated. Mercedes wasn’t faking her sickness to give him room to escape—she knew those symptoms well enough to be sure of that—but surely he would use this opportunity to make his debut in the catacombs as Edelgard once had.

* * *

Bobbing torches cast flickering shadows across the grim and grisly décor of Garreg Mach’s catacombs. Edelgard remembered this place well, though she wished with all her heart she didn’t. These were tight, enclosed spaces, the tunnels barely wide enough for people to walk two abreast, the air smelling of stale musk and faint decay. Skulls and bones lined the walls, mortared in with the bricks and stones to form macabre friezes.

These dark, cramped tunnels were far too much like the dungeons beneath Enbarr for Edelgard’s liking, and being down here without the protective shell of her Flame Emperor armor made her feel all but naked. If she only had Byleth’s hand to hold, it would be easier to delve into this darkness, but she had no choice but to smother her needy fingers in a tightly clenched fist and hope that no rats slithered across her feet.

She held an iron axe in her hand; Felix had insisted that they make a detour to arm themselves, just in case they ran into brigands or bandits down here. The axe felt unusually heavy, constantly reminding her that she did not have the Crest of Flames, and on top of that, she didn’t even have the muscle tone and definition that she remembered having at eighteen. This body’s weakness kept surprising her even when she knew it shouldn’t.

True to Felix’s word, they did encounter resistance—soldiers clad in blue cloaks and furs leaped out of the shadows with gleaming sabers and rapiers, short spears, and light bows. Byleth’s Sword of the Creator cut fiery arcs through their ranks, her students’ weapons nipping at their flanks. Even though Edelgard was weaker than she would have liked, and even though she was fighting alongside many people who were strangers to her, she found herself falling into old habits—even barking the occasional order to Annette and Ashe, both of whom had joined Mercedes in the Black Eagles Strike Force back in her world. Edelgard knew their strengths backward and forward (Ashe was fast and dexterous, but by the same metric, he was fairly weak and quite defenseless if an enemy could ever actually pin him down; Annette was good with wind magic, which was especially useful in these catacombs, but shared Ashe’s physical weakness) and so commanding them just came naturally to her. So naturally, in fact, that she found herself irrationally irritated when they ignored her orders.

Winding through the zigzagging corridors of the catacombs, Edelgard struggled against both the mysterious soldiers who sprang up to repel her and the claustrophobia tightening her chest. She was used to fighting for her life, but this body wasn’t—while her feet struggled to move at her brain’s command, the slim blade of an enemy’s rapier easily ripped through her bicep, spreading a blossom of dark blood across the sleeve of her blouse. Edelgard could normally shrug off such a wound with ease—it would just join the myriad scars, both from battle and from the experiments, that crisscrossed her body—and keep fighting, but in this body, it was enough of a shock to knock her to the floor.

A saber cut through the air overhead, felling the soldier who’d attacked her, and Felix knelt down to help her up. “Careful, princess,” he said to her. “You might break a nail.”

She rolled her eyes, not so much at his barbed comment as at her own frailty. She certainly had her work cut out for her down here.

Whenever the short spurts of fighting died down, Edelgard returned to the lead with Byleth and Seteth, tracing her own familiar path through the catacombs. She was amazed she remembered this place so well. There was, as she recalled, a large chamber in the center of the maze where the Death Knight should have brought Flayn, assuming things were proceeding here as they had in her world—which was, admittedly, a rather big assumption to make.

Edelgard stepped back and sank into the center of the formation as Ashe nimbly set to work on opening the door to the central chamber. If things were going as they had in her world, then the Death Knight would be behind that door.

She still remembered swooping in to save her classmates from Jeritza’s bloodthirsty alter ego. How nervous she’d been, trembling under the suit of armor that hid her fear so well; how disgusted she’d been, laying her eyes of Flayn’s unconscious body and realizing just what she’d been forced to play a part in; how hard it had been to stay calm when she’d stepped in front of the Death Knight and told him he’d had his fun and his work here was done. Was Dimitri the same type of person who would step in to stop his own Death Knight from slaughtering his classmates as well?

The door swung open and the class surged through, fanning out into a loose arc. In the middle of the chamber, flanked by cobweb-wreathed stone coffins, was the limp and seemingly lifeless body of Flayn, her emerald hair fanned out around her head on the floor like a halo.

 _“Flayn!”_ Seteth cried out, stepping forward only for Byleth to cross her sword over his chest and hold him back.

Standing over Flayn was a knight clad in armor and vestments so dark blue they were nearly black and wearing as a cloak the skinned pelt of a gargantuan Faerghus dire wolf—the beast’s thick hide draped over his shoulders with its forelegs and clawed paws dangling over his chest and its tail cascading down his back. He held in one gauntlet-covered fist the haft of a long polearm capped by a wickedly curved, single-edged blade. The knight’s helmet, emerging from a sea of fur, was forged in the shape of a wolf with its jaws open wide; within its maw, caged by long, sharp fangs of steel, was a metal likeness of a dour, grim human face. Shifting and flickering torchlight danced across flowing geometric patterns etched into metal and sewn into fabric.

Edelgard squinted to better make out the mysterious knight’s features in the darkness. Was this the Death Knight of this world, or something else? Was it Dimitri underneath that bestial helm and thick pelt?

“Step away from her,” Seteth commanded the knight, readying his lance.

The mysterious knight said nothing, but merely raised his glaive, upended it, and used the back of its curved blade to gently lift a lock of Flayn’s long, curly hair from her head to reveal a sharply pointed ear.

In response, Seteth stiffened and brandished his lance, making to strike. Edelgard swore she could hear him grinding his teeth. “I said to step away from her! Who do you think you are?”

The knight stepped backward and drew his glaive back from Flayn’s face, letting the tip of the blade cut a shallow line of crimson across her cheek. A hollow, echoing chuckle, deepened and distorted by some device within the knight’s helmet, escaped him. “I am the Hurricane King,” he said. “Count up your sins, for the dead demand their tribute.”

The room erupted into a tempest of swords and spears. The Hurricane King’s glaive clashed with every weapon that came its way, kicking up flurries of sparks. Edelgard was wholly unprepared for such ferocity: This was not the measured and composed show she’d put on as the Flame Emperor by any stretch of the imagination. In his guise, Dimitri seemed to have no regard for the safety of his own classmates, though the brunt of his fury was directed at Seteth.

Arrows glanced off the Hurricane King’s armor, snapping and splintering on impact. Cutting wind buffeted his armor, billowing and bristling his heavy fur cloak. Despite the onslaught, the Hurricane King was indomitable, shrugging off Ingrid and Sylvain’s lances and the steel bite of Felix’s blade. The Sword of the Creator lashed out, its segmented blade wrapping around the haft of his glaive and wrenching it out of his grasp. Seeing an opening, Seteth thrust his lance forward, only for the Hurricane King to grasp the haft with his hands, clench his fist, and reduce the sturdy and polished wood to splinters in his grip.

The Hurricane King ripped the useless halves of the lance out of Seteth’s grasp, leaving him defenseless. Byleth leaped to Seteth’s aid, trying to keep the Hurricane King occupied, only for the lance’s spearhead, held in the Hurricane King’s grip like a sword with no hilt, to rip through her thigh and splatter the stone floor with a spray of blood so dark in the torchlight it was nearly black—

Edelgard was not the type to lose her cool. But she was distressed and distraught enough already, given her situation, and the sight of her beloved’s blood spilling on the floor was beyond the pale.

Charging forward with an angered battlecry, she swung her axe at the Hurricane King’s head, aiming for the neck, letting the power of the Crest of Seiros surge through her. She’d decapitated him once before in another life and she could do it again—

His gauntleted hand hit her in the midsection hard enough to knock the wind out of her and throw her off her feet; she felt her back crack against the far wall and saw an explosion of stars twinkle and spin before her eyes. The world swam in and out of focus, blurring and sharpening to the beat of her heart.

The soft, pained sound of gagging and gurgling echoed through the room as the Hurricane King held Seteth aloft by his neck, gauntlet clamped around his throat and squeezing tighter and tighter, threatening to snap his neck if anyone dared raise a blade against him again. “I am the living monument to your sins,” he intoned, speaking to his new captive. Seteth’s face, already pale from lack of air, began to take on a corpselike bluish pallor. The Hurricane King squeezed tighter. “The storm of reckoning and liberation is nigh; now beg the Goddess for forgiveness and salvation with your last breath…”

A pillar of light burst from the floor at his side, dissolving in a flurry of sparks to reveal another knight—this one clad in spiny black armor with a horned death’s-head helmet, blazing red pinpricks for eyes behind its cavernous eye sockets. An almost mechanical rasping sound issued from the knight’s helmet and a constellation of lights blinked steadily across his breastplate with clockwork precision.

The black knight laid a hand on the Hurricane King’s shoulder, his gauntlet sinking into the furry pelt up to his wrist. “Halt, my liege. You are pushing yourself too hard,” he spoke in a deep, sonorous voice altered in the same manner as his counterpart. “We have made an impression. Our work here is done.”

The Hurricane King pondered his words, then loosened his grip on Seteth’s throat and let him crumple in a heap to the floor, coughing and sputtering. Another pillar of light engulfed him and the black knight, sweeping them both away without a trace.

The world grew muddled and turned pitch-black again, and when Edelgard regained consciousness, her head was resting on a familiar lap; her eyes were greeted by a familiar face.

 _“Byleth, my darling, my love,”_ she gasped, her tongue forming words before her brain could fully process where she was or who exactly she was speaking to, _“how you shine upon my life…”_

Nearby, Sylvain snickered. “And I thought _I_ was hot for teacher,” he said as Edelgard realized what she’d just let slip.

“M-My apologies,” she stammered to a bemused Byleth, blushing madly enough that she felt her fingers and toes tingle from the loss of blood. “I—I was delusional and I mistook you for someone else…”

Byleth nodded. “I see,” she said, which did nothing to quell Edelgard’s embarrassment. “Dedue, take Seteth and carry him back to the surface; Ingrid, bring Flayn up.”

 _“Wait; there’s someone else here!”_ Ingrid called out. _“Felix, get over here!”_

“First the Death Knight, now the Hurricane King?” Ashe pondered, his voice shaking as much as his shoulders were quaking. “It’s like we’ve fallen into one of Mercie’s ghost stories…”

Edelgard felt Byleth’s arms snake under the crook of her knees and the span of her shoulders and lift her up. She felt herself grow weak in Byleth’s embrace, sagging in her grip and resting her head on her soft, warm chest. If she ignored the way Byleth looked at her and acted around her and focused only on the way her body felt, she seemed exactly the same as the woman Edelgard so dearly knew and loved.

She’d been a fool to avoid this. Being next to Byleth, waiting for the heartbeat that would never come, made this strange, wrong world feel _right._

She couldn’t avoid her. She had to be by her side.

Byleth carried her through the catacombs back to the sunlight. The journey was tedious; though Annette had closed and knitted together the wound to her leg, she still had to limp her way through the catacomb’s tight and winding tunnels. As soon as Edelgard felt well enough to walk on her own, she lowered herself to the floor, embarrassed to have burdened her professor for as long as she had.

When they emerged from the depths of the monastery, the sunlight was blinding. By the time Edelgard’s eyes adjusted, Dimitri had reconvened with them, already rid of his imposing Hurricane King armor. “You found Flayn? Thank goodness!” he cried out, running up to them and taking her off Ingrid’s hands. “She’s so pale,” he noted, a hint of distress bleeding into his voice. Edelgard didn’t know what to make of it—whether he was genuinely worried for her or merely putting on an act or something in between, she couldn’t tell. Who knew what had been going on in his head back in the depths of Garreg Mach? His thoughts might have been as complex and difficult to unravel as hers had been, though his berserk rampage suggested otherwise.

“She’s just unconscious,” Annette assured him, “and her pulse is strong. I think she’ll be alright!”

“We cornered the culprit,” Dedue informed him. Seteth’s unconscious body was slung over his broad shoulder. “However, he managed to escape.”

“He was like a tempest made flesh,” Ashe said, shaken. Blood stained his uniform in a few places where swords and lances had nicked him, even though he’d kept his distance as best he could in the catacombs’ tight and winding corridors.

“Yes, you would’ve gotten along well with him, boar,” Felix spat at Dimitri. A wet splotch of blood stained his forehead and matted his tied-back indigo hair.

Dimitri shook his head. “I don’t think I would have, seeing what he’s done to you all. Is Seteth…”

“Breathing,” Dedue assured him.

“Good. Tell me more about what happened later. For now, it’s enough for me to know that you’re all alive.” He wore a pained, weary smile as his icy blue eyes drifted over his classmates. Again, his gaze briefly made contact with Edelgard’s, and again, Edelgard remembered the moment that had lingered for an eternity after she’d taken his life when she’d stared into his dead eyes. She swore he somehow recognized her, or perhaps somehow _remembered_ her. “Professor, I’m sure I can trust you to get the wounded to the infirmary.”

Byleth nodded. “Of course.”

“What about Mercie?” Annette asked. “Is she alright?”

“She’s resting in her quarters. You know how tired she gets, Annette. She’ll be fine in an hour or two,” Dimitri told her. “Oh, and by the way, Professor… I don’t think I’ve ever seen your face like that.”

Edelgard glanced at Byleth and realized that she was smiling. At _him._ A pang of jealousy struck her heart.

“We found someone else down there, too,” Felix said, setting down the body he had been carrying over his shoulder onto the lawn. Edelgard knew, vaguely, who it was—this was what Those Who Slither had done in her world, too—but instead of Kronya in the guise of the red-haired Monica von Ochs, it was another one of their agents, this one in the form of a young man swaddled in a ragged cloak, his skin stained with dirt and long indigo hair snarled and matted. Edelgard hadn’t been able to discern much of his features in the darkness of the catacombs, and neither had anyone else, apparently—because when sunlight kissed the ragged young man’s thin, pale face, Felix recoiled from him as though he’d laid his hands on a hot stove. Sylvain and Ingrid gasped, both looking as though they had seen a ghost, and the tortured smile that didn’t reach Dimitri’s eyes faded away.

“Felix,” Sylvain whispered, the lump in his throat bobbing as he choked down a mouthful of air, “i-is that…?”

 _“Glenn,”_ Dimitri hissed, looking from Felix to the unconscious doppelganger lying at his feet as the color drained from his face.

* * *

Having tea with Professor Byleth was a nerve-wracking affair. Edelgard could hardly keep her knees from quaking and had to keep her hands clasped over them when she sat. She’d never felt such an unruly ball of unrest like roiling worms in her stomach.

It was just tea with the Professor. She’d had tea with her plenty of times over the course of their studies, and during the war as well. Teatime with Byleth had always been a treat. Perhaps it was precisely because she had such fond memories that the prospect of having tea with her now, here, felt so daunting.

“Thank you for inviting me, Professor,” she said politely, taking a biscuit from the tray in front of her and setting it down on her saucer next to her teacup. She mustered a smile.

Byleth didn’t quite smile back. There was a very subtle tugging at her cheek that might have been _something,_ but that was it. It hurt to see it. In Edelgard’s past, the first time she had seen Byleth smile—and smile at _her—_ had been after the rest of the Black Eagles had rescued Flayn. Here, that privilege of being the first person to see such a wonderful sight, like the first blossoming bud in springtime, had belonged to Dimitri. As irrational as it was, Edelgard almost felt as though Byleth had cheated on her.

Pushing all that aside and willing herself to just _enjoy_ her time with Byleth—that was why she was here, after all, because being without her was unbearable—Edelgard raised her teacup to her lips. The scent of the steam rising from the cup reached her before the tea could; the distinct and heady aroma of bergamot, a fragrant and tart citrus fruit, filled her nostrils.

Bergamot tea. Her favorite.

“I just want to thank you for helping my class,” Byleth told her. “It was very brave of you to accompany us down there. I wasn’t aware you were such a risk-taker.”

“For once in my life, I couldn’t stand by and do nothing,” Edelgard said. Her hand slipped to the back of her head, gingerly prodding at the tender, bruised lump under her hair that remained from when the Hurricane King had thrown her into the wall. It had been a few days since Flayn’s rescue, but it still hurt enough that she couldn’t sleep on her back. “I… cannot explain why, but I empathized very strongly with Flayn.”

“Perhaps that was why the Goddess granted you that revelation.”

“About that…” Edelgard leaned closer. “My tea—er, Professor Eisner—”

“Professor Byleth is fine.”

“Professor Byleth, can you keep a secret?”

Byleth thought for a moment, then leaned toward her. “Yes.”

Edelgard lowered her voice. “There was no revelation from the Goddess. The day Flayn had gone missing, I’d seen the Death Knight carrying her into the catacombs in the middle of the night,” she lied. “I was afraid to come forward, since I feared what would happen if Seteth knew I’d been wandering at night, so after a few days figuring out what I should do, I… pretended to have that vision.”

“I see.” Byleth took a sip of her tea. “I’ll keep this between us. What’s important is that Flayn is safe because of you. That was a very cunning way to go about it, though. I hear you’ve been exhibiting a lot of that as of late.”

“What, cunning?”

“Yes. I was speaking to Professor Hanneman the other day. He says he’s almost unnerved by the way you’ve been throwing yourself into your studies as of late. He meant it as a complement. I think.”

“Thank you, Professor.” Edelgard took a sip and winced—too hot, it burned her tongue—and set the teacup down. Her chest hurt fiercely, and staring down at the teacup she’d set down, she felt something stirring inside her, rising—

“Is something wrong?” Byleth asked.

Edelgard looked up at her. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, bergamot is my favorite… y-you brought me my favorite tea.” Her voice hitched. Why couldn’t she hold herself together?

Because Byleth was beautiful. Because the Sunday afternoon sunlight streaming into the courtyard made her skin and eyes glow just right, because her deep blue-green hair was so feathery and looked so soft to the touch, because her lips—

Edelgard wanted so badly to kiss those lips. She wanted to throw herself across the table at Byleth. She wanted to kiss her, wrap her arms around her, sink into her embrace and melt into the curve of her bosom. She _wanted_ Byleth, her wife, the one who had seen all of her sins and still chosen her unconditionally, in every conceivable meaning of the word.

Her sight blurred and she felt something hot and wet roll down her cheeks. Even _this_ Byleth, one who didn’t know her, who didn’t have any _reason_ to know her, had still taken the trouble to pick out her favorite tea.

Byleth lifted herself from her chair, bracing her hands on the table. To see those bare fingers, graceful and slender yet marked by the scars and calluses of mercenary life, and yet to not see a hard-fought wedding ring on any of them only made it harder for Edelgard to fight back the tears welling in her eyes.

“Are you okay, Edelgard?” Byleth asked.

Edelgard nodded. She had to pull herself together. Where was that severely-enforced stoicism and distance she’d carried with herself all through her days at the academy in her own world? Why couldn’t she summon it so easily here?

But too late—Byleth had already circled around the table, crouching at Edelgard’s side so their eyes were level. With not so much as a word she laid her hand on Edelgard’s back just between her shoulderblades.

“There, there,” she murmured.

It only made things worse. Edelgard’s entire body shivered; spasms wracked down her spine; the gentle rolling of tears down her cheeks became a torrent. She buried her face in her hands. She wanted to tell Byleth everything— _everything—_ about herself, about _them._ That she had lived a different past and seen a different future, that this version of _her_ with such a happy and carefree life was a stranger to her, that she knew Byleth as her closest and dearest companion through hardship and betrayal, that they were meant to be joined together as woman and wife—

“I’m sorry, Professor,” she choked out past the lump in her throat once the tears had slowed once again to a trickle. “I…”

She couldn’t tell Byleth who she was. How could she? And how would Byleth believe her?

“It’s hard being a middle child,” she lied, her voice coming out as a croak. Byleth offered her a handkerchief to wipe the tears and snot from her face, which she was happy to do. “The eldest get the lion’s share of the inheritance, the youngest are doted on, and those of us in between are ignored. Nobody notices us—too young to be the family’s standard-bearers, too old to be babied and coddled. I suppose that’s why I’ve garnered such a reputation for being lazy—because to be scolded means that at least _somebody_ is paying attention to me.”

Byleth nodded, so serene and saintlike in her understanding.

As Byleth’s palm gently glided across her shoulders, a pang of greed stabbed at Edelgard’s soul. She wanted more. More caring, more coddling, more outpouring of sympathy, more of Byleth’s hand caressing her as only it could.

She forced herself to think about their wedding night, the smiles on her friends’ faces, the heady buzz of true love that had saturated the hot, thick, muggy summer air that night. She forced herself to think about the moment she had desperately searched for a pulse on Byleth’s body while the two of them had laid before the Immaculate One’s corpse in the burning ruins of Fhirdiad. She forced herself to think about the day she had met Byleth at the Goddess Tower after five long years of war without her. She forced herself to think about the moment when Byleth’s sword had refused to claim her life, instead settling between her and Rhea to protect her. She forced herself to think about their tryst on the night of the winter ball. She forced herself to think about that night in Remire when Byleth had leaped to her defense—the very first night they had met.

She forced herself to relive all these memories, to stew in them, to braise herself and make herself tender, so that it would hurt more, so that she could cry more, and so that in return, Byleth would keep holding her.

Byleth kept holding her until the tears ran their course.

“And so… thank you,” Edelgard said to her, sniffling, when she’d had her fill. Her voice was a hoarse croak—it hurt to speak. “Thank you for noticing me.”

“Of course,” Byleth said, of course.

“Professor, I have a question for you. I know it might sound unorthodox, as you teach the students from Faerghus and I am still a princess of Adrestia even if I am not likely to inherit anything from it, but I must ask…”

She looked into those stunning azure eyes and had to fight every urge in her body to throw herself at Byleth. Her heart burned a hole in her chest. Why hadn’t she struggled this much with adolescent hormones in her own time?

Edelgard had no idea how to return to her own world and her own time. She didn’t know what Those Who Slither were plotting with Dimitri among their pawns. But something made her feel as though figuring out what forces had shaped this world into something so different from her own would be the key to finding her way back home. And as long as she was trapped in this world, she couldn’t decipher the mystery of its existence alone.

“Professor Byleth, I—I would like to join the Blue Lions.”

The words stuck in her throat. She knew what she was leaving behind by asking it. Her old class, her old friends—no, _not_ her old friends, but distorted reflections of the people she’d known for so long. Perhaps it would be a relief to escape that classroom. And of course, Byleth was such a more effective teacher…

Byleth cocked her head, pondering the question. “Hmm…” She paused, letting her little vocalization hang on the late summer breeze. The buzzing of bumblebees and twittering of birds filled the silence. “I’ll talk to Seteth about it,” she finally said.

Edelgard swallowed another lump in her throat. “Thank you so much, Professor.”

It might have just been her imagination, but she could have sworn she saw a little half-smile flicker on Byleth’s face. A smile for _her._ Edelgard returned to her room in higher spirits and spent the rest of the afternoon unable to think about anything else but Byleth, the warmth of her hand on her shoulder, and that little smile.

When the high ran down, she was left with a pit of guilt boring its way through her stomach. This wasn’t the first time she had manipulated Byleth—she’d spent an entire year torn between her identities as Princess Edelgard and the Flame Emperor lying to her and everyone else, so this was hardly new to her—but the way she had conducted herself today, extracting unearned sympathy from the oblivious woman she loved the same way one might milk a cow, felt particularly perverse.

She looked at her hand, letting her eyes trace the lines of a pristine palm, and found herself wishing her old scars were still there.


	3. The Same River Twice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard joins Byleth's class and earns some unwanted attention and some very wanted attention, and Mercedes and Dimitri tell some ghost stories.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check out this art of Mayonnaise Dimitri by [@axe_drawings](https://twitter.com/axe_drawings)
> 
>   
> 

The eve of Edelgard’s last day as a Black Eagle was restless and marred by unusual dreams—not the nightmares she was accustomed to. She hovered helplessly over her own shoulder, invisible, inaudible, and intangible, as she watched herself put her foot in her mouth over and over again, insulting her friends, ruining diplomatic meetings, making an ass of herself…

She woke up, to her relief, in a body that was, while not quite hers, fully under her control—though so much of it still ached. This body just couldn’t handle her usual training regimen, or even half of her usual training regimen, on top of the nasty blow to her head and back she’d taken in the catacombs. Her spine ached when she sat up and dragged herself out of bed.

Edelgard ran a comb idly through her hair. She still wasn’t used to it being so thick or strong—in her world, her bleached-white hair was fragile and required plenty of maintenance, including special soaps and oils, to tame its flyaways and frizz.

She almost hoped she wouldn’t get used to it. If she let herself sink too deeply into this world and love what it had to offer her, she feared she might no longer want to go back. She had to remind herself that she had stolen this life from the other Edelgard, albeit not by choice. It was not hers to want.

Then again, she _was_ completely upending this other Edelgard’s new life.

 _“Edelgard, are you awake yet?”_ Ferdinand asked, knocking on her bedroom door.

It was Ferdinand knocking at her door, not Hubert. Something was wrong—more so than usual. Dreading what he had to say, Edelgard set down her comb and went to the door.

Ferdinand and Hubert were both standing in front of her. The former, of course, looked perfect—not a single button or tassel on his uniform was out of place, his cape freshly ironed, his boots freshly polished, his auburn hair perfectly combed. Hubert, by comparison, had only just been roused from sleep by the looks of it.

“Edelgard, dear,” Ferdinand said to her, “I heard from Professor Byleth that you are transferring into her class tomorrow.”

“Should I not be?” she asked, measuring her words.

“Actually, I think it is wonderful news!” he replied. “You have clearly begun to apply yourself, and if your newfound desire to excel drives you to a different teacher… one whose teaching style better befits you…” He shrugged. “Who am I to say no to that? I am proud of you.”

“Oh.”

“Were you expecting me to say something else?”

“Oh, no, no—that makes sense.”

“I mean, you did not, er… You are not doing this to get away from me, are you?” Ferdinand asked, a worried frown creasing his face.

“No, certainly not,” Edelgard lied.

“I wish you had informed me of this, Lady Edelgard,” Hubert said, crestfallen. “Now I will have to request a transfer as well…”

Ferdinand looked perturbed. “Hubert…”

 _“Lady Edelgard, you’re transferring into Professor Byleth’s class?”_ Caspar hollered, running down the hall and skidding to a halt just before he careened into Ferdinand. “Can you put in a good word for me? Damn, what I wouldn’t give to be taught by a _real_ mercenary!”

“Y-You cannot _all_ transfer into the Blue Lions!” Ferdinand sputtered, horrified. “The Battle of the Eagle and Lion is next month; I cannot fight it with half a house!”

“Stay with Ferdinand, Hubert,” Edelgard said. “I’ll be fine on my own. I trust Professor Byleth.”

“But I am your retainer,” Hubert protested.

“You’ve coddled me for too long,” she replied, raising a hand to rest it on his shoulder. “This eagle must spread her own wings.”

“She is right,” Ferdinand told him. “Besides, what would this class be without you, my friend?”

Hubert sighed and shook his head. “I understand, Lady Edelgard. I shall remain here. But if you ever need my help—”

“I trust you’ll never be too far away,” Edelgard said. “Now, why don’t we all try to enjoy our last day as classmates?”

As she followed Ferdinand out of the dormitories and across the yard, she felt the unique sensation of a pair of eyes boring into the back of her head. After more than a decade dealing with Those Who Slither in the Dark, she knew that feeling well. She glanced behind her and saw someone slip behind the courtyard’s tall hedges too quickly for her to make them out.

“I will say, this is quite the transformation you have undergone this past week, Edelgard,” Ferdinand said to her. “It is hard to believe one could turn their life around overnight.”

Caspar laughed. “Yeah, what have you done with the _real_ Edelgard?”

Edelgard felt a chill run up her spine. Her mouth turned dry. Again, she felt intensely watched. “I _am_ the real Edelgard, Caspar. Do you think Ferdinand and Hubert wouldn’t know an impostor at first glance?”

Caspar recoiled from her and looked away. “Whoa, lighten up,” he mumbled, folding his arms across his chest. “It was a joke.”

“That is no way to speak to a princess!” Ferdinand and Hubert both scolded him in unison.

“My apologies,” Edelgard said, realizing for the umpteenth time in the past week that she didn’t have a reputation for being so cold and stern in this world. “I’m just nervous, I suppose. As much as I think I’m doing the right thing, I can’t help but be worried for the future.”

“You will be fine, Edelgard,” Ferdinand assured her, patting her on the shoulder and flashing her a cheery grin. “As much as Hubert and I shall miss you, I must admit I am thrilled at the thought of facing this exciting new you at Gronder Field next month, so train hard under Professor Byleth!”

“So you admit to being the kind of man who fantasizes about beating his wife?” Hubert spat in a rare instance of venom toward him. But before Edelgard could feel comfortable in this rare alignment of worlds, his scowl morphed into a grin and he and Ferdinand both laughed.

“Perish the thought. If anything, I fantasize about having a wife who could beat _me,”_ Ferdinand chuckled.

Edelgard rolled her eyes. She’d had about enough of Ferdinand for the day. And perhaps Hubert as well.

Ferdinand led her to a table with the rest of the Black Eagles. Even Bernadetta was there, although by the way she was shivering, likely under duress.

“Your seat, my lady,” he said, bowing and motioning for her to sit at the bench. “I will get you a plate.”

Edelgard sat down and watched him weave through the crowded dining hall.

“Um… L-Lady Edelgard?” Bernadetta stammered.

“Yes, Bernadetta?”

“Is it true that you’re leaving for the Blue Lions?”

“I’m afraid it is. I’m joining Professor Byleth’s class.”

“But if you leave—then w-who’s gonna tell Ferdinand to leave me alone?”

“Oh, I’ll still be here. It isn’t as though I’m moving halfway across Fódlan. You know exactly where my room is. Just tell me if he starts getting obnoxious,” Edelgard assured her.

Bernadetta didn’t seem very assured.

“I’m surprised you had it in you,” Dorothea said. Her eyes narrowed. “You _do_ know that Professor Byleth’s class isn’t going to be any _easier,_ right, Edie?”

“I’m hoping it’ll be more of a challenge, actually.”

Dorothea threw her head back and laughed. “You can barely lift an axe and you want _more_ of a challenge?”

“Lady Edelgard has been making great strides,” Petra pointed out to her. “I am thinking maybe you are being inspired by me?”

“Indeed,” Edelgard told her. “Petra, seeing you improve yourself so much these past few months has lit a fire under me. I can no longer resign myself to mediocrity.”

Petra smiled, a fierce gleam in her eyes. “Then we are both becoming greater.” She clapped her hands together. “We will prove our hard work to each other on the battlefield.”

The prospect of facing Petra in battle chilled Edelgard’s blood. She had to remind herself that firstly, it was a mock battle and everyone would be using wooden swords; secondly, it was still just over a month and a half away and she would hopefully have returned to her own world by then.

A shadow fell over her. Edelgard glanced up and found Dimitri looming above her. “Hello, Edelgard,” he said. “I hope you are looking forward to your time in the Blue Lions.”

“I certainly am,” she said to him, meeting his icy blue eyes. He was trying to be friendly, but beneath that thin veneer, he was so cold that Edelgard could have sworn she could see her breath in the air in front of her. His smile didn’t even come close to reaching his eyes. _She_ hadn’t been this cold when she’d been in his shoes, had she?

“Is your head feeling better?” he asked, very carefully letting his hand hover about an inch above her shoulder. She had never quite realized how much he tried to diminish himself around others—a giant trying to seem small, shrinking from the world as though everything and everyone were covered in shards of sharp glass. His polite words, too, were ill-fitting—stilted, stiff, and painfully overthought. “Professor Byleth told me you took a nasty blow from that so-called Hurricane King.”

Edelgard thought once more about the Hurricane King. His fierceness, his relentlessness, the fury laced in his voice as he’d choked the life from Seteth, the almost sadistic glee she’d seen in the way he’d held his glaive over Flayn’s unconscious body… He was a different beast altogether compared to the Flame Emperor. Who was he, beneath those masks he wore? How had his torment by Those Who Slither shaped his mind?

“You suffered a head injury?” Hubert gasped, leaping to his feet. “Lady Edelgard, why did you not tell me?”

“You saw the Hurricane King?” Caspar gasped, leaping to his feet. “Edelgard, you gotta tell me all about him! Was he strong?”

“You got hit on the head again?” Dorothea gasped. “And your personality _didn’t_ completely change this time?”

Dimitri recoiled, his brow furrowing. His eyes met Edelgard’s and quickly flitted away. He thumbed the clasp that held his cape nervously, as though he’d suddenly become even more uncomfortable in his own skin.

“I’m fine, Dimitri,” Edelgard assured him.

“Ah—well, I look forward to seeing you in our classroom tomorrow,” he said, making a hasty exit.

Dorothea watched him hurry away. “So that’s that, then,” she said to Edelgard. “The next time we see each other, we’ll be enemies.”

“Then not much has changed,” Edelgard frostily replied, crossing her arms over her chest. She tried not to take Dorothea’s attitude toward her personally—of course Dorothea, who had scraped and scrounged and clawed her way up from nothing to become an opera star and then gave it all up so she could just barely afford to enroll in Garreg Mach’s prestigious Officer’s Academy, would resent a royal brat who had never earned a thing in her life. Edelgard sympathized with her, of course, for having to work so much harder for so much less, but she would be glad to rid herself of this doppelganger Dorothea before she spoiled all of her fond memories of the original.

Dorothea picked at her food. “Honestly, I don’t know what you see in Professor Byleth. She’s _creepy.”_

“Excuse me?” Edelgard shot back, momentarily forgetting her situation and leaping to her wife’s defense. “The Professor is—I mean, what do you find ‘creepy’ about her, Dorothea?”

“It’s her eyes. Blank. Piercing. Accusing. Like she can see through everything you are in an instant.” Dorothea looked away, idly spearing a sausage link on her fork and nibbling one end. “She’s like a perfect marble statue made flesh. As though she only _looks_ human.”

“You’re correct on your second point,” Edelgard admitted before she could stop herself. “And as for her eyes, well—we’ll have to agree to disagree.”

Dorothea laughed. “Oh, Goddess. Is _that_ what this is about? You’re joining her class because you have a _crush_ on her?”

Edelgard felt the tips of her ears burn. “What? No!”

“I might have misjudged you, Edie. Who knew you had a thing for commoners?”

Hubert shot to his feet and slapped the table with his palms. “Now see here! That is _royalty_ you are mocking! Persist like this and I assure you, your fate will be—”

“What are you gonna do, kill me for the honor of Little Miss Ninth-in-Line-for-the-Throne?” Dorothea taunted him.

Hubert scowled in a very characteristically Hubert way, his jaw clenching, only for him to suddenly and meekly retreat back to his seat as Ferdinand returned to the table with two plates held in his hands. He set one down in front of Edelgard before taking his own seat. “Breakfast is served, Your Highness,” he said with a polite nod of his head.

“Thank you, Ferdinand,” Edelgard said, picking at the eggs and bacon on her plate. An awkward silence fell on the table.

“Say, Edelgard,” Linhardt said after a few minutes of uneasy peace, “you aren’t going to tell Dimitri about all of our strengths and weaknesses ahead of Gronder Field, are you? Because that’s what _I_ would do if I wanted to eke out an easy win.” He yawned. “I guess I’ll just surrender right away and save Dimitri the trouble of beating me up.”

“Of course not,” Edelgard said.

“Try it if you want, but it won’t work!” Caspar chimed in, thumping his fist against his chest. “I’ve already put together a six-week training regimen to shore up all my weaknesses, so anything you tell Dimitri about me ahead of the battle will be wrong!”

“I’m transferring to a different class,” Edelgard said, “not defecting to an opposing army. We’re not at war yet.”

 _“Y-Yet?”_ Bernadetta stammered. “Oh, no… Is Faerghus planning on invading us?”

Edelgard’s thoughts turned once more to the Hurricane King. “No,” she lied. “Sorry. That was a joke, Bernie. Anyway, Caspar, I can assure you that I won’t tell Dimitri about your fear of thunder.”

Caspar’s face turned white. “Who told—I-I mean, me, afraid of thunder? That’s ridiculous!” His wide eyes flitted to and fro among his peers.

“I trust Lady Edelgard enough to keep our secrets safe,” Hubert said.

“But if it is not too much to ask, Edelgard,” Ferdinand added, “perhaps you could tell us about your new classmates as you learn more about them so that we may devise a… strategy?”

Edelgard shook her head. “Sorry, Ferdinand. You’ll have to win on your own strength.”

“I would rather win on my own strength, yes,” he said, “but I supposed it was worth a shot.”

Edelgard looked at the familiar faces surrounding her—the distorted, but still nostalgic echoes of her friends. If this world followed the same path as hers, they would all die defending the Adrestian Empire to their last breath, one by one.

She had to know if Dimitri’s cause was as righteous as hers. If it was not, then for the sake of this world’s Edelgard, for this world’s Black Eagles, she would have to stop him.

* * *

Edelgard took time in the afternoon, once the last of Hanneman’s interminable lectures had concluded, to practice her swordsmanship in the training hall. In her world, she’d been proficient with a sword, though not as skilled as she was with her axe, and so she hoped that the gulf between this body’s skill and her mind’s memory would not be as wide. She wanted to make a good impression on Byleth tomorrow. It was an amusing idea, though—to think that after all these years, she had been reduced once more to simply a girl with a crush on a teacher, desperate to impress her.

Her sword cut through the air in a swift arc, and though she struggled to keep her footing, at least she didn’t fall face-first into the dirt. Her mind still moved faster than her body—she could hardly keep up with herself—but so far, it seemed manageable.

While other students came and went, later in the afternoon, the only other person in the training hall beside her was Felix Hugo Fraldarius, who as of tomorrow would be her classmate. He fought unending waves of invisible enemies with the frenzied fury of a man possessed, his iron blade cutting shining arcs through the air. Sweat glistened on his brow and flew from the tips of his indigo hair. He paused for only a moment to mop the sweat from his brow on his sleeve, then threw himself back into his routine. He was relentless in a way Edelgard couldn’t help but respect.

Edelgard, glad to be handling a wooden training sword (it would not do to take chances, after all), found herself trying to match his pace. She hadn’t ever faced Felix in battle herself—he’d been killed in Arianrhod and it had been Ashe who’d put him down if she recalled Hubert’s final report correctly—but she’d been told of his skill with a blade. This version of Felix, though, was younger, slower, less well trained; she fell into the old habit of pushing herself too hard and too fast, forgetting that the body she occupied was not her own, because she knew that a battle-hardened emperor with six years of experience over him could match or exceed him.

For her hubris, she fell flat on her face and, as Caspar would say, ate dirt.

Panting, her whole body aching, she mopped the sweat from her brow. She could feel her blouse sticking to her back like glue. Once she’d caught her breath, she pulled herself up, brushed the dirt from her aching elbows and knees, and looked up to see that Felix had stopped and was now glaring at her.

“Are you mocking me?” he asked her. He wore a scowl like an intemperate cat.

Edelgard laughed at him. “Don’t be so self-absorbed. I lost my footing. That’s it.”

“Hmph. Don’t think you can just pick up a sword and master it without putting in the work. It’s an insult to the art of the blade.”

Edelgard’s pride wanted her to explain to him that she’d put in the work already. But some things weren’t worth explaining. She picked up her sword again and took a fencing stance, trying to empty her head of all the things she knew how to do but that her body wasn’t ready for yet. She had to unlearn what she had learned and start from the basics. She and Felix went back to work.

“What are you even trying to do here?” Felix asked her, pausing to observe her. “I thought you were a princess.”

Edelgard focused on slow, steady strokes, deliberate foot movements, tracing beginner-level stances carefully and cautiously. She would get a feel for this body and master it soon. Then she would master her axe again. The other Edelgard would thank her for it, whenever they traded places again. “Perhaps I’ve had a change of heart. Perhaps I fancy myself a knight.”

Felix crossed his arms and let out a bitter laugh. “Go back to pampering yourself and stuffing your face with sweets, Your Highness. Scrapes and bruises don’t suit you.”

“In times of war, a great emperor must be willing to lead their armies from the front,” Edelgard said. There was nothing that disgusted her more than the prospect of letting wars rage from the comfort and safety of a palace while commoners died for the honor of noblemen.

“A great emperor?” he scoffed at her. “I heard you have ten brothers and sisters. Are you expecting something to happen to all of them?”

Incensed, Edelgard slipped too quickly back into letting her instincts rule her. She swung too hard, too fast, lost her balance again; the wooden sword went flying from her hand and nearly knocked a burlap training dummy’s straw-filled head off. The heat of her Crest of Seiros, activated unbidden, burned in her veins.

Without dignifying his barbed comment with a response, Edelgard stomped over to retrieve her sword. What an inauspicious way to hit it off with a new classmate. A part of her was glad Felix hadn’t joined her side in her world—she didn’t think she could have put up with him for very long before sending him off on a suicide mission.

Felix grunted noncommittally and went back to work, only to be interrupted again when another visitor entered the training hall. The newcomer obviously wasn’t here for any sort of practice with a sword, or any other weapon, for that matter, judging by the wooden crutch wedged under one arm. He was quite nearly Felix’s spitting image, though his face was more gaunt than lean, and his freshly-cut dark hair hung loose and free around his face.

A smile lit up the visitor’s face. “Felix!” he called out.

Though it took a second, Edelgard recognized the face of the young man who’d been pulled from the catacombs the other day. Dimitri had called him ‘Glenn,’ but Edelgard knew just as well as he did that this man was not who he appeared to be. While he was a standoffish jerk, Felix deserved Edelgard’s pity for what Those Who Slither were putting him through.

Felix barely even looked his way. “Go back to the infirmary before your leg gives out, Glenn. I’ll visit you on my own time.”

“How am I supposed to see how much you’ve grown if you won’t even visit me?” Glenn asked him. He even had the same voice as Felix, only just a bit deeper. It was easy to see that these two were brothers—if one wasn’t visibly older, they could have passed for twins.

“I’m busy,” Felix insisted, throwing himself back into his training. “Go back to bed. If you’re going to walk around like that, you’ll get no pity from me when you fall over and break your other leg.”

“Aw, Feelie, what’s wrong?” Glenn limped closer. “I don’t recall you being like this.”

“I don’t recall you being alive. Leave me alone,” Felix said, tossing his sword aside and stomping off in a huff.

Glenn watched him go, lazily turning his head to follow him through the door. “What’s _his_ problem?”

Edelgard felt another chill run up her spine, as though she were being monitored by unseen eyes, as Glenn approached her. She instinctively held her sword close, knowing that Glenn—or whoever he was underneath that perfect mask—was likely faking the injury to his leg. His crutch could easily be used as a makeshift weapon if need be. Then again, there wasn’t much a wooden sword could do to help her defend herself.

“So, you’re the transfer student…” Glenn cocked his head. Edelgard couldn’t help but be reminded of Kronya by his body language and manner of speaking. Perhaps it _was_ Kronya behind the mask. “Edelgard von Hresvelg, right?” He looked down at her. “I heard you were a spoiled little royal brat. Are people wondering what you’ve done with the _real_ Edelgard?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Edelgard lied. She stood up, keeping her eyes trained on Glenn’s. She suppressed a disgusted shudder with all her might. Did he think she was one of _them?_ In that case, she would have to choose her words carefully. She dared not invite the suspicion of Those Who Slither. “And for the record, I am an Imperial princess; I don’t appreciate being spoken to in such a lackadaisical matter.”

“Well, you’ll have to get used to it!” Glenn chortled, clapping her on the shoulder. “Soon as this leg heals up, I’m joining the Blue Lions. I think you and I are gonna be _best_ friends.”

“I think you’re asking me to cut off your hand,” Edelgard hissed, taking his hand and pulling it off her shoulder.

“Wow. Rude.” Glenn stepped back and shook his head. “Missing, presumed dead, for what, six years, and _this_ is the welcome I get?” He limped over to the exit, tracing Felix’s footprints across the dirt floor of the training hall. “I get no respect… no respect at all—”

He froze in his tracks, as he found his path blocked by the tall, broad wall of Dedue Molinaro’s body.

As far as Blue Lions went, Edelgard didn’t know Dedue very well, either. No one did, it seemed—even Hubert’s obsessively-documented dossiers were sparse where he was concerned. Her most concrete memory of him was of watching him die on the same day as Dimitri, on the same battlefield, subsumed into the body of a towering behemoth summoned from his own flesh. Dimitri’s cry of despair had rung out across the Tailtean Plains when the beast had been felled and its ichor-stained flesh had crumbled away around the remains of Dedue’s used-up corpse.

What Edelgard did know about Dedue, then, was that he was willing to do anything— _anything—_ for Dimitri, even if it meant relinquishing his own humanity. She could respect that.

Dedue stared down at Glenn. “There you are, Glenn. His Highness has been worried about you. I must ask you to return to the infirmary at once.”

“Oh, has he?” he asked. “Thank you, Dedue. Yes, I’ll see him at once. No need to let him worry, is there?”

As Dedue guided Glenn out of the training hall, his icy eyes slipped toward Edelgard and she felt another chill run up her neck as she realized that he had been the one watching her from afar all day.

* * *

The next morning, Edelgard felt nervous enough to vomit. Stepping into the Blue Lions classroom felt like intruding on enemy territory, even though she’d used this room for war council meetings plenty of times while her army had occupied Garreg Mach. As the butterflies in her stomach fluttered with reckless abandon, she felt thankful she’d had the foresight to eat a light breakfast. A single lightly-buttered slice of toast was doing somersaults in her gut right now.

Seeing Byleth in her proper place at the head of the class, though, made Edelgard feel better. Seeing Byleth standing in front of a blackboard with meticulous and detailed diagrams already scrawled across the board, a piece of chalk in one hand and a long pointing stick in the other, made this wrong world feel so _right._

“Alright, Lions,” Byleth said as soon as Edelgard had stepped over the threshold, “we have a new student joining us. Edelgard, why don’t you introduce yourself?”

Every head turned toward her.

“I,” she began, “am Princess Edelgard von Hresvelg, heir to Emperor Ionius IX—er, I mean, ninth in line for the throne.” She cleared her throat. Her mouth felt dry. She could feel Byleth’s eyes boring into hers and found herself thinking about Dorothea’s discomfort with those eyes. They _were,_ she had to admit, awfully piercing. “One of the heirs. Nothing special, really. I’m looking forward to studying with you.”

“We’re happy to have you, Edelgard,” Dimitri said from his desk next to Dedue. “Take a seat anywhere you like.”

Edelgard looked around the room. She felt Dedue’s eyes follow her. He was still watching her like a hawk even now. Each desk in the room fit two people, and everyone was paired up except for Felix on one side of the room and Sylvain on the other.

She chose to sit next to Sylvain.

“Well, hey there, princess,” he said to her, one hand lazily propping up his cheek, the other rakishly tousling his fiery red hair. “Come here often?”

Edelgard regretted sitting next to Sylvain.

Byleth launched into her lesson for the day. Edelgard felt an adrenaline rush just from listening to her speak. She’d heard every word before, and she could anticipate every one of them, but hearing them all over again in that beautiful voice made her happier than she’d ever been since she’d arrived in this world.

She was an avid participant, drawing on not only the contents of Byleth’s lesson for the day but also throwing in things she recalled from war council meetings and strategies from the battlefield. There was something perversely pleasurable about feeding Byleth’s future ideas back to her past self.

When the lecture concluded and Byleth had answered every student’s questions, the class left the classroom and marched to the forest outside of the monastery for drills and open-air practice, and this was where Byleth excelled. Most professors at the Officer’s Academy taught like, of course, _officers._ She taught how to fight like a mercenary—in other words, she taught her students how to survive by their grit and determination, not just their strength. Most mercenaries, she’d always said, weren’t strong—they were wiry, lean, fast, and above all, _smart._

Edelgard finally felt at home in this world. She was where she belonged. She was—

Falling on her sword over and over again.

She was letting her emotions get the best of herself, she scolded herself as she picked herself up. Trying too hard to impress Byleth, failing to ignore the way her older, more experienced brain kept telling her younger, less experienced body how to move.

“You shouldn’t be trying techniques so advanced at your skill level,” Byleth said, not in a scolding way but simply matter-of-factly. She took Edelgard by the hand and lifted her to her feet. “If that were a real sword, you’d be seriously injured.”

“I know, Professor,” Edelgard said, gingerly resting a hand lightly on the blossoming bruises lining her midriff. She tried to keep her voice from trembling—though it was hard to focus on holding herself back with Byleth’s hand clasping hers. “I know I shouldn’t push myself so hard.”

“You’ve read a lot of books on swordsmanship, haven’t you?” Byleth asked.

“Um… yes,” Edelgard lied. “How could you tell?”

“Your head knows all the right moves, but your body doesn’t.” A wry little smile forced its way onto Byleth’s stoic face. She glanced over at Ashe. “He was the same way. Knew his way around a sword backwards and forwards… he just couldn’t quite manage to lift it.”

“Yes, Professor. I have to admit, I’ve… _studied_ a lot of weapons that way,” Edelgard said. “So what should I do?”

“Hmm…” Byleth’s eyes drifted away from Edelgard’s, as though she were listening to a voice only she could hear. “First off, you’ll need to train your body on something you don’t have so many hangups about first until it’s strong enough. How well versed are you with spears?”

“I know the basics.”

“Great. You’ll pair up with Ingrid for the day. Let’s see how that goes.”

Edelgard looked up at Byleth and smiled. “Thank you, Professor.” She felt closer to home now than she ever had over the past week.

* * *

That night, Edelgard found herself sitting in a circle with the rest of the Blue Lions students and Byleth in a remote part of the monastery grounds. She hadn’t put much thought into socializing outside the Black Eagles in her world, so with the exception of those who had joined her class and fought at her side, most of these people were strangers—nothing more than ledger lines in the dossiers Hubert had kept and faces of the freshly killed. She sat between Ashe and Annette, whom she knew best from her world and who seemed mostly unchanged, flanked on all sides by people she’d only ever really known as enemies and corpses. Mercedes, the only other familiar face in the class, sat in the circle opposite her, and in the dark of the night, her long, thick white hair cascading down her shoulder and pale skin made her look like a ghost. A little oil lamp rested on the grass in front of her, casting shifting and flickering amber light across her eerie features.

Mercedes cleared her throat. A cold breeze filled the air. The black silhouette of the monastery walls stretching toward the heavens above the gathered students faded into the darkness of the night sky. “Well, then,” she said in her soft whisper of a voice, “now that night has fallen, we are ready to begin. Your Highness, are you ready?”

Edelgard nodded. She had no idea what to expect from this—an initiation ritual of sorts? Hazing? An interrogation? They wouldn’t do something like that with Byleth right here beside them, would they? Next to her, Ashe shivered even though the air, aside from the breeze, was warm and pleasant. He pulled his hood over his head, as though he knew what was coming, and Ingrid gave him a comforting, but awkward pat on the shoulder to console him.

“Tonight’s story is ‘The Golden Arm,’” Mercedes said. “It starts like this… _There once was a man who traveled all across the land for want of a wife. He saw young and old, rich and poor, pretty and plan, but none who caught his eye. Until he met a woman who was young, fair, and rich, and whose entire right arm was solid, lustrous gold from shoulder to fingertip. The man was instantly smitten and begged her to have him as her husband. They lived happily together, but in his heart, the man loved his wife’s golden arm far more than he loved her golden hair or golden voice._

 _“At last,”_ she continued, her voice hushed and breathy, _“she died. No one wore their grief more prominently at her funeral than her husband, but it was all for show. That very night, he crept to his wife’s fresh grave, dug up her body, and scurried back home with the golden arm he had so coveted clutched in his greedy hands. At last, he and his true love were reunited.”_ She leaned forward. Her violet eyes met Edelgard’s and a faint, wry smile crept across her face.

Edelgard returned the smile and let herself loosen her shoulders. She should have known it was just one of Mercedes’ macabre stories.

 _“The following night,”_ Mercedes said, _“he put the golden arm under his pillow and slept with it—”_

“I’ll _bet_ he put it under his ‘pillow,’” Sylvain interjected with a bawdy wink.

 _“Shh,”_ Byleth hissed, holding a finger to her lips.

Felix punched him in the shoulder.

“Thank you, Felix.” Mercedes waited for a few seconds. _“The following night, he put the golden arm under his pillow and slept with it, but a cold wind filled his bedchambers and roused him. Half asleep, he found himself paralyzed, a cold weight on his chest pinning him to his bed—and floating before him was the specter of his dead wife. Dirt marred her golden hair and insects crawled across her pallid cheeks and blue-tinged lips. The man tried desperately to pretend he was not afraid, and to hide his fear, he spoke to the ghost: ‘My love, what hast thou done with thy cheeks so red?’”_

Mercedes’ voice grew quieter, slower; her next lines came in a hollow tone, barely a whisper. _“‘All withered and wasted away,’ the ghost replied._

_“‘What hast thou done, my love,’ the man asked, ‘with thy rosy red lips?’_

_“‘All withered,’ the ghost said, ‘and wasted away…’_

_“‘What hast thou done with thy golden hair?’_

_“‘All withered and wasted away…’_

Mercedes leaned forward with each repetition, her eyes widening, the lamplight casting a ghoulish shadow across her face. She looked nearly as ghostly as the woman in her story. _“‘And what hast thou done,’ he asked, ‘with thy golden arm?’”_

Silence weighed heavily on the circle of students. An oppressive, electric aura hung in the air, as though lightning had struck nearby; the air sizzled.

 _“‘THOU HAST IT!’”_ Mercedes shrieked, jolting forward and flinging out her arms, fingers hooked into wicked claws, eyes wide and mad. Several yelps of fear and surprise rang out around the circle, Ashe’s being the loudest (Edelgard felt a hand curl tightly around her wrist and realized it was his). Byleth, of course, was completely and utterly unmoved.

Edelgard, who had to admit she’d flinched (but only from being mildly startled—the Mercedes she’d known had done this plenty of times with the Black Eagles as well), smiled and clapped politely. Ghosts in stories didn’t scare her: she’d seen enough true horror for them to do anything but amuse her. Real, solid things, corporeal things like rats, were what scared her the most, and no scary story in the world could replicate the feel of a rodent’s naked tail slithering across one’s bare feet.

Mercedes returned an amused smile and bowed. “I’m glad you enjoyed my story, Lady Edelgard.” She turned to Dimitri. “Your Highness, what did _you_ think?”

Dimitri, who had been sitting attentively with his fist propped underneath his chin, as still and stoic as a marble statue, blinked. “Huh? It’s over already?” He shook his head. “No, wait, I am sorry, Mercedes; I did not mean—”

“That’s okay,” she assured him. “One day, I’ll find one that scares you.” She smiled. “And you, too, Professor.”

“It’ll be a challenge,” Byleth warned her. “I have experience with ghosts.” Then she made a pained face as though someone had just shouted in her ear.

* * *

Edelgard didn’t sleep easily that night, though not because of Mercedes’ ghost story. Her waking thoughts ran around each other, circling the abyss of sleep like ocean currents swirling around a whirlpool but never fading to slumber. Half-conscious anxieties, fears for an uncertain future both mundane and grandiose, traced themselves in the shadows splayed across the ceiling.

Idly, unbidden, her brain grasped for the faint, half-remembered details of faces long gone. She remembered her brothers and sisters, but too vaguely. Every day more concrete details—the shape of a nose or jaw, the position of a mole or a freckle, the exact way they wore their hair—slipped into her subconscious, irretrievable in waking.

She could see them all in this world, alive and happy, but all older than the children she’d watched die. The thought occurred to her that if one of them came to visit her, she might not even recognize them.

The walls seemed to close in on her, looming on all sides, the ceiling pressing down on her. The slower and more sluggish her thoughts became, the closer she drifted toward sleep, the smaller her room seemed, the thinner her bedsheets, the harder the mattress underneath her. Ghoulish faces paraded in front of her, swimming through the shadows crawling across the ceiling. Ludwig von Aegir, that proud, fat, balding toad of a man with avarice gleaming in his piggish eyes; Thales, his corpselike complexion stark and ghastly, a sinister grin twisting his pale face, his pure white eyes boring into hers; Emperor Ionius, staring down at her with a look of abject horror and shameful guilt pressed into every line of his careworn face, biting his lip until blood trickled down his chin.

For a moment, Edelgard felt herself plummet to the bowels of the world, and with a jolt, she snapped fully awake, pulse racing, heart pounding.

She pulled herself out of bed, drew a coat over her nightgown, and slipped out of her dormitory, creeping down the hall and down the staircase to the lawn. The air was pleasantly warm aside from the wind, the grass against her bare feet pleasantly cool. The waning moon stared down at her through a break in the cloud cover overhead.

Deep down, a part of her was hoping she would run into Byleth. The night she’d first spoken candidly to her had been a night just like this one, and it was etched into her memory. She’d had a nightmare about her imprisonment and Byleth had heard her mumbling in her sleep. The two of them had run into each other on the lawn right here, and for the first time in her life, Edelgard had told another soul what horrors crept into her dreams. That had been the first time Edelgard had taken a leap of faith for Byleth, and while she’d admired and, on some level, _wanted_ Byleth since the night they had first met, it hadn’t been until _then_ that Edelgard had realized how deep those feelings really ran. From that moment on, Edelgard had kept beckoning Byleth closer, closer, closer, inch by inch, and eventually the two of them had become as close as close could be. Or had Byleth been drawing _her_ closer, reeling her in like a fish caught from the monastery’s pond?

She shook her head. No, it was best not to dwell on such thoughts. It did her no good to work herself up and invite that heartache, she told herself, remembering her shameful display when Byleth had invited her for tea.

She let herself wander aimlessly, meandering through the monastery grounds, letting the fresh air fill her lungs and the breeze from the open sky above run through her hair. Nothing soothed her more than wide open spaces like this. While she wouldn’t call herself claustrophobic, sometimes dark and enclosed rooms just reminded her too much of a prison cell.

Eventually, Edelgard found herself in a quiet spot near the monastery’s inner walls, where not even crickets chirped, where not even the grass rustled. She looked up at the distant moon and felt some semblance of kinship with it.

She heard the muttering of a distant voice drift through the air and, not wanting to be caught outside so late into the night, ducked behind a bush that grew in front of the wall, pressing her back against the cool stone as she crouched amid the briers and brambles. Grass rustled under heavy boots as the voices drifted closer.

 _“…see no reason why they would do something like this,”_ Dimitri said, his hushed voice just barely audible.

 _“He was delivered to aid us in our plans, Your Highness,”_ Dedue replied, his deep voice just as quiet. _“The Men in Black must have grown tired of our string of failures.”_

Edelgard furrowed her brow. Men in Black? Was that Dedue’s pet name for Those Who Slither in the Dark? Hubert certainly had him beat when it came to nomenclature.

_“But why Glenn? Of all the faces they could have chosen…”_

_“His is a trustworthy face.”_

Dimitri sighed. _“I suppose. It still feels cruel of them, though, especially to Felix and Ingrid. And what of Edelgard? What do you think of_ her?”

_“It is worrying, but I would not count her among the changelings unless there is a faction we are unaware of.”_

_“Yes… she would not have spoiled our plan if_ they _had sent her. Still, keep a close eye on her, Dedue.”_

_“As you wish, Your Highness. If she continues to pose any threat to us…”_

_“I trust you to do what is right.”_

The footsteps drew closer, and Edelgard realized with mounting horror that if Dimitri and Dedue passed this way, they would see her—and they would almost certainly mistake her for the spy they suspected her of being. Even if they thought she wasn’t an agent of Those Who Slither, or the Men in Black, she’d still heard too much. It would be dangerous to leave her alive—

Dedue paused. _“There is someone here,”_ he hissed to Dimitri.

Edelgard pressed herself as tightly as she could against the ground, pulling her coat up over her head to further conceal herself, and peered out through the prickly leaves of the bush she was hiding behind.

 _“Dimitri?”_ Byleth’s voice rang out. _“Is that you over there?”_

Edelgard watched Dimitri pull away from the wall, leaving her hiding spot undisturbed. Dedue orbited him closely as the two of them met Byleth on the lawn.

“Guilty as charged, Professor,” Dimitri sheepishly admitted. “Might I ask what brings you out here tonight?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” Byleth answered, not accusingly but rather almost coyly. Edelgard felt a twinge of bitter nostalgia.

“I just wanted some fresh air. You know how lovely the breeze has been tonight. I find such things soothing when sleep evades me.”

Byleth nodded. “I couldn’t sleep, either.” She looked to Dedue. “And you?”

“If His Highness cannot sleep,” Dedue said to her, “then neither can I.”

“Tonight has been particularly troubling,” Dimitri said. “Professor, this may sound like an odd question, but… what do you know of Glenn?”

“He’s Felix’s brother, isn’t he?” Byleth answered.

Dimitri nodded. “That, and he and Ingrid were arranged to be married when they were both children. He was a squire to Sir Gustave Dominic, King La… _my father’s_ personal guard, as well. About half of our class knew him personally. Everyone thought he’d died in the Tragedy of Duscur.”

“You must all be happy, then,” Byleth commented.

“I suppose,” Dimitri admitted, “although in truth, I believe it has brought a great pain to the surface for many of us. And the thing is… Professor, can you keep what I am about to tell you a secret?”

Byleth nodded. It was a trustworthy nod. Edelgard recognized it. Seeing that simple dip of her chin for the first time, she’d almost felt as though she could have told her anything without fear of judgment or condemnation.

“Six, perhaps seven years ago now, I…” Dimitri rocked uncomfortably on his heels and pressed a palm to his forehead, his fingers burrowing into his snowy hair. “I confess I do not remember much of what happened then, nor do I remember much from before, but I swear… I could have sworn that I saw Glenn die. Painfully. Horribly. Slowly.”

“Memories are fickle things,” Byleth said to him, resting a hand on his shoulder. “I know it isn’t quite the same, but my father will sometimes ask me if I recall something from when I was little, and we’ll both remember it completely differently, and we’ll both insist we were right. Your mind can play tricks on you like that.”

“Ah… if he stands before me alive, then my memories _must_ have been mistaken. You are right, Professor.” His voice brightened. “Do you ever stop teaching?”

“I’m not sure I’ve even started,” Byleth said, and Edelgard had to bite her tongue to keep herself from laughing. That was classic Byleth.

“But that reminds me, Professor—what do you know of that incident?”

“The Tragedy of Duscur? Not much.”

“Right—it still surprises me how little your father told you about the outside world. When I was ten or eleven, I think, my father and stepmother journeyed north of Fhirdiad to to the Duscur peninsula for a diplomatic meeting with Sir Gustave, his squire, and a dozen of the Knights of Seiros. The official story is that soldiers from Duscur beset our caravan in the mountains, murdered my father and the knights, and kidnapped my mother, Glenn, and me for ransom. But—”

Dedue silently laid a cautionary hand on Dimitri’ shoulder and shook his head. Dimitri gave him a low, slow nod that seemed to whisper _trust me,_ and he withdrew his hand.

“The truth is, Duscur was only a scapegoat. As though they were possessed, half of the Knights of Seiros themselves slaughtered the others and then turned their blades on the royal family. Only Glenn and I were taken, and rather than put up for ransom, we found ourselves imprisoned in a stronghold deep within the mountains and sequestered with a dozen other children stolen from across Faerghus. For over a year, they cut our bodies open and stitched us back together over and over again, pouring poison in our veins…”

Edelgard shuddered, feeling phantom aches across her body from the scars it had never bore.

Byleth’s brow furrowed and mouth contorted in a disgusted grimace. “Why?”

“Whoever commanded those false knights wished to create a vessel for unparalleled power. Due to my Crest of Blaiddyd and the physical strength it affords me, I was their prized subject. The other eleven children were prototypes for me… and for this.” Dimitri held out his hand, palm facing upward, and a pattern traced itself in the air above it. Arcs of pale, icy blue light laced together to form the shape of the Crest of Flames.

Byleth gasped and recoiled.

The cold light on Dimitri’s face lent him a sinister demeanor. “The same Crest of Flames you bear,” he said, his low voice growing rougher. “It burns in my blood, too.”

Edelgard watched Byleth cup her hands around Dimitri’s upraised palm and curl his hand gently into a loose fist, dispersing the glowing insignia traced in the air. “I’m sorry, Dimitri.”

“It is not your place to apologize, Professor,” Dimitri said. “But something evil has marked you with that Crest as well. Someday, Dedue and I will have vengeance for myself, for you, for my family, for the ghosts of those children, and for the ashes of Duscur.”

Byleth looked down at their conjoined hands. “Thank you, Dimitri.”

He withdrew his hand. “I think I will sleep soundly now, Professor. Thank you for lending me your ear tonight.”

“Anytime,” Byleth said, and while it was too dark to make out much of her face without the light from Dimitri’s Crest, Edelgard could hear the smile in her voice.

“I do hope you will sleep well, too,” he said. “I would feel terrible if my own ghost story proved more frightening than one of Mercedes’ tales.”

“I’ll be fine, thank you,” she said.

Another smile for someone other than her. Edelgard couldn’t help but feel jealous again, and it was stupid and immature of her and she knew it. And beneath that, Dimitri’s story left a pit in her heart, and for once in over ten years, she felt useless. In this world, Dimitri was Edelgard, and he’d even drawn Byleth close to him just as she had. That meant that in this world, Edelgard herself was redundant. In this world, Byleth didn’t need her, _wouldn’t_ need her.

Dimitri and Byleth might sleep soundly tonight, but Edelgard doubted she would.


	4. The Road Not Taken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard makes friends with Ingrid and Flayn, Dedue conducts an agonizing interrogation, and Byleth makes a chilling discovery.

Day after day, Edelgard felt more and more of her strength return to her. Her body moved with more confidence, gripped her weapons more tightly, followed her own mind’s instructions more and more easily. But she was unaccustomed to the curriculum Byleth had laid out for her, and after about a week of work with spears and lances, Edelgard was almost becoming used to getting her ass kicked; so when she finally managed to eke out a win against Ingrid, she couldn’t help but feel just a bit more elated than she’d thought she would.

“You’ve picked this up quickly, Edelgard,” Ingrid said, picking herself up off the ground and brushing the dirt off her clothes and out of her long straw-blonde hair. Her wooden training lance lay on the ground beside her. “I’ll admit, I never took you for such a quick study.”

“Praise is not necessary,” Edelgard said, setting down her own lance and taking Ingrid’s hand to help her up. “Besides, I haven’t improved that much. You’re just off your game today.”

Ingrid looked away. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You don’t usually leave yourself so wide open. Is something on your mind?”

“Not any more than usual.”

The two of them went back to sparring. Edelgard paired a question with each lunge; Ingrid a cagey response with every parry. She recalled what she had overheard Dimitri tell Byleth. “Is it about Glenn?”

“What about him?” Ingrid shot back, evasive.

“I heard you and him were quite close.”

“We were.”

“One might think you’d be happy he’s alive, then.”

“One might.”

“He doesn’t act like himself, does he?”

Ingrid left herself wide open, allowing Edelgard’s lance to catch her in the ribs and knock her back down to the ground.

“You can’t allow yourself to be distracted by your emotions in battle,” Edelgard told her.

Ingrid pressed a hand gingerly to her side and for a moment, Edelgard feared she might have horribly wounded her. Images flashed through her mind—a golden-haired knight riding an ivory white pegasus at the siege of Arianrhod, a swing from Aymr parrying the legendary lance Lúin, blood and viscera spilling onto the ground from horse and rider alike as the head of her axe chewed through flesh and bone. In the haze of that furious battle, Edelgard hadn’t recognized her.

“That was a dirty trick,” Ingrid protested.

“You’ll have to get used to them,” Edelgard told her, trying to erase the persistent memory from her mind’s eye. “There are no such things as dirty tricks when your life is on the line.”

Ingrid let out an involuntary, derisive chuckle and blew a stray strand of her hair out of her face. “Alright, Princess. If you say so.”

“She’s right, Ingrid,” Byleth interjected, stepping between the two of them. “Plenty of people have shouted all sorts of colorful curses at me while I was trying to kill them.”

“Did it stop you?” Ingrid asked.

“Most of the time? No.” Byleth pulled away the jacket draped over her shoulders and held out her arm to show a long, ragged scar winding its way around a toned, muscular bicep. “But sometimes, if it wasn’t an insult I’d heard before, I’d end up with something like this.”

Edelgard beamed with pride.

“However, Edelgard,” Byleth added, giving her a stern look, “using psychological tactics like those when you’re supposed to be training for technique mastery kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?”

“Oh.” Edelgard felt the sunbeams pouring out of her heart turn dim. “Yes, I… I suppose it does. I’m sorry, my teacher.”

“There’ll be plenty of opportunities to learn to fight dirty,” Byleth assured her. “Just keep in mind which skills you’re  _ supposed  _ to be developing at this moment.”

“Yes, Professor.” Edelgard offered her a polite, contrite little bow.

“Another match, then,” Ingrid said, taking up her lance. “And no tricks this time.”

Edelgard took up her lance. It felt twice as heavy in her hands, which hadn’t built up the callouses she was used to yet. And while she’d never had much stamina before—having two Crests was very taxing, after all—this body had even less than that. After two weeks of training, it was still a princess’ body in far too many ways.

“Yes,” she said, trying to keep her weariness out of her voice, “another match. And no tricks this time.”

“No,” Byleth said. She crossed her arms. “You two have had enough for the day.”

“I can handle it,” Edelgard insisted. “Diamonds are forged from pressure.”

Byleth nodded. “Yes,” she replied to her, “but bread dough rises with rest, and bread is more useful than diamonds. It’s Friday; you two should hit the sauna before someone else stakes a claim on it.”

Edelgard, who could feel bruises fresh and old from the past week’s worth of training on every inch of her body from the neck down, couldn’t say no to that, so after she and Ingrid had had dinner (Ingrid ate like a famished pig), she followed her to the sauna, where the two of them stripped to their underclothes and sat down in the wood-paneled steam room.

The thick, humid air soaked into her aching muscles. This wasn’t a feature of the monastery Edelgard could say she’d used often; she’d never wanted anyone, student or faculty, to see so much of her body—in particular the heavy pattern of scars that stopped just short of her neck, the remnants of her torture. She’d spent some time in here alone, and some time with Hubert (he was permitted to see her like that, after all) and some time in here with Byleth (not enough), but never with another student. Not even any of the Black Eagles Strike Force. It took Edelgard a while to stop feeling self-conscious about revealing so much skin; every once in a while, she had to look down at herself and remind herself that in this world she had nothing to hide.

“I noticed you don’t wear makeup,” Ingrid pointed out, breaking the sauna’s heavy air of silence.

“No,” Edelgard said. “I’ve never fussed all that much with it.”

“I’d have thought, seeing as you’re, well…”

“Truthfully, I don’t see much utility in it. You put all that stuff on in the morning and take it all off again at night, and just to make people think your skin is smoother or your lips are redder? A waste. I’d rather look human than perfect.”

“With a face like that, it’s easy for you to say that.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing. I agree, actually. All these cosmetic diversions are just a waste of time. Knights don’t need to gussy themselves up and look pretty. I thought for sure princesses  _ did,  _ though.”

“Not this one.”

“Did you dream of being a knight, too?”

“Something like that.”

Ingrid sighed and slumped forward, resting her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand. Her skin was glistening from sweat. She looked like a marble statue covered with morning dew. “I received a letter from my father today.”

“Does he often write to you?” Edelgard asked. She’d always written to her father in her world, but she had no idea if this world’s version of herself had the same habit, or if he wrote back. If she were being honest with herself, the prospect of a letter from him arriving and expecting her response made her feel uneasy.

“Every so often, when he finds me another suitor.”

“Oh? But I thought Glenn—”

Ingrid squinted at Edelgard suspiciously, guardedly. “You thought Glenn what?”

“I’d overheard someone say you two had been engaged,” Edelgard said, flustered, knowing she’d revealed that she knew too much. She wasn’t lying, technically.

“Yes.”

“So why be upset about your father’s letter? If you don’t wish to marry any of the suitors he’s found, it seems you have a convenient excuse to say no now.”

“That’s the problem,” Ingrid said. “Ever since I was little, I’ve wanted to be a proper knight. But since I’m the only heir to my house who bears a Crest, I’m meant to be nothing more than… well… a mother. A mother to as many children as it takes to get another Crest-bearer.”

Edelgard shivered despite the cloying heat. How ghoulish these noble families were! She had thought Adrestia’s culture of aristocracy had been especially bad, but it was nothing compared to that of Faerghus. To them, people with lives and dreams of their own were nothing but stud bulls and brood mares. It was sickening.

“I’d resigned myself to marrying Glenn before the Tragedy. Actually, I’d grown to love him,” Ingrid said. “I really felt we’d have been happy together. And then… you know the rest of the story, I take it.”

Edelgard nodded.

“With Glenn gone, though, all I had to do was turn down anyone my father picked out for me and I’d be free… at least for the moment. As long as I kept putting that off, I could feel as though I could still make my own decisions about the future.” Ingrid sighed. “Now I guess I’m done feeling that way. He’ll be a nice husband, I know, but… Glenn will go on to be a wonderful knight, and I will bear his wonderful children.” She sighed again and leaned back, letting her head rest against the wood panel wall.  _ “Our  _ wonderful children. To be honest, I can’t help but feel disappointed.”

“I know what it’s like to have your future decided,” Edelgard told her. “But that’s no reason not to take your fate into your own hands. The life ahead of you is still yours to write.”

Ingrid shook her head. “It isn’t so simple. You won’t understand, Edelgard, but House Galatea is very poor for a noble house. My father nearly starved himself to keep me fed. I might not like it, but offering the Crest of Daphnel to a wealthy house is the only way I can repay that kindness. And I could do much worse than Glenn.”

“I understand,” Edelgard said. “If it is any consolation, I don’t have any choice in who I’m engaged to, either. My father married me off to Ferdinand von Aegir as part of a compromise between himself and the Prime Minister some years ago.”

“Ferdinand?” Ingrid’s brow furrowed. “The head of the Black Eagles?”

“That’s the one.”

“He seems nice.”

“He  _ is  _ nice—if a little obnoxious. But he isn’t quite my type, if you know what I mean.” Edelgard bowed her head and bit her lip. Just  _ thinking _ about Byleth made her feel even warmer. The air felt especially thick in her lungs. “I don’t think he realizes that all his father cares about is tying the Crest of Seiros to House Aegir. At any rate, he will be a wonderful prime minister, and I suppose  _ I _ will have to bear his wonderful children as well.”

“And you don’t want that?”

“I’ve never had much… interest in starting a family,” she said, her mouth suddenly dry despite the cloying humidity. In fact, in her world, she was fairly certain that the experiments had rendered her barren even if she’d  _ wanted  _ to have a child or children. Regardless, though, removing Crests from the world started with her, and it was her decision to refuse to pass the Crest of Seiros to another generation. “I wanted to walk my own path.”

“Huh. I see.” Ingrid smiled. “You know, Edelgard, from what I’d heard, you were a lazy, shiftless layabout. When Professor Byleth told me to start training you, I expected you to break in a few days. I hadn’t thought we’d have so much in common.”

“Yes,” Edelgard said. Suddenly, it was hard to look at Ingrid, so she turned away from her. Ingrid was one of the very people Edelgard had fought her war to liberate—someone whose future had been decided because of the greed of the aristocracy and the so-called ‘blessings’ of the Crest system. And yet she’d fought to the bitter end for the sake of the very kingdom whose strict and conservative adherence to tradition had kept her oppressed.

It was a pity. She wished she had managed to recruit Ingrid to her side in her world, or barring that, had at least managed to capture her alive in Arianrhod.

That was war, though. Sometimes one had to kill people in order to save them.

Ingrid bit her lip. “Edelgard… what did you mean, ‘Glenn doesn’t act like himself?’” she asked, her brow furrowing with worry.

“You seemed perturbed around him. You and just about half the class,” Edelgard said. “There’s something wrong about him, isn’t there? Something off?”

“Well…” Ingrid let out a disarming, nervous laugh. “It’s true that he’s changed. Before… the Tragedy, he was… well, he was a lot like Felix, except less bitter: cold, serious, a bit of a dick until you got to know him… And now he’s so  _ upbeat.” _

“I can see how that would be unsettling,” Edelgard said, thinking of Hubert. “I’m sure whatever has happened to him over these past six or so years has changed him.” That was how Kronya had gotten away with acting nothing like Monica, and it was bound to be the same excuse whoever wore Glenn’s face would be relying on to deflect suspicion. “Still, if he makes you uncomfortable, I’m sure there are… options.”

“Like what?”

“If you’re fleeing an arranged marriage, you could always ask for asylum in the Empire,” she said coyly.

Ingrid let out a sharp bark of laughter. “I don’t plan on ever leaving Faerghus, except to fight on its behalf should I have to. A knight’s duty is to king and country.”

“So it is.”

“Besides…” Ingrid curled her hands into fists in her lap. “It’s not Glenn’s fault he’s… changed. He’s been missing in Duscur for over five years and…” She took a deep, shuddering breath, her nails digging deeper into her palms. “It’s those fucking Duscurites! They did this to him! They took him away from us and they—they don’t even give them back right!”

Edelgard wondered if she should bring up what Dimitri had said about the people of Duscur being a scapegoat. Then again, she had no proof of that other than a clandestine conversation she certainly couldn’t admit to overhearing, and without anything to back up such a claim, her words would likely fall on deaf ears.

“They took the Glenn I knew away from me,” Ingrid said, lifting a hand over her eyes to wipe away the sweat pouring off her brow, and possibly tears as well, “just like they took the Dimitri I knew. Whatever they did to him, we found him two years later with his hair stark white and—and me, Sylvain, Felix, he—he didn’t remember us at all. We were all best friends when we were little and… and he didn’t even blink when he saw us.”

Edelgard bowed her head soberly and found herself anxiously kneading her hands in her lap, her sweat-slicked fingers weaving around each other. She’d lost her childhood to Those Who Slither in the Dark just as this world’s Dimitri had. She knew what it was like to have gaps in her memory, to feel guilty knowing that faces she should have known seemed like those of strangers, to feel the great emptiness that came with no longer remembering what it was like to be young and innocent. And without a childhood, she’d lacked an adolescence, too—those years had been spent scheming and plotting, adding to a lifetime of lonely self-denial when everyone around her was making friends and having fun. She knew that life. So did Dimitri.

“He didn’t even remember… He barely remembered…” Ingrid choked out, her chest heaving, her breaths becoming shallow and rapid. Edelgard knew what a panic attack looked like; she’d seen it often enough in Bernadetta. This hot, thick, humid air was doing Ingrid no favors, either; it was all too easy to hyperventilate.

Edelgard stood up and grabbed her by the arm. “We’re done here,” she said curtly, and promptly dragged her out of the sauna. The cool evening air set upon the both of them immediately. Edelgard felt her sweat-soaked skin prickle as though a wave of pine needles had just washed over her and took in a lungful of cool, thin, light air.

She and Ingrid stood at the back of the sauna in their underclothes as the sweat on their skin cooled. Ingrid slowly, carefully dropped to her knees, breathing the cold air deeply and slowly as she collected herself. Her face was red and far too drenched in sweat for anyone to tell if she’d been crying; her golden hair was plastered to her skin.

“Are you feeling better?” Edelgard asked her.

Ingrid nodded. “Yes… thank you, Edelgard.”

“The sauna can really take a lot out of you,” Edelgard admitted, shivering and trying to rub the goosebumps off her bare arms. Her legs felt as though all her muscles had melted; the prospect of walking up the stairs to her room didn’t particularly thrill her. She felt she could fall over right here and fall asleep in an instant, even though she hadn’t even had dinner yet. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“No, don’t worry about it.” Ingrid shook her head. “I was already upset. You’re right. Glenn’s different now, and… it’s unnerving.”

_ More than you can imagine, _ Edelgard wanted to say. “Do you need help getting back to the dormitories?”

“No, I’ll be fine,” Ingrid insisted, pulling herself up to her feet. Edelgard stayed by her side anyway. “We still need to wash up anyway. You know… way back, when Dimitri was about nine or so, he met a girl from the Empire. Sylvain said he was head over heels in love with her and even gave her a dagger when she had to go back home. We could always rile him up just by asking him about ‘Dagger Girl.’ But he doesn’t remember it now, so we can’t embarrass him like we used to. I think about what we’ve lost, and…”

Edelgard put a hand to her chin. “He gave her a dagger?”

“It must sound even sillier to you; it’s not a custom I think they have down in the Empire.” A faint smile forced its way onto Ingrid’s face. “Although it’s a stretch to call it a ‘custom.’ In Faerghus, blades are tools of destiny; ways to forge your own path and create your own future. There are plenty of stories—myths, really—of lords and knights bequeathing each other daggers as a sign of their unbreakable bonds, going all the way back to Loog and Kyphon.” That faint smile turned into a faint chuckle, and she shook her head. “To give one to a girl you’re smitten with, though… I don’t think Dimitri really understood those stories back then.”

“Or perhaps he understood them better than you do,” Edelgard said. “He gave her a dagger…” she mused. The fact stuck in her head and circled around her thoughts.

“Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing.” She shook her head. “Let’s wash up and go back to our rooms.”

They did, and when Edelgard returned to her bedroom ready to collapse, she avoided her bed and instead went to her desk, standing over it on weak and shaking legs. She pulled open the desk drawer and looked down at the dagger resting in the corner, its steel blade covered by a short black sheath. She held it up, unsheathed it, let the gray-blue steel blade catch the lamplight, studied the gold detailing on the crossguard and pommel and the leather-wrapped hilt. She’d owned a dagger just like this in her world, too, down to the last detail, and had never known where it had came from—only that it had seemed important, and that she’d felt stronger with it at her side.

_ El, listen to me. No matter how hard things get, you can’t give in, okay? You've got to cut a path to the future you wish for, no matter what. _

The young boy’s voice echoed in her mind. She’d forgotten his face, let alone his voice, but for the first time in well over a decade now, it rang out clearly in her head. To think it had been Dimitri, of all people… __

She stumbled into bed and drew up the bedsheets to ward off the cold. Before she fell asleep, her thoughts turned to the gray and rainy day on the Tailtean Fields when she’d crushed the Kingdom army and stood over. Aymr had glowed with an inner fire amid the persistent drizzling rain, casting its blazing light on the slick mud and blood that stained the ground. With one final swing of her axe, she had severed Dimitri’s head from his shoulders as he’d gazed up at her with hatred burning in his icy blue eyes and rage twisting the leonine grace of his hard, weathered face. Aymr’s spiny crab-claw blade had not so much chopped his head off as it had  _ ripped _ it free of his neck, leaving viscera to spew onto the ground and mingle with the mud as his hateful last words had echoed in Edelgard’s head.

_ To the fires of eternity with you, El… _

* * *

The next day, Edelgard could still feel as though she were being watched, and realized that she’d been working too hard. The Edelgard of this world wasn’t the type to train so zealously, and her sudden change of priorities had attracted undue attention. To lessen the cloud of suspicion hanging over her head, she had to at least devote  _ some  _ time to lollygagging, and what better day was there than Sunday?

_ I want to relax, _ she told herself, straining herself to relax. The thought occurred to her that she wasn’t entirely sure she knew  _ how _ to relax anymore. She’d cherished the few moments she got to herself in her own world, but they were few and far between even with Byleth and her friends at her side, and it was hard to commit herself to leisure here when she knew that she was an intruder in this world. When she tried to lie down and rest her eyes under the shade of an oak tree, as she’d often seen Linhardt do, she just felt anxious and fidgety. She considered relaxing by eating, but felt that associating leisure and stress management with food could present problems in the long run, mainly relating to how well her clothes fit.

Then it hit her. Of course! She could go fishing! Byleth had taught her all about fishing, and the pond in front of the monastery’s great hall was the perfect spot for it.

She found herself all too eager to borrow a rod, buy some bait, and cast her line—although baiting her hook with the worms she’d bought was quite a challenge, as she’d always had Byleth do that for her to avoid goring herself. Still, though, she managed it with only a few bloody puncture wounds littering her fingertips.

Before she knew it, the day began to pass her by and the sun climbed higher into the sky. Long stretches of time passed in between bites (Edelgard never managed to hook anything). It was quiet and soothing. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine that Byleth was beside her. When the two of them went fishing together, Byleth never said a word—she said it spoiled the moment. Maybe this world’s Byleth would fish with her as well, and maybe she would be just as silent.

A shadow fell over her, eclipsing the sun, and Edelgard felt a familiar pair of eyes stare down at her.

She looked up at Dedue. He loomed in a way that no one else in the monastery could. Edelgard felt the same aura of cold menace radiating off of him that she often felt from Hubert whenever he was doing something wicked for her sake. He had ambushed her here.

Dedue looked down at her. His hard, chiseled face betrayed no emotion. Not a single silver hair on his head, pulled back into a tight topknot, was out of place. He held a steaming bowl in his hands. “Lady Edelgard, I request a moment of your time.” His voice was utterly flat.

Edelgard pulled the reel out of the water and set down her rod, then stood up.

“No, remain seated.”

She sat back down. Dedue sat beside her and offered her the bowl. It was filled with a thick, dark stew of stir-fried pork and vegetables served over a bed of wild rice. The pork was sliced into thin strips and the peppers poking out of the thick brown sauce were as red as blood. The steam rising up from the bowl was as eye-watering as it was mouthwatering.

“Have some,” he said, sticking a fork into the bowl and spearing a sliver of meat and one of the forebodingly red peppers.

Edelgard looked down at the food. In all likelihood, it was poisoned. In any other circumstance, Hubert would demand to taste it first, but he wasn’t here right now.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Old family recipe.”

“I’ve already eaten lunch,” she lied. Her stomach growled.

“You have not.”

“Is it spicy?” Edelgard sniffed it and felt her sinuses open up, immediately answering her question. “I have a sensitive stomach. Spicy food gives me ulcers.” Petra had often treated her to food from Brigid and had told her just as often that she had the heat tolerance of a baby.

“You do not,” Dedue said. “Have some.”

“How do you know what food I like?”

“I keep detailed dossiers on every student in the academy.”

He really  _ was  _ this universe’s Hubert. Well, Edelgard supposed she’d learned something new about this world’s version of herself.

“In Duscur,” Dedue said, “it was polite to take food you are offered.”

“As a princess,” Edelgard replied, recalling Dedue’s late night conversation with Dimitri. “I find that often conflicts with my survival instincts.”

“Of course,” he said. He took the fork and ate a bit, chewing it slowly and thoughtfully. He swallowed. “See? It is not poisoned.”

Edelgard took the fork and dug in. The first bite wasn’t unpleasant. In fact, it was delicious. Savory, a bit sweet, and nowhere near as hot as she’d expected.

“Do you like it, Lady Edelgard?”

“Yes, Dedue. Thank you.”

As soon as the words had left her lips, every inch of the inside of her mouth burst into flames. She could already feel sweat gathering on her brow.

“What made you decide to transfer into the Blue Lions?” he asked her.

“Byleth,” she answered, too busy minding the burning heat to come up with a more believable lie. “That is to say I found her pedagogy appealing,” she added. Her tongue tripped over itself. This was the most devilish interrogation she’d ever been led into. How could she concentrate on lying through this heat? “I’ve never cared much for bettering myself until I met her.”

“I agree. She is an excellent professor. Is that all?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Yes.”

“Being in this class lets me put some distance between myself and my fiance.”

Dedue nodded as though that were a very reasonable answer. “Understandable. How did you know where Flayn was being held captive?”

Against her better judgment, Edelgard ladled another forkful of food into her mouth to give herself more time to come up with a response. At least the dish tasted delicious, aside from the burning. Good Goddess, the burning! She’d had a severe toothache once that wasn’t even half as bad as this. “The Goddess spoke to me in a vision,” she mumbled, mush-mouthed.

“Hmm.”

“Do you believe in the Goddess?”

“I respect her as a foreign deity, but find my own gods to be sufficient.”

Edelgard could tell that the ‘vision from the Goddess’ spiel didn’t have much sway over him the way it would with someone like Seteth or any of the Knights of Seiros.

She took another bite. She couldn’t feel her tongue anymore and her brow was as damp with sweat as it had been last night in the sauna. One more bite and she was certain she’d go blind.

Dedue continued to pepper her with cryptic questions, and Edelgard did her best to answer the way she thought this world’s version of herself would answer. She had no secret alliances or devilish plans in this world, after all, and she couldn’t explain that her consciousness was inhabiting this body from the future of another world and be taken seriously. He didn’t stop with his interrogation until Edelgard had finished the meal he’d given her. When the bowl was empty save for a few specks of rice, he asked her one final question.

“Did you enjoy my cooking, Lady Edelgard?”

Edelgard barely heard him. She’d never feigned ignorance so much in her entire life, and that was after spending her entire adolescence the first time around feigning ignorance. And on top of that, she couldn’t feel any of her mouth or throat anymore. Even her lips were tingling; she was all but panting like a dog from the heat. “Um… it tasted excellent,” she said, mopping up the sweat on her brow with her sleeve. “Thank you for the meal, Dedue.”

Dedue pulled out a notebook and scribbled something in it. He didn’t make any attempt to hide what he was writing, so Edelgard assumed it wasn’t anything too secret and stole a peek at it.

_ Heat preference _

_ Dimitri:  _ ●

_ Ashe:  _ ●●●

_ Sylvain:  _ ●●●●

_ Felix:  _ ●●

_ Ingrid: N/A _

_ Annette:  _ ●●

_ Mercedes:  _ ●

_ Byleth:  _ ●●●●●● +?

_ Gilbert:  _ ●

_ Catherine:  _ ●●

_ Shamir:  _ ●●●●●

_ Jeralt:  _ ●●●●

_ Edelgard: _

Edelgard looked at Byleth’s entry in his list. Of course, even in this world, Byleth still had a cast-iron stomach.

Dedue tapped his pencil on the blank spot next to Edelgard’s name, looked her over with his piercing steely eyes, and decisively drew three circles in the blank spot next to her name.

* * *

Sunday morning, Byleth called the Blue Lions to the classroom, joined by Seteth and Flayn. Seteth still bore bruises around his neck, almost completely hidden by his collar but still just slightly visible—deep purplish-black thumbprints pressed onto his throat. Flayn stood at his side, morosely staring down at the floor, her hands clasped in front of her.

Edelgard studied Dimitri’s face. He’d gone as stony and stoic as Dedue, who towered at his side as he usually did, at the sight of his handiwork.

“Seteth, Flayn,” Dimitri said, clearing his throat. “What a pleasure to see you this morning. What can we do for you?”

“First of all, I don’t believe I’ve properly thanked your class for what you’ve done,” Seteth said. “Flayn and I are eternally in the Blue Lions’ debt.”

Dimitri shook his head. “It’s our newest classmate you should be thanking. I’m sorry I had such a small role to play.”

“The second matter at hand,” Seteth added, “is that Flayn and I have decided to leave Garreg Mach.”

Flayn crossed her arms and pouted. Evidently, this decision hadn’t been hers to make in any way.

“Seteth is asking us to accompany him and Flayn for protection,” Byleth said.

“Professor, do you think the Knights of Seiros might be better suited for this task?” Edelgard spoke up. “Not that I don’t think we can handle it, but…” She looked at Dimitri again. He was trying his best to look pleasant, but she could tell that the hatred he felt toward Seteth, and possibly Flayn as well, that he’d displayed so eagerly as the Hurricane King was simmering just below the surface.

“Do you really have to leave?” Mercedes asked. “I’m sure the church is doing everything they can to make sure you’re safer here.”

“Seteth, if this is about something I said to Flayn,” Sylvain added, “I’m sure I didn’t mean it.”

“I don’t think you should leave, either,” Dimitri said. “Even in light of this security breach, can you really say that anywhere outside the monastery is safer?”

That was curious. Why, Edelgard wondered, would Dimitri want Seteth and Flayn to remain here? Wouldn’t he be glad to be rid of them? Or did he still have unfinished business with them?

“The Knights of Seiros have their hands full tracking down that fiendish Hurricane King and his Death Knight,” Seteth said. “We know a safer place and trust your class to escort us there. It is in Faerghus, so you should know it well.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Edelgard said. “If the Hurricane King and the Death Knight wish to pursue you, they would only need to compromise one of us to reveal your location. Professor, what do you think?”

“It’s not our decision to make,” Byleth said. “Seteth, however you wish to go about this, we are at your service.”

Seteth nodded. “I understand your concerns. You need only take us as far as Arianrhod, and from there, we shall make the rest of the journey ourselves.”

Dedue and Dimitri shared a glance. “It is up to our professor,” he said once the two of them had finished their silent conference, “but we would gladly escort you through the Kingdom.”

* * *

Later that morning, the Blue Lions set out from the monastery, tracing winding paths through the Oghma Mountains northward. Seteth, riding his trusty wyvern with Flayn seated behind him, and Ingrid, riding a snow-white pegasus, drifted in lazy circles over the rest of the class, keeping watch over them from the air. The earthbound Blue Lions, all on horseback, surrounded a horse-drawn carriage containing Seteth and Flayn’s meager belongings. Mercedes, due to her delicate constitution, drove the carriage with Annette. Byleth led the class onward, with Dimitri and Dedue flanking the carriage on one side and Felix and Sylvain on the other. Edelgard and Ashe brought up the rear of the convoy.

The clouds grew thicker and grayer as the day grew longer, threatening rain, and the convoy reached a place to stop and set up camp for the night when the sun began to dip over the horizon and its rays turned from brilliant gold to dull orange.

Zanado, the Red Canyon, was nestled in the northern foothills of the mountain. It was a familiar place to Edelgard, and to everybody else as well. After the bandit she’d hired to murder Claude and Dimitri had fled Remire Village, he and the remains of his gang had set up camp here, and on the Church’s orders, the Black Eagles had tracked them here to wipe them out. The same had happened in this world, except with Byleth leading the Blue Lions. This had been where many of Edelgard’s classmates, old and new, had shed first blood. Edelgard could still remember comforting Dorothea— _ her  _ Dorothea—as she’d vomited over the corpse of a bandit who’d been slain by her hand. Poor Dorothea had never had the constitution for killing, not even during the war, and yet she had chosen to fight anyway.

Remnants of canvas tents and long-extinguished campfires dotted the cliffs that lined the valley, along with scraps of cloth, armor, and bone. Animals, never one to miss a free meal, had picked the remains of the bandits clean. The crumbling ruins of tall stone walls tracing the sharp, geometric lines and corners of what might have been an ancient city, peppered the desolate landscape.

“Everyone, start setting up your tents,” Dimitri said, dismounting from his horse. “I can feel rain coming.”

Seteth’s wyvern landed beside the carriage, tucking in its wings to let him and Flayn dismount. “You have done well, old girl,” he said, patting the wyvern on the tip of its snout. “Flayn, our tent and bedrolls are in the carriage, if you would retrieve them…”

“Yes, Brother,” she sighed, forlorn.

As the class settled in for the night, Edelgard noticed Byleth standing off to the edge of the encampment, staring off into the distant ruins littering the canyon the canyon as the last rays of the setting sun, now an orange blob over the horizon, grew dimmer and the amber light splashed against the violet clouds grew duskier.

“Professor?” she asked, approaching her. “Is something the matter?”

Byleth jolted as though she’d just been woken up. “Hmm? Oh, Edelgard. No, nothing’s wrong. It’s just that… I wonder why they call this place the Red Canyon.”

Edelgard squinted through the hazy darkness. The contours of the ruins were fading into the shadows with the weakening daylight, but she remembered seeing them in daylight. These ruins were ancient, and they looked like nothing else in all of Fódlan. What had once lived here, a long, long time ago, had not had any relation to the people who now lived in Fódlan, though their descendants still dwelt in this world.

“Legend has it the Goddess once descended from the Blue Sea Star to this place, though only for a short time,” Dimitri said, crossing his arms. His white hair and pale face stood out in the darkness like a second moon. “The heretical astronomer Aristarchus once claimed that the Blue Sea Star is a sun just like our own, millions upon millions of miles away from us across an ocean of luminiferous aether. What interest do you think she has in us mere mortals, traveling such a vast distance just to visit us?”

Byleth shrugged. “Maybe she doesn’t exist.”

Dimitri chuckled. “Don’t let Seteth hear you say that. Or any of the Knights of Seiros. It would be a waste of your incredible talent if you were burned at the stake, Professor. Besides,” he added, his icy eyes flitting from her to Edelgard, “Lady Edelgard here, it seems, has a quite personal connection to the Goddess, if you wish to ask her about this place.”

“Why are you listening to heretics, Your Highness?” Edelgard asked Dimitri, raising her eyebrows.

“I don’t believe that all heresies are created equal,” he replied. “If anything, believing that the Goddess is so far away from us only makes the love she has for us more awesome to behold. One must have great faith indeed to imagine her journeying so far for the sake of such lowly creatures as us.” There was an almost bitter tone to his voice, reminding Edelgard of her own relationship to the Goddess. As with her, the Goddess had never answered his pleas for salvation, either.

“Who knows?” Byleth said. “Maybe she’s closer than you think.”

Edelgard thought about the Crest Stone buried in Byleth’s chest, the one even she didn’t know about yet, the one that allowed her to live without a beating heart. Hubert had only discovered it the night before the Black Eagles Strike Force had reached Fhirdiad, and it had dissolved away after Seiros had been slain. Rhea had created Byleth to be a vessel for her so-called ‘mother,’ the goddess Sothis. Did Byleth know about that already in this world? Or was this just her strange sense of humor rearing its head?

Edelgard felt a patter of rain tap against her head and shoulders. “Professor,” she said, tugging on the sleeve of Byleth’s coat, “I think we should head back to camp.”

She and Dimitri headed back to their tents as the pattering rainfall began to tap louder and more rapidly on the bare, stony ground, but even as the drizzle became a downpour Byleth remained standing, staring out at the darkness shrouding the ruins of Zanado, cocking her head as though listening to a voice only she could hear.

* * *

Edelgard hadn’t had to endure a night of rough sleeping since the end of the war in her time. Some lords and nobles at the Officer’s Academy would balk at their first time having to sleep in a thin bedroll atop dirt or grass or bare stone, unaccustomed to anything harder than a down-stuffed mattress and silken bedsheets, but Edelgard had never been that kind of spoiled brat. Or maybe this world’s Edelgard  _ had  _ been. At any rate, though she certainly was accustomed enough to these sleeping accommodations, she’d hoped those days had been behind her.

She woke up in pitch-black stillness, and when her breath froze in her throat, she fumbled blindly in the dark for her lance to assure herself that she was not, in fact, a defenseless little girl chained up in a dungeon. When her fingers brushed the smooth, lacquered wooden haft of the iron lance she’d taken with her on this mission, she felt at peace. It wasn’t an axe, but it would do.

The rainstorm that had passed through the camp had once more subsided into an intermittent drizzle, raindrops tapping every few seconds on the waxed canvas of her tent instead of the constant drumming that had lulled her to sleep.

There was a tapping at the front of her tent and a faint white light bleeding through the canvas.  _ “Excuse me? Lady Edelgard? Are you awake, Your Highness?” _ Flayn whispered.

Edelgard sat up. “Flayn?”

_ “Oh, sorry—did I wake you?” _

“No, I was already awake. Is something wrong?”

_ “May I come in?” _

“I don’t see any harm in that. Come in.”

Flayn poked her head and one arm through the tent flap. A little speck of white magic floating above her outstretched palm lit the tent. It was cold, white light that made her face seem pallid and her eyes hooded and buried in shadow. She crawled the rest of the way in and sat cross-legged on the ground. “Thank you for having me, Your Highness. I just realized that I never thanked you for what you did.”

“I think anyone would have done what I did in my situation.”

“Ah. Well, what matters is that you did it, and I owe you my gratitude. I… I shudder to think what those monsters would have done to me.”

“The Death Knight and the Hurricane King? Yes, they did cut quite imposing figures. When we encountered them, even I was afraid.”

“Not only those two,” Flayn said, shaking her head. “There were cloaked men, too, wearing strange beaked masks…”

“Men in black,” Edelgard said, letting Dedue’s moniker for Those Who Slither in the Dark slip from her lips.

“Those were the most frightening. And their leader… he was as pale as a corpse, and his eyes were pure black…” Flayn shivered. “I confess I do not remember what they did to me, but I can sometimes feel knives against my skin when I think of them…”

Edelgard had never felt such sympathy for Flayn before. No one, not even those aligned with the Church of Seiros, and certainly not such a young and innocent girl, deserved to be a victim of Those Who Slither.

“Were you having a nightmare about them?”

“No.” Flayn shook her head again. “In truth, I rarely have nightmares, or at least not ones that I remember. In fact, I… I am afraid of sleeping. Often, when I lie in bed, I find myself consumed by dread. I fear I might not wake up for years upon years, and when I do, everybody I care about will be long gone—vanished with the sands of time. It must sound like a silly fear to you, Your Highness.”

“Everybody has irrational fears, Flayn,” Edelgard consoled her. “For example, I am deathly afraid of rats. The thought of their little tails slithering across my feet or their teeth gnawing on my fingertips or toes…”

“Oh, how morbid!”

“And the ocean, especially at night. The deeper and darker its depths, the more frightened I feel just at the sight of it. If I were to fall off the side of a boat, I would sink like a stone and join the carcasses of countless shipwrecks, my bones stripped bare by scavengers of the deep…”

Flayn cringed and squirmed uncomfortably. “Oh, compared to yours, my fears are so abstract…”

“There’s nothing abstract about losing the people you love. Sometimes I have nightmares of my siblings dying before my eyes. My older brother, paralyzed, helpless… my older sister crying for help that never came… the youngest babbling words beyond meaning. I see my family dying slowly, waiting in the darkest depths for a glimmer of light… but the darkness only gets darker… until no one is left but me.

“But,” Edelgard said, “they are only nightmares. My brothers and sisters are all alive and safe when I wake up, and when you wake up, the ones you love are still there. When we care for each other and help each other, our fears become powerless against us. Why, I could face a hundred rats as long as I had someone like Professor Byleth by my side!”

Flayn laughed. “Yes! I just… wish that I could have friends, too. Seteth only wants what is best for me, but he has done nothing but keep me away from other people. Sometimes it is as though I only ever feel happy when I am disobeying him.” She held her other hand to her mouth. “Oh, but I am selfish. He is right; Garreg Mach is no longer safe for me.”

Edelgard nodded. “Seteth is right to worry for your safety, but isolating you will only keep you weak and afraid. It is only natural to forge connections with others, and we ignore our impulses to do so at our own peril.” She’d never imagined saying or believing a statement like that when she had been at the academy in her world. It hadn’t been until Byleth had taken her side, and the rest of the Black Eagles as well, that she had realized that the only true path to victory was in trusting the strength of her friends. She could have taken on the entire world alone—she’d been planning on it—but she would not have triumphed. She knew that now.

“You are wise beyond your years, Your Highness,” Flayn said, forcing a smile. “The Goddess must have blessed you with more than just that vision.”

“Oh, don’t flatter me, Flayn. Wise beyond my years?”  _ Yes,  _ Edelgard almost wanted to say, smiling inwardly at the thought,  _ about six years by my reckoning. _

Flayn crawled over to her side and sat next to her, and the two of them sat in silence as the gentle and intermittent drizzle drumming on the tent slowly came to a stop. “Once Seteth and I reach Arianrhod,” she said, “I fear I shall never see you or your classmates again. I wish it were not so. In the time we have left… may I perhaps be your friend?”

Edelgard looked away from her. She’d never been close to Flayn—in fact, she’d done her best to keep her distance—but on that fateful day when the Flame Emperor had been unmasked and Byleth had stood by her side, a small part of her had hoped that Flayn would join the rest of the Black Eagles at her side as well. That probably wouldn’t happen in this world, either—in fact, given the almost sadistic attitude Dimitri had shown toward her in his guise as the Hurricane Knight and how he’d nearly killed Seteth, it was a certainty that when he was unmasked, Flayn would not join him.

“We may, perhaps,” she answered, “until our paths diverge. And perhaps one day they will converge again.”

“Yes, perhaps!” Flayn’s hopeful smile brightened and broadened. “Wherever Big Brother and I go, I will await that day!”

“Do not simply await it,” Edelgard said. “Work for it. Make it happen. Take your destiny into your own hands.”

“I will, Your Highness—or may I call you Edelgard?”

“You may.”

A terrible, bestial scream rang out, faint and distant—the howl of a monstrous beast, gargantuan and grotesque, its cry deep and reverberating, as bone-chilling as it was bone-rattling.

Flayn held the little light she’d conjured close to her chest in clasped hands. It bled through the tips of her fingers, a warm red-orange. “What was that?”

“It sounded like a demonic beast,” Edelgard said, taking her lance. “Flayn, hurry back to Seteth. I’m sure he heard that, and I’m sure he’s worried.”

The sun was just beginning to crawl over the horizon when Edelgard crawled out of her tent after Flayn. The rest of the Blue Lions were already mobilized, but Byleth was nowhere to be found.

Another roar cut through the air.

“It sounds like your brother, Sylvain,” Felix said. “Any other monstrous family members we should know about?”

Sylvain shook his head. He already had the Lance of Ruin slung over his shoulder, its spiny bone spearhead glowing orange with an internal flame like a beacon in the dim light of the early morning. “Not unless my dad’s gone nuts.”

_ “Flayn!”  _ Seteth shouted out sharply, heading straight toward her and grabbing her by the arm. “Come with me. We’ll circle the campsite until the danger is passed.”

“What’s going on? Where’s the Professor?” Annette asked, still rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“I saw her head into the valley just before dawn,” Dedue said.

Ingrid’s pegasus swooped down and came to a gentle stop, its hooves clopping across the stony ground. “The Professor’s heading up from the valley. There’s a demonic beast on her tail,” Ingrid said. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

Dimitri narrowed his eyes and gripped his lance tighter—tight enough that Edelgard could swear, though it was hard to know for certain in the dawn light, that the wooden haft was beginning to splinter. “Worse than Miklan?”

“I wouldn’t say worse—but different.”

_ “I can see her!”  _ Ashe shouted out from the edge of the cliff. “She’s coming up the other side of the ravine!”

Edelgard rushed to the cliffside. If she squinted, she could just barely see the silhouette of Professor Byleth hurrying up a narrow sloped pathway that ran up the opposite cliff, its outline traced by the golden rays of dawn sunlight spilling over the eastern horizon. And behind her, scaling the sheer cliff wall with talons dug deeply into the rock, was a grotesque reptilian creature. The shape of its hind legs and forelegs were almost human, though the proportions were all wrong, and bony protrusions emerged from its spine running down the length of its tail. Its head, terminating at the end of a long, thick neck, was covered by a stone mask, and a patchwork of a leather harness and scraps of armor covered some of its skinless flesh—taut cords of black muscle wrapped like bandages over its bones.

“My Goddess,” Ashe breathed, “what the hell is that?”

Edelgard was similarly stunned. She hadn’t thought she’d see one of these monsters again—at least, not clad in that peculiar armor. These were monstrous soldiers of Those Who Slither. What was one of them doing here so soon?

Dimitri leaped onto his horse. “There’s a bridge to the other side just south of here,” he called out to the rest of the class. “Everyone, follow my lead! Converge on the Professor’s location!”

Edelgard did the same and took off after him. She wasn’t much for horseback riding, but she was proficient enough as long as she didn’t have to fight while riding. She’d dismount as soon as the need arose.

With the rest of the class trailing behind and Ingrid gliding overhead, she and Dimitri reached Byleth just as the demonic beast pulled itself over the brink of the cliff, its scaly talons gouging out chunks of stone. As the dawn light brightened and the beast neared, Edelgard could see that it was already grievously injured: black blood trickled from myriad wounds, and Byleth’s Sword of the Creator had already done a number on the heavy stone mask hiding its face. The beast reared up on its hind legs, almost standing like a human. Edelgard shuddered, remembering that these creatures were the result of humans without Crests being exposed to the power of Crest Stones.

The beast bellowed, its vocalizations—as pained as they were rage-filled—shaking the air and causing the ground itself to quake. Blood and viscera dripped from beneath its mask and splattered on the ground, rank and foul-smelling like decaying fish.

“Professor!” Dimitri called out, catching Byleth’s attention. “Head to safety; I’ll take care of this monster.”

Byleth wasted no time arguing; she sheathed the Sword of the Creator at her hip and swung her leg over Edelgard’s horse. “Thanks, Edelgard,” she said, panting from exertion. Edelgard could feel her breath against the back of her neck. “Let’s make like a tree and get out of here.”

“As you wish, Professor!” Edelgard tugged on her horse’s reins and headed back toward the safety of the bridge, slipping behind the rest of the class’s ranks.

Dimitri rode in a wide arc around the beast, baiting it, trying to lead it further away. It swiped its claws at him; his horse reared back and threw him off, then bolted. With a gurgling growl, the demonic beast prepared to pounce on him, its bare muscles coiling and tightening like compressed springs.

Edelgard felt her ears pop.

The next thing she knew, Dimitri had leaped into the air—leaped impossibly high—and an eldritch tingle in the air bristled the hairs on the back of her neck. She felt the familiar sensation of her Crest of Flames activating—but not within herself.

Dimitri brought his outstretched leg down on the beast’s forehead, shattering both its stone mask and its skull. Jagged shards of bone ripped themselves free of the beast’s flesh like a crown of thorns embedded in its head. The beast howled in agony, letting loose such a baleful and mournful cry that Edelgard almost felt  _ sorry  _ for it, though she knew there was nothing of its once-human self remaining within it.

Dimitri threw a single punch, and a split second later, the beast had a mangled mass of viscera where its head had once been. The beast stumbled backward, slipped on the edge of the cliff, and plummeted into the ravine. Edelgard heard the faint sound of its body splattering against the ground one hundred feet below.

She was awestruck. In her world, with only the Crest of Blaiddyd, Dimitri had been renowned for his freakish strength, but this— _ this  _ was something else. Had he used both that and the Crest of Flames at once?

Dimitri’s gauntlet on his right hand fell to pieces, revealing a naked and scarred forearm. Crimson blood ran in rivulets from his knuckles down his arm, and for a second, the veins standing out on his pale skin glowed bright red before the light faded. He cradled his bloody knuckles and took a few halting, limping steps toward the rest of the class.

“I, um, don’t think he’ll be bothering us again,” he said, casting a glance toward the canyon. “Professor, are you alright? What were you doing down there?”

* * *

Once Mercedes and Flay had treated Dimitri’s (entirely self-inflicted) injuries to his arm and leg, Byleth led the Blue Lions down into the valley to show them what she’d found.

“I saw a flash of green light in the valley before sunrise,” Byleth explained, “around here. I thought I’d investigate.”

“That was irresponsible of you,” Seteth chided her. “You should not have gone down here alone like that.”

“Yeah, Professor,” Sylvain chimed in. “I’d have been happy to come down here with you for some early morning… investigations.” Ingrid jabbed her elbow into his ribs.

“Is it worth getting chased by a demonic beast, Professor?” Felix grumbled.

“You tell me,” Byleth said, leading them deeper into the ruins.

Edelgard gasped at the sight that awaited her. Ashe and Flayn both let out a frightened yelp. “Cethleann’s tits,” Sylvain gasped, “what the  _ fuck  _ is that?” Seteth gave him a very stern glare and slapped him upside the head.

Embedded in one of the ruined stone walls was a mage clad all in black, wearing a beaked black mask over his face and a peaked, pointed hood. His arms and legs were bound to the wall and… somehow,  _ fused  _ into the ancient facade. Flesh and cloth simply flowed smoothly into stone. The mage’s chest rose and fell rapidly, like the beat of a hummingbird’s wings.

And there was another mage next to him protruding from the stone wall, this one bisected from top to bottom; one leg, one arm, and half of his face vanished into the stone. His body was limp and unmoving. Another mage’s torso protruded at a skewed angle out of the wall, his limp arms and head dangling like an abandoned ragdoll’s. A gloved hand sprouted from the ground at the base of the crumbling wall like a grotesque flower, its fingers curled into desperate claws. Two more mages were embedded into an adjacent wall, their bodies contorted into agonized poses and held in place by the stone engulfing their limbs. One had lost his mask, and the bottom half of his face—the top half was buried in stone—was frozen in a silent scream of terror and agony.

Edelgard recognized the garb of these unfortunate mages. Those Who Slither in the Dark. But what were they doing down here, and in such a state?

“Good heavens,” Seteth breathed, quickly tracing a holy sign across his chest with his thumb. “What in the Goddess’ name is this?”

Annette yelped and tripped over something; all eyes turned toward her, and that was when Edelgard noticed the edge of a stone mask just like the one the demonic beast had worn protruding from the ground, as though the rest of another one of those monsters had been buried underground—but  _ how? _

Byleth approached the one surviving mage and pulled away his mask, revealing a face as pale as a corpse. The mage’s wide eyes were glassy and unfocused, and his lips moved without making a sound. “How did this happen to you? Where do you come from?”

“Hang on,” Felix said, drawing his sword. “I’ll cut him free.”

“But he’s buried up to his elbows and knees!” Mercedes exclaimed, holding her hands to her mouth in revulsion.

“Pity.”

The mage’s lips curled, and after a few agonizing seconds, a pained whisper left his mouth.  _ “K-K-Kill… m-me…” _ His eyes rolled up into the back of his head, showing only bloodshot whites, and a rivulet of blood trickled over his bluish lips and down his chin.  _ “K-Kill… m-m-me…” _

“What happened to you?” Byleth repeated. “We can try to help.”

The mage let out a laugh that turned into a cough, then a death rattle. More blood leaked from his mouth and trickled out of his ears.  _ “Re… mi… re…” _ His chest heaved; bloody vomit, red and black, erupted from his mouth and spilled down his chest, splattering on the ground.

Dedue stepped forward and nudged Byleth aside, then rested his hand with surprising gentleness against the mage’s throat. With a quick flick of his wrist, he snapped the mage’s neck, and the mage slumped over, bowing his head as though in prayer.

While the rest of the class reeled from the sight of Dedue’s mercy killing, Seteth observed one of the other mages and removed his mask, revealing a dessicated, bug-eaten face—merely a few scraps of dried flesh and cartilage clinging to naked bone. Unlike his neighbor, this mage had clearly been dead for years—perhaps a decade or more.

Edelgard felt sick. She’d seen death before—death on an unimaginable scale—but she’d never seen  _ this.  _ What monstrous acts were Those Who Slither perpetrating in this world?

Something in the corner of her eye caught her attention; she slipped away from the rest of the class and crept toward another one of the ruined walls that sprouted from the ground like tombstones. Embedded in the ground, resting among a patch of dry, brittle grass, was a rotting, decayed arm clutching a dagger in a death-grip. 

The dagger’s blade had rusted entirely, leaving only a mottled reddish-brown shard of metal, and the leather wrapped around its hilt had long since rotted away, but its gold crossguard was just as lustrous and brilliant as it had been on the day it had been forged.

It was Dimitri’s dagger, and it was exactly like the one resting in her desk drawer back at Garreg Mach down to the last detail.


	5. Familiar Scenery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Dimitri shows off his strength again, Edelgard runs into some distressingly familiar faces in Arianrhod, and Flayn attends the greatest slumber party in the history of Fódlan.

Another day’s worth of travel took the Blue Lions past the grotesque tableau they had witnessed at Zanado and down the road that wound its way through the dense and foggy forests of Magdred Way. Edelgard remembered this place well. For the Black Eagles in her world, and the Blue Lions of this world, it had been the first time any one of them had seen firsthand one of the Knights of Seiros in battle—and the heavy toll paid by those who dared to defy the Church.

Lonato Gildas Gaspard, head of House Gaspard, had instigated a rebellion against the Church of Seiros following the execution of his son Christophe. Byleth’s class had followed Lady Catherine of the Knights of Seiros to Castle Gaspard to clean up the remnants of the rebellion, only to find themselves mired in an ambush in these very woods. The tense, frantic battle that had broken out had ended only when Catherine’s seven-bladed sword Thunderbrand had bathed in Lonato’s blood. It had been a stark reminder—a warning, really—of what happened to those who stood against the church.

Rain clouds swept by overhead, turning the thick blanket of fog into a cold, wet haze. Edelgard could feel the cold bite into her knuckles as her hands clasped the rain-slicked reins of her horse. Byleth had brought Sylvain up to the head of the convoy so that the both of them could use their Heroes’ Relics as beacons; the spiny blade of the Sword of the Creator and the wicked spearhead of the Lance of Ruin glowed like torchlight in the mist, fuzzy and indistinct. The carriage was a black, shapeless mass rising from the sea of mist. The fuzzy silhouettes of Seteth’s wyvern and Ingrid’s pegasus glided overhead. In the mist-choked corridor winding through the woods, time seemed to have lost all meaning. Had they been riding all day, or only for a few hours?

“I hope I’m not the only one expecting someone to leap out at us from the fog,” Ashe commented, shivering. Droplets of water dripped like dewdrops from his hood. Edelgard watched his eyes dart from one gnarled tree branch stretching out of the fog to another as though they were grasping hands reaching out to claim him and drag him into oblivion.

“This would be the perfect place for an ambush,” Edelgard agreed. The dense blanket of mist seemed like it could conceal almost anything—bandits, marauders, soldiers, mercenaries… even the months-old corpses Lonato’s men and the men of the rebellious western branch of the church who’d united under his banner against Archbishop Rhea. “Be on your guard.”

She didn’t know what to expect from Dimitri here. His feat of strength at Zanado still had her shocked. Knowing he was capable of that strength, she recalled her encounter with the Hurricane King—if he had used even a fraction of the power he’d shown off against that demonic beast when he’d had Seteth’s throat in his hand, he would have popped his head like a grape. He could have snuffed out Flayn’s life just as easily—so what was he playing at? Had he just been trying to frighten them? Was he purposefully driving them away from Garreg Mach so that he or some other agent of Those Who Slither in the Dark could kill them beyond the watchful eye of the Church? Thankfully, Seteth and Flayn were gliding high above the rest of the convoy right now, well away from the danger Dimitri posed—though an archer’s volley, sailing out from the trees, could fell their wyvern easily and send them plummeting to the ground…

“It might sound silly,” Ashe confessed, “and maybe it’s just that I’ve heard too many of Mercedes’ ghost stories, but… I can’t help but feel that Lonato might be out there… haunting the forest.”

“If he does, I’m sure his spirit would bear you no ill will, Ashe,” Edelgard assured him. 

She knew Ashe well from her own world and her past, and this world’s version of him seemed little different. She knew that Lord Lonato had been his adoptive father, and his rebellion and subsequent death at the hands of the Knights of Seiros and Byleth’s class had created a rift between Ashe and the church; it was of little surprise, then, that in Edelgard’s world he’d ended up on her side. Ashe had had to struggle to gain his adoptive family—and the Church had ripped it away from him swiftly and without mercy or consideration. Those whose lives the Church of Seiros did not ruin by their obsession with Crests, they destroyed in a myriad of other ways.

“I was here,” Ashe said, shaking his head. “I fought his men. _Killed_ his—” His voice cracked. “People I knew from town, from the castle, people who’d only ever been nice to me… How could his spirit _not_ bear me ill will for that?”

“Trust me,” Edelgard said to him, riding closer to him so he wouldn’t slip away in the thickening fog, “if the dead could have vengeance upon the living, there would be no living people left in the world.”

“Well, that’s morbid,” he said.

“Is it less morbid than the alternative? Than expecting ghouls and revenants to leap out from the trees and claim you? Our faith tells us that the dead all become one with the Goddess, and our reason tells us that any ghosts we might encounter in this world must only be a trick of our senses—an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, or a fragment of an underdone potato. So neither our reason or our faith leaves us any room to entertain the possibilities of ghosts.”

Ashe let out a little laugh in spite of himself.

“Besides,” Edelgard added, “no one seeks revenge against people with kind hearts. Only the wicked invite it upon themselves, and I don’t think you have a single wicked bone in your body.”

Ahead of them, the carriage jolted, tilted over precariously, and shuddered to a halt; the rest of the students clambered to a stop around it.

Seteth’s wyvern swooped down and lit on the road next to the stopped carriage as the Blue Lions milled around it. “What’s happened? Why have we stopped?” he asked, holding Flayn’s hand as he dismounted the scaly beast. Ingrid touched down beside him.

“Looks like the wheels have gotten stuck in the mud,” Byleth pronounced.

“I’ll get it,” Dimitri said, dismounting from his horse and crouching at the side of the carriage. With his white hair and pale skin emerging from the thick fog choking the road, he looked the spitting image of the sort of ghosts that Ashe was so afraid of—a phantom, half flesh, half fog, haunting the living world and hunting for revenge.

“The wheels don’t look damaged,” Sylvain said, inspecting the carriage with the Lance of Ruin still lit like a torch in his hand. “But we’ve hit a rough patch. Damn, I should’ve noticed…”

“I’ve got it,” Dimitri said, reaching under the back of the carriage and grabbing hold of the undercarriage. “Let the horses off their reins.”

“Allow me, Your Highness,” Dedue said.

“Don’t strain yourself, Dimitri,” Mercedes warned him as she and Annette hastily exited the carriage and separated the horses from the carriage. “You could hurt yourself again…”

“If the boar wants to be a beast of burden, then let him,” Felix scoffed. “If the horses tire, he can pull the carriage, too.”

With a mighty grunt, Dimitri lifted the entire back half of the carriage off the road and held it over his head. Clots of wet and dried clumps of mud fell from the wagon’s undercarriage and wheels. Apparently, this feat of strength was not so surprising to the rest of the Blue Lions, and Edelgard had to admit that it was far less impressive than punching a demonic beast apart, but even she found herself impressed. The Crest of Flames had never boosted _her_ strength that much. Then again, she’d never tried it. She would have to conduct an experiment when she returned to her own world.

Flayn clapped. “Oh, incredible, Dimitri! That is amazing!”

Dimitri inched forward, his hands gliding along the undercarriage, until he was standing underneath the center of the carriage and all four of its wheels were hanging in the air. “Is the path dry ahead?” he asked casually, as though he were not carrying an entire carriage over his head as easily as one might lift a housecat into the air.

“We should be good,” Sylvain said. “Take it forward about two or three carriage-lengths and we’ll be in the clear.”

Dimitri did so with ease and set the carriage down again, then clapped his hands clean. “There we are. We can proceed.”

“Are you alright?” Byleth asked him.

“I appreciate your concern, but yes, I am fine,” he said. “I did not even break a sweat.” Contrary to his confidence, though, he rubbed his right arm, which was bare due to the loss of one of his gauntlets the other day, and winced. Edelgard noticed under his clenched fingers fresh bruises popping up on his pale skin.

“Oh, I told you not to push yourself too hard again!” Mercedes chided him, rushing to his side and taking his arm up in her hands. The soft green glow of healing magic enveloped his arm and lifted the bruises from his skin.

“Amazing,” Flayn gasped, her emerald eyes wide and sparkling like a lake in the sunlight. “Brother, if we tire of flying, I am certain Dimitri could carry us, wyvern and all! Dimitri, if my brother will allow it, may I please ride on your shoulders?”

Dimitri looked down at her. The smile he’d worn shrank, but only by a little; even so, though, Edelgard could all but feel twisting coils of revulsion writhing like snakes under his skin. “I suppose I could,” he said, the tone of his voice calling to mind the way the Hurricane King had so gently traced his blade against Flayn’s cheek and awakening a nebulous worry that crawled down Edelgard’s back.

“Flayn, the crown prince of Faerghus does not deign to give piggy-back rides,” Seteth chided her. “At any rate, if we can proceed, then let us proceed.”

Though Flayn was disappointed, she joined her brother atop their wyvern’s back and took to the skies, and the convoy proceeded apace.

* * *

Another long ride past Gaspard territory lay the County of Rowe and its capital city, Arianrhod. The fortress city stood proudly within tall, thick alabaster walls that gleamed in the sunlight, earning it the nickname, ‘the Silver Maiden.’ The city had been built centuries ago, when House Rowe had still been part of the Empire, but as soon as it had been completed, they had seceded from the Adrestian Empire and joined the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, and so the magnificent fortress city meant to protect Adrestia from incursions from the north had almost instantly become Faerghus’ bulwark against incursions from the south. In terms of Faerghus’ few cities, it was second in its size and splendor only to Fhirdiad, the seat of the throne.

The last time Edelgard had been here, it had been about five years from now, and she and her Black Eagles Strike Force had led an army to conquer the Silver Maiden. The battle had been a furious slog over the city’s walls and through its complex networks of traps and snares, but in the end, her forces had emerged victorious. They’d even managed to slay one of the agents of Those Who Slither, excusing it as a regrettable consequence of the fog of war.

A few days later, Those Who Slither in the Dark had reduced the magnificent city to dust with javelins of light and warned Edelgard that if she stepped out of line again, Enbarr would be next. Edelgard couldn’t help but think of that when she saw the city rise before her—how easily it could be laid low.

The Blue Lions stopped at an inn to rest and spend the night, intending to set out the next morning back toward Garreg Mach; that same morning, Seteth and Flayn would venture alone to a destination only they knew.

“Ah, Arianrhod,” Sylvain sighed as he helped Edelgard and Ingrid hitch the party’s horses. “Truly the loveliest maiden in all of Faerghus. Have you ever been here, Lady Edelgard?”

Edelgard shook her head. “Not in the past, no.”

“‘The loveliest maiden in all of Faerghus?’” Ingrid repeated with a disdainful scoff. “I’ll tell that to the next poor girl you try to invite to dinner.”

“Then I’ll have to only ask out girls from the Alliance and the Empire from now on,” Sylvain said. “Say, Lady Edelgard… I knew a few good places to grab dinner here…”

“I’m engaged,” Edelgard said.

“She’s engaged,” Ingrid said at the exact same time.

Sylvain shrugged. “Well, can’t blame a man for trying.”

“I beg to differ,” Ingrid said. “We should check into our rooms; it’s been a long day, and we’ll be back on the road tomorrow morning.”

“Speak for yourself,” Sylvain retorted. “The sun hasn’t even set yet. Are you girls really going to just go right to bed and ignore everything this city has to offer?”

“Yes,” said Ingrid.

“Yes,” said Edelgard.

“But what about the salons? The restaurants? The—”

 _“—The boutiques,”_ Annette’s voice drifted past the stables, _“the bakeries… I’ll bet we can pick up plenty of sweets we can’t find anywhere else!”_

 _“Oh, Annie, I wouldn’t miss that for the world,”_ Mercedes responded, yawning, _“but it’s been a long day, and we’ll be on the road again tomorrow morning…”_

_“Well, don’t worry! You stay here and rest up and I’ll pick out something you’ll love!”_

“At least _some_ of the girls here know how to live a little,” Sylvain grumbled. “Hey, Annette! How about a night on the town?” he asked, rushing out of the stables and hurrying after her.

Ingrid crossed her arms and sighed. “Incorrigible,” she muttered, shaking her head. “You know I once caught him flirting with my grandmother?”

Edelgard found herself smiling. “She must be gorgeous. Do you take after her?”

Ingrid’s cheeks turned pink, but her lip curled in a decidedly non-flattered way. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, clearing her throat and coughing into her elbow as she hurried out of the stables.

Left alone with the horses, Edelgard sighed. Had she really just _flirted_ with Ingrid? Goodness, she was getting lonely. 

As she made her way to the inn after Ingrid, she decided she would spend a little time in the city. Perhaps she would find a nice gift for Byleth in one of those boutiques Annette had been talking about. Yes, it would make her a bit of a teacher’s pet, she supposed, but it was _Byleth._ And she knew exactly what Byleth liked…

She heard Flayn shout out from within the inn’s foyer. Fearing the worst, she braced herself and rushed in.

 _“Why can they not come with us?”_ Flayn shouted at Seteth, stomping her foot and pouting.

Seteth crossed his arms. “Flayn, we have discussed this,” he answered curtly. “The Professor and I are in agreement. The fewer people know where we are headed, the better.”

“But they are my _friends!_ Am I not allowed to have _friends,_ Brother?”

“Of course you may have friends, Flayn; do not be ridiculous. If the Professor’s students are as trustworthy as you hope, then they will _more_ than understand our need for secrecy.”

“So I am supposed to… what? Leave them behind? Never see them again? If that is so, then why could I not spend some time among them to say my goodbyes?” Flayn curled her hands into fists. “You did not even let me travel _here_ with them!”

“Flayn, there are more important things to concern yourself with than socializing; your life may very well still be in danger,” Seteth sighed, exasperated. “There is nothing more to say.”

“This is not just about _socializing,_ Brother, it is about sharing my _life_ with other people!”

“You have me!”

“Well, then I don’t _want_ you; I am _sick_ of you!” Flayn retorted, teary-eyed, and without another word she spun on her heel and stormed out of the inn past Edelgard, leaving Seteth standing alone in the foyer, speechless and aghast. He seemed to remain frozen like a statue for a second before snapping out of it and rushing after her.

“Lady Edelgard, I am sorry you had to see that,” he mumbled, pushing past her.

With a clamber of boots on wood, Byleth hurried down the stairs, followed by Dimitri and Dedue. “What’s going on?” Dimitri asked. “I heard shouting…”

“Flayn got into an argument with Seteth and ran off,” Edelgard explained. She wondered, was she to blame for that outburst? No, Seteth had been far too overbearing… even though he was right, if not by intention, to keep Flayn away from Dimitri.

“We should fan out and search the city before she gets too far,” Byleth said. “Dimitri, Dedue…”

Dimitri nodded, a grim frown crossing his face. “Leave it to us, Professor,” he said, hurrying the rest of the way down the staircase.

“I’ll come with you,” Edelgard said, closely following him out into the street.

“Thank you, Lady Edelgard, but it’s better if we split up into smaller search parties,” Dimitri told her. His cold blue eyes flitted left and right, scanning the road. “This way, Dedue.” He hurried down the street with his retainer following behind him like a second shadow, and Edelgard struggled to keep up.

Their path took them through the labyrinthine city streets for what felt like hours. Arianrhod did not just rely on thick walls and devilish snares to deter invasions—the city’s streets were a maze designed to force an invading army to creep as slowly as possible toward the citadel in its northern quadrant. Edelgard remembered the streets, but didn’t remember them so lively with civilians, though—no, she remembered them filled with the chaos of battle, swords and spears clashing, fireballs soaring overhead and electric bolts scorching the air, and the earth-rattling footsteps of mechanized titans plodding across friend and foe alike.

The search for Flayn was far less perilous, but just as frantic and heart-pounding. As much as Dimitri didn’t want her here, Edelgard stuck to him like glue. If he and Dedue found Flayn alone, there was no telling what they would do to her—but if Edelgard was there to witness them, he might be forced to stay his hand.

The shadows grew longer, the sky darker, as the sun began to dip below the walls of Arianrhod, plunging the city streets into shadow. At last, Edelgard caught sight of a flash of emerald-green hair in a gap between a throng of people, and seizing on that clue before Dimitri noticed, darted off toward it, weaving through the crowd. The sea of nobles, merchants, and commoners parted around her and she laid eyes on Flayn in the distance. The young girl was standing with and talking in the alley to two other men who towered over her with menacing auras.

 _“Flayn!”_ she shouted out, sprinting toward her. She glanced over her shoulder. Dimitri and Dedue were well behind her now. She would get to Flayn first, and then she would be out of danger—

She noticed too late who Flayn had been talking to. A tall man dressed in the garb of an Adrestian noble, with severe and hawklike facial features and long black hair spilling down his back.

Volkhard von Arundel.

Flayn turned to face Edelgard as she skidded to a halt in front of her. “Oh, hello, Edelgard! I was just telling my new friends here about you!” she chirped, beaming. She looked up at Arundel. “It is okay. Edelgard told me it was okay to call her that instead of Lady Edelgard or Her Highness.”

Arundel smiled. There was a twinkle in his lilac eyes. “Ah, my little El! Whatever brings you all this way to Arianrhod?”

Edelgard felt her breath catch in her throat and her tongue cleave to the roof of her mouth. As long as she could remember—which was not long, admittedly—her uncle Volkhard had been dead and replaced by Thales, leader of Those Who Slither in the Dark. If there was one person in the world she hated the most…

But what was he doing here in Arianrhod? Was he here for Flayn? How had he known that she and Seteth would be stopping here? Could Dimitri or some other agent within Garreg Mach—Glenn, perhaps—have informed him so swiftly?

Edelgard had no further opportunity to spin such thoughts in her racing mind, though, before she found herself enveloped by a whirlwind of red and gold and all but lifted clear off her feet. A pair of strong arms wrapped around her back, crushing the air from her lungs. She felt her heart beat a rapid, frantic tattoo against her ribcage.

“Ellie! Look at you in your academy uniform!” the second stranger cried out, setting her down. Edelgard couldn’t get a good look at him until he let her go. He was in his early twenties, by the look of it—at least three years older than Edelgard, she reckoned. He was at least a foot taller than her, too, and probably more. His face was familiar—the curve of his jaw, traced by a well-groomed blonde chinstrap beard, reminded her of her father’s, though just a bit broader—and his short, wavy blonde hair was a lustrous gold. He wore a sharp red suit with gold trim and epaulets that perfectly traced his strong, though lithe physique, and a short black cape hung over his shoulder, clasped by a brooch bearing a double-headed eagle insignia.

Edelgard stared up at him and Volkhard, dumbfounded. Who was this man, and why did he seem so…

“What’s wrong?” the familiar stranger asked her. “Is it the haircut?” He brushed away a lock of blonde hair from his brow. “Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me anymore.”

Dimitri caught up with her, but his eyes were fixed solely on the familiar stranger. “Ah, Prince Burkhart,” he said, a genial smile crossing his face.

“Prince Dimitri!” Burkhart’s smile widened. “The White Lion in the flesh! It’s an honor, Your Highness.” He took a bow.

“The honor is all mine, Your Highness,” Dimitri retorted, returning the bow. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting Enbarr’s Comet in person before he ascends to the throne.”

“Well…” Burkhart chuckled. “You’ve got plenty of time before then, Your Highness. I’d say Papa has five, maybe ten more years of ruling left in him.”

Edelgard was dumbfounded. _Burkhart?_ This was her eldest brother, Burkhart? _That_ Burkhart?

“And Flayn! There you are. Your older brother has been worried sick about you,” Dimitri said, looking down at the green-haired girl. He turned to Arundel. “Thank you for keeping an eye on her, si—U-Uncle Volkhard, is that _you?”_

 _Uncle Volkhard?_ Why in the Goddess’ name would Dimitri call Arundel his _uncle?_ Even Burkhart seemed taken aback.

Arundel laughed. “It was nothing, my dear nephew; she is a delightful little sprite.” He patted Flayn on the head and tousled her hair playfully.

“What brings you to Arianrhod, Uncle?” Dimitri asked.

“As it happens, Prince Burkhart and I both had business to attend to here, so we decided to make the trip together,” Arundel said. “But enough about me. Edelgard, darling, how is Garreg Mach treating my favorite niece?”

Dimitri gave Edelgard a sharp, confused look, his brow knitting in confusion. Edelgard shared his bemusement. How could they _both_ have an Uncle Volkhard?

“The Black Eagles aren’t picking on you, are they?” Burkhart asked, smiling. “Um… Ellie, what’s the matter? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

Edelgard blinked, wrested control of her body, and cleared her throat. “Ah. B-Burkhart.” The name sounded so foreign to her lips, it had been so long since she’d said it. “Burky, no, I—I have not seen a ghost. I was merely surprised to see you here.” Her voice quivered just a little; she tried to keep it under control. Her heart felt like it was ripping itself in half.

This was really him. This was what he’d have looked like if he’d had the chance to grow up, the way she had. Not the young boy—though still much older than her—whose skin had been so pale it was nearly blue, whose curly golden hair had been matted with blood and filth, who had died paralyzed from the neck down and unable to even breathe. This was the man he had deserved to grow into.

“Are the rest of the Eagles here, too?” Burkhart glanced at the people milling around them. “I hear you’ve got a pretty eclectic bunch this year, as if Ferdinand and your retainer weren’t enough.”

“Um, well, actually…”

“Lady Edelgard transferred into the Blue Lions about a week ago,” Dimitri said.

At that, Burkhart’s eyes hardened into flecks of cold sapphire; he lifted his head and stared down his nose at Edelgard, his lips curling into a disdainful sneer. Edelgard felt her heart sink into her stomach and keep going, burying itself under the cobblestones beneath her feet.

“It’s treason, then,” he spat at her.

Edelgard withered under his gaze. She couldn’t breathe, let alone speak. This was a nightmare brought to life. Here she was, face to face with her eldest brother, her dear Burky, and not only had she not recognized him at all, but she’d displeased him so terribly…

And then Burkhart burst out laughing, clapped her on the back, and wrapped her up in another tight, warm hug. His fingers threaded themselves through her hair and curled around the nape of her neck. With her face pressed against his chest, she could hear his heartbeat, strong and steady.

“Well,” he said, “I can’t in good conscience root for the Blue Lions at Gronder Field this year,” he chuckled, “but you’d better give Ferdinand a few lumps for me!”

Edelgard nodded and sank deeper into his embrace, letting her arms curl around his waist and her hands rest against his back. Her brother really _was_ here in front of her, and that meant all the rest of her siblings really _were_ alive, and her Uncle Volkhard really _was_ her Uncle Volkhard. She could cry. She could cry, but she wouldn’t, because _this_ world’s Edelgard probably wouldn’t, because she hadn’t known the pain and loss of losing one’s family one by one, day by day, inch by inch…

She felt hot, wet tears well up behind squeezed-shut eyelids and roll down her cheeks, and her chest heave and her shoulders quake. She couldn’t help herself. She had a family here. She had a _family_ here!

“Ellie?” Burkhart pulled away, though he kept his hands on her shoulders. “El, are you alright?”

Edelgard composed herself, choking down the lump in her throat and swallowing her aching heart, wiping her tears on her sleeve. “I’m fine, my brother,” she croaked, hating how fragile and weak she sounded. “I—I’ve been… more homesick than I’d realized, I suppose.” She tried not to look directly at his face, as though the sight of it, like the sight of the sun, would blind her. “It feels as though I haven’t seen you in years.”

“I remember six months ago you couldn’t wait to be rid of me.”

“Well, I’ve changed.”

“I’ll say,” Dimitri interjected. “Since she joined the Blue Lions, Lady Edelgard has been quite a workhorse.”

Burkhart furrowed his brow. “Okay, who are you, and what have you done with the _real_ Edelgard?”

Edelgard could feel the blood drain from her face. “I-I… I—” She couldn’t be flustered here; it would only make Dimitri more suspicious of her.

He laughed at her again. “I’d hoped the academy would knock some sense into you,” he said, gently rapping his knuckles against her forehead. “Little Ellie’s growing up. I can’t wait to tell Papa!”

“This has been lovely,” Arundel said to Burkhart, “but we must be going, Your Highness. How long are you planning on staying in Arianrhod, El?”

“Just until tomorrow morning, I’m afraid,” Edelgard said.

“A pity. Though you’re more than welcome to visit Enbarr whenever you’d like.” Arundel took her up in his arms. “And, of course, I’ll see you at Gronder Field next month. Take care, my dear.”

“You too, Uncle Volkhard,” Edelgard mumbled, forcing herself to hug him back. She still couldn’t shake the sickening feeling that something was off—maybe it was because she’d had to pretend to be affectionate with Thales so many times in order to keep people from growing suspicious.

What if this was all an act? What if this was still Thales behind a mask, just more devious and cunning than even the one in her world was? What if he was here in this world, knew what she was, and was holding her siblings hostage? How could she possibly trust him?

She broke away. “It was nice to see you,” she said, a little more curtly than she’d intended.

Arundel smiled—and perhaps it was just Edelgard’s imagination, but she could see a knife in that smile and Thales’ wicked glint in his twinkling lilac eyes—took Burkhart by the arm, and led him into the street; the two of them quickly vanished into the crowd.

Edelgard waved, and tried to say, “Goodbye, Burky,” after her brother, but her voice stuck in her throat like a lump of cinnamon.

“So,” Flayn piped up, “if you two both have an Uncle Volkhard, that means you must be related somehow, correct?”

Edelgard glanced at Dimitri, who looked just as perturbed as she felt. “I suppose we must be,” she answered, masking her horror.

 _“Flayn!”_ Seteth’s voice rang out above the murmur of the thinning crowd, and he emerged from the street to rush to his sister’s side. Byleth trailed behind him. “Flayn, what are you doing here? Do you have any idea how long we have been searching for you?”

Flayn looked away from him and pointedly fixed her gaze on her shoes, her face reddening sheepishly. “I… I am sorry, Brother. I was not thinking.”

“You most certainly were not. Don’t you know how dangerous a city like this can be for a girl like you? You could have gotten hurt, or worse!” Seteth gave her a stern glare, but then his demeanor softened and he threw his arms around her. “This is why I worry about you, Flayn…” he murmured, holding her in a tight embrace.

“Dimitri, Dedue, Edelgard, good work finding her,” Byleth said, relieved.

“It was nothing, Professor; we were just lucky,” Edelgard said, though inwardly she welcomed Byleth’s praise. “Let’s meet up with the rest of the class before it gets dark.”

* * *

Flayn was in a far more subdued and withdrawn mood when she was brought back to the inn. Seteth wouldn’t let her out of his sight, or even let her slip so much as out of arm’s length, and when they reached the inn, he immediately took her to their room and vanished behind a shut and locked door. Edelgard couldn’t say she envied Flayn; she knew what it was like to be locked up in a cage, to have the shape of her life decided for her… and while, of course, it was obvious that Seteth cared a great deal about her safety and did love her dearly, he was also quite strict and paternal and could scold with such intensity that even Edelgard herself sometimes dreaded the thought.

The streets beyond Edelgard’s bedroom window were dark, and the only lights shining in the city now were the faint glimmers of torchlight from behind other walls and the occasional late-night carriage or pedestrian. More than ready to get some sleep—though she regretted not having the time to explore the city as some of her classmates had—she began to ready herself for bed, slipping out of her uniform and slipping into her pajamas.

 _“Hey, uh, Lady Edelgard? Can I come in?”_ Annette asked, knocking on the door.

Edelgard sat down on her bed and laid back, letting herself sink into the mattress and watching the soft amber light of the lamp on the bedside table cast wavering shadows across the ceiling. She would have to get what sleep she could tonight; tomorrow marked the beginning of another few days’ ride back to the monastery. “You may.”

Annette opened the door and walked in. She had a basket under her arm no doubt filled with all sorts of goodies from the local shops, but didn’t have the cheerful look on her soft, round face that Edelgard would have expected to see from someone who’d spent the evening having fun. She set the basket down at the foot of the bed on the opposite side of the room and tended to her bags without even a word about what she’d found.

“Is Flayn okay?” she asked.

“We’ll see when Seteth’s done with her,” Edelgard said. “Don’t worry. She didn’t get far, and she was fortunate enough to run into my uncle before we caught up with her.”

Annette let out a heavy, forlorn sigh, curling a lock of her short, carrot-red hair around one finger. “I can’t believe I was out _shopping_ while the rest of you were so worried about her. If I’d just waited a few minutes, I wouldn’t have missed her running off…”

“Don’t worry. It all worked out in the end,” Edelgard assured her. “At least _you_ got to see some of the beautiful Silver Maiden.”

“Yeah, but we’re not here for fun; we’re here to escort Seteth and Flayn,” Annette said. “And I just ran off like a tourist instead. What if we’d been assigned to a battle, and instead of fighting I’d just ran off to marvel at the scenery while you guys took care of everything? I can’t believe myself!”

“Our mission was to bring Seteth and Flayn to Arianrhod,” Edelgard said. “The moment we arrived here, we had already done our duty. Besides, like you said, you were already gone by the time Flayn ran away. No one can blame you for that.”

“I guess.” Annette shook her head. “I just don’t want people to think I’m…”

“Lazy?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t have to be responsible for everything. A little idleness is good for the soul every once in a while. In moderation, of course.”

Annette laughed. “That’s rich coming from you, Edelgard. You train almost as much as Felix and Ingrid do!”

“Yes, well, I spent the past seventeen years being idle, so I’ve learned from experience the dangers of overindulgence… in both directions. You can indulge in work, too—not just leisure.”

“You sound just like the Professor.”

Edelgard’s heart leaped. “Do I?” she asked, not in the slightest bit surprised. In her world, she’d overheard Byleth having ‘the talk’ with Annette about her tendency to take on too many burdens many times. It had taken a while to sink in, and the Annette she knew still had a long way to go.

“Yeah! I swear, in our lectures sometimes it’s like you two are on the exact same wavelength. Like you’ve known her for years.”

“How about that.”

Annette rummaged through her bag. “Um, Lady Edelgard?”

“Please, just Edelgard is fine.”

“Right. Um, Edelgard? Can you turn around or close your eyes or something? I’m gonna change into my jammies.”

“Your what?”

“My jammies.” Annette pulled a bundle of robin’s-egg blue flannel cloth from her bag and unfolded them into a matching set of blouse and pants. “You know, jimmy jams? Pee-jays? Like what you’ve got on.”

“Oh, pajamas,” Edelgard said sheepishly. She’d never heard anyone, even Annette, use that sort of slang before. Perhaps that was another point of divergence between this world and hers. She rolled onto her side, facing away from Annette, and closed her eyes. “Okay, I’m ready.”

“Thanks, Edelgard. Your jammies are really cute, by the way,” Annette said to her while she changed.

“Thank you.”

“Um… it’s okay for me to talk to you like this, right, Lady Edel… uh, Edelgard?”

“I don’t see anyone from the Empire to take offense at it,” Edelgard said. “Be as casual as you like. Anyway, did you find anything interesting at the shops today?”

“Boy, did I!” Annette chirped. “There was a confectioner in town, and he said he only sets up shop in the fall. He had black currant candies, and rose candies, and even sour lime candies… I could eat them until my teeth fall out! And he spins sugar like a glassblower; it’s incredible! He says he’s also invented a drink that’s as sweet as candy, but bubbly like champagne, though he only sells it during the summer. Do you like sweets, Edelgard?”

“I’ve been known to indulge from time to time.”

“Mercie and I can’t get enough of them; Mercie especially. I’ve never seen anyone with such a sweet tooth.”

“She sounds like Lysithea,” Edelgard murmured, unsurprised. Perhaps a voracious appetite for sweets was a side-effect of surviving Crest implantation experiments. She’d noticed that she didn’t crave sugary treats quite as much in this world as she did in her own, and that her stomach wasn’t so easily upset—Dedue’s lunch had proven that to her.

“Who?”

“Oh, um… nothing. No one you would know. Old friend.”

“I can set aside a few candies in a little pouch for you,” Annette suggested, “before Mercie inhales the rest.”

“I’d like that. You’re good friends with Mercedes, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, of course! She’s like family. When I bring her home, it’s like I’ve got two moms!”

“Pardon my asking, but was her hair always white?”

“Huh? Yeah, as long as I’ve known her. The other kids called her the Walking Phantasm. When we first met at Fhirdiad, she took me aside and told me her hair was the source of all her power.”

“She’s strong?”

“Boy, is she! Right from the first day, she was better than any of the professors at the Royal School of Sorcery! Sometimes they’d let _her_ teach their classes!”

Edelgard smiled, but bitterly. It seemed Mercedes really _was_ the Lysithea of this world.

“She’s not much for showing off anymore, though,” Annette said. “She’s gotten so sickly… I’m actually kinda surprised she came to Garreg Mach at all. I’m always worried one day she’ll push herself too far and something will, uh… break.”

“She’ll be fine,” Edelgard assured her, “as long as you’re watching over her.”

Someone knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” Annette called out.

 _“Hello, Annette!”_ Flayn called back, her voice muffled behind the closed door. _“It’s me, Flayn! May I come in?”_

“Go ahead!” Annette called out, and Edelgard realized that she didn’t have to keep her eyes closed anymore. She sat up and swung her legs over the side of her bed.

The door swung open and Flayn stepped into the room wearing a mint green nightgown, her head bowed and her hands clasped behind her back. She rocked back and forth anxiously on her heels, her teeth kneading her lower lip. “Hello, Annette, Lady Edelgard.” She bowed. “My brother has let me leave our room—briefly—so that I may apologize for the trouble I have caused and give you two a proper goodbye.” She spoke slowly, as though reciting a speech she’d memorized by rote. “I am sorry for causing you such distress through my conduct and hope you may forgive me.”

“Aw, it’s okay, Flayn,” Annette cooed, resting her arm around the young girl’s shoulders. “Having to leave your home is really tough. We don’t blame you for snapping at all! Right, Edelgard?”

“It was a blessing in disguise, really,” Edelgard offered. “If you hadn’t run off, I might never have found out my uncle and brother were here.”

Flayn sniffled. “Still, though, I caused you all such worry. I ought to have known better. I simply… I wished this journey had taken longer,” she admitted. “I thought we would have more time to bond and… be friends. But I suppose this is where our paths diverge.”

“For now,” Edelgard assured her.

“It’d be nice if we knew where you were going,” Annette said. “Then we could send letters to each other to keep in touch.”

“Hmm…” Flayn thoughtfully coiled a lock of her curly emerald hair around one finger. “I think I know where we’re going.”

“Don’t tell us,” Edelgard told her. “You might put yourself at risk. You’ll see us again; there’s no need to compromise your safety.”

“You can tell us,” Annette retorted. She held a hand over her chest. “I swear to the Goddess, Edelgard and I won’t tell another soul on pain of death. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Edelgard stood up. “Annette, do you mean that? Would you refuse to give up her location even under the threat of death and torture? Would you stand up to someone like the Hurricane King if he demanded to know where she’d gone?”

Annette went pale, and her eyes darted to the side, failing to meet Edelgard’s gaze. “I, uh… Y-You’re kind of creeping me out, Your Highness…”

“Sorry.” Edelgard sat back down on the side of her bed. It wasn’t like her, in this world anyway, to be so serious; she had to keep in mind who she was pretending to be at least a little bit. “I got a little carried away, I guess.”

“You’re right, though. I, uh… I’d never really thought about that… but I wouldn’t tell a soul, not even the Hurricane King! Not ever! Flayn, your secret won’t leave this room. I promise.” Annette’s heart was always in the right place, and when she made promises like that, she usually intended to keep them. Sometimes _intending_ wasn’t good enough, but she was always made of tougher stuff than her cherubic face and rosy chipmunk cheeks suggested.

“Well… Brother is being cagey as he often is, but I—er, _we_ have an uncle who lives near Lake Teutates, just north of here,” Flayn said. “We might stay there for a few days or weeks. We—er, I also have an uncle who lives further northeast in Sreng. But I think wherever we go, we will eventually settle down on the Rhodos Coast to the northwest. That way, we will be close to Mother.”

“Your mother lives there?” Annette asked.

Flayn shook her head. “No, that is where… where we laid her to rest.”

“I’m sorry,” Edelgard said. She recalled her own mother—what little she could. She couldn’t recall her face very well, but sometimes her voice was clearer. After her uncle had taken the two of them to Fhirdiad, they’d been separated. Edelgard had lived with her uncle, and her mother had all but vanished. For all she knew, she had passed away long ago.

But that had been in _her_ world, _her_ past. Here in this world, who knew how things had turned out? Maybe her mother was alive and well to this day, living in Fhirdiad under a false name. Maybe this world’s Edelgard had a habit of visiting her from time to time. Edelgard wasn’t sure how to feel about that possibility.

“No, it is okay. She passed away when I was much younger than I am now,” Flayn said. “It has been… a very long time.”

“And your father’s gone, too, right?” Annette asked. “If it’s just you and Seteth?”

“Um… yes. Just me and my brother, I’m afraid.”

“It sounds like you’ll be awfully lonely up there, with no one but your big brother for company. I’m so sorry, Flayn. No wonder you ran away. I don’t have much of a family anymore either since my father left, so I know what that’s like. But Edelgard, you’ve got enough brothers and sisters for the both of us, don’t you?”

Edelgard swallowed a lump in her throat. She did now, although they weren’t exactly _hers._ But it wasn’t something she could explain, and the sentiment didn’t sit well with her. She had a large family. She was blessed with so many siblings. No traumas had scarred her body and soul. Her claim to the pain and suffering seared into her mind and branded into her dreams was as legitimate in this world as her claim to the throne—ninth in line out of eleven, a middling, mediocre girl with a middling, mediocre life—even if the past she knew told a different story.

“Yes,” she said, trying to wipe at her eyes as surreptitiously as possible. “You two are welcome to have some of them, if you’d like.”

Flayn smiled. “Well, I would definitely like to have a brother like Prince Burkhart!”

Annette smiled, too. “Oh, that gives me a good idea!”

“Renting out my family to orphans and children from broken families?” Edelgard asked.

“No! We can have a little slumber party right here in this room!”

“I don’t see how that quite follows from Flayn’s point,” Edelgard began, “but…”

“I packed my makeup kit with my stuff, and a few sweets for the road, and then there’s the stuff I picked up in town today while you were all out searching—and we can invite Ingrid, too, and Mercie if she’s not too worn out, and we can spend all night putting on makeup and doing our hair and talking about boys and so on! It’ll be a proper going-away party!”

Flayn’s eyes sparkled. “Really? You would do that for me?”

“Sure! If you’re gonna be alone for who knows how long, then the least we can do is make sure you’re not alone tonight! What do you think, Edelgard?”

Edelgard squirmed atop the bedside she’d been sitting on. A slumber party? Sharing a room with the rest of the Blue Lions girls? What if she had one of her nightmares? Or night terrors? What if she started mumbling all sorts of revealing things in her sleep?

But, she reasoned, this world’s version of herself would have probably jumped at the opportunity, so she would have to cross that bridge when she came to it.

“I think it sounds like a great idea,” she said, “as long as Seteth is okay with it.”

Flayn’s face fell. “Ah. I had not considered that. After what I did, and what I shouted at him, I doubt he would permit me…”

“He’s _got_ to make an exception. This is our last day together!” Annette said. “Look, Edelgard and I will talk some sense into him, you’ll see.”

“You will?” Flayn asked.

“We will?” Edelgard asked.

* * *

Against all odds, they _did_ manage to convince Seteth to be lenient and allow Flayn one last night with her friends.

That night, the rest of the girls (Ingrid with some cajoling) brought their bedrolls into Annette’s room, pushing aside the beds and reorganizing the room’s furniture to maximize floor space. Annette and Mercedes shared some of their favorite sweets and pastries; Edelgard used her extensive knowledge of caring for brittle white hair to carefully brush and braid Mercedes’ long, snowy tresses; Ingrid actually deigned to let Annette practice on her with her new makeup kit. Rumors were spread; spooky legends regarding the ancient heroes and villains of Fódlan were told; high-stakes games of truth or dare were played (Edelgard, unfortunately, unwilling to expose the gaps in her own knowledge of her past, had no choice but to take on riskier and riskier dares); a wide variety of lipsticks were tested on a wide variety of cheeks and hands. Flayn beamed all the while: her elated grin never left her face for even an instant as she joined in the merriment. Edelgard had only ever seen her so happy in situations involving fish.

The night ran long. Mercedes was the first to retire, blaming it on her weak constitution. Ingrid was next, and when she curled up in her bedroll, she suggested to the others to do the same due to the long days of travel ahead of them. With few left to carry the torch, Annette called it a night, and with that, the great girls’ night had come to an end, with only Edelgard and Flayn left awake.

Edelgard laid awake long after the other Blue Lions had begun softly snoring. As worn-out and as exhausted—physically and emotionally—as she was, sleep eluded her. She kept seeing Burkhart’s face when she closed her eyes, and when she opened her eyes and stared up at the darkness, she still kept seeing it.

He’d grown up handsome, strong, smart, kind, compassionate, friendly, funny… good Goddess almighty, he’d grown up _perfect._ Edelgard wondered, what if _he_ had survived the monstrous experiments of Those Who Slither instead of her? Would he have been stronger than her? Smarter than her? Would he have committed himself to walk the same path as her? Would he have done it _better_ than her? Surely he would have. He had been the best of them all.

Edelgard choked back tears. Why, then, had he had to die first?

“Edelgard?” Flayn whispered, her faint voice cutting through the quiet. She was lying next to her, so her hushed whisper did not have far to travel.

“Yes, Flayn?” Edelgard whispered back, trying not to keep her voice from breaking.

“I do not think I want this night to end.”

“I had that thought once. Two weeks ago, there was a morning I didn’t want to see, because it would mean the most wonderful night of my life would have to come to an end.” _And,_ Edelgard added, but only in her mind, _I ended up never seeing it. Like the story Mercedes told of the cursed monkey’s paw, which brings all wishes true with a horrible cost…_

“What happened two weeks ago?”

“It’s a long story. But you… are you still afraid to let yourself sleep, even here?” she asked Flayn, recalling their conversation from the other night.

“I do not want you to be gone when I wake up,” Flayn said to her. She rolled over, her bedroll rustling around her. Her silhouette was black against the darkness enveloping the bedroom. “Edelgard, may I tell you a secret?”

Edelgard listened closely and did not answer until she had made sure she could count three other people snoring. “You may if you like,” she said, keeping her voice down. “I’m excellent at secret-keeping.”

“I know it sounds like a silly fear, to be afraid of falling asleep,” she said, “but the nightmares I have… where I wake up with only my f—my brother, and everyone else I know has been lost to history… they are not merely fantasies. It happened to me once. A long, long time ago, I was injured very badly, and I had to sleep for a very long time. When I awoke from that accursed slumber, all I had left was him. My mother was alive the day I fell asleep, if only barely, but when I awoke…”

“I’m sorry, Flayn.” The story confirmed several of Edelgard’s suspicions regarding the girl. While she may have looked and acted like a teenage girl, she was most definitely _much_ older than seventeen, and if her passing resemblance to Archbishop Rhea and that glimpse Edelgard had seen of her pointed ears were any indication, it was highly likely that she (and by extension, her brother) were not human. But Edelgard took no joy in having those suspicions confirmed. “May I tell you a secret as well?” she asked.

“Yes, most certainly. I would be honored to keep a secret for you, Your Highness.”

“You mustn’t tell anyone.”

“Not even my big brother,” Flayn assured her.

Again, Edelgard listened closely and made sure no one else was listening. “I told you of my nightmares the other night as well. Do you remember?”

“Yes. Your siblings…”

“Those are not mere fantasies, either. Those tragic events happened to me. And yet they did not.” Edelgard took a deep breath. “I am… not from this world, Flayn. I am Edelgard von Hresvelg, but from a different version of this world—the same in so many ways, except that my life was not so carefree. Somehow, this world’s Edelgard and I have switched places. Here, the horrible tragedies that marred my life exist only in my head.”

“That’s horrible.”

“On top of losing my family as a child, a few months from now, in my world, a horrible war broke out across all of Fódlan. After five terrible years, I emerged victorious and strove to create a better world, one where a war like that would never happen again. When we finally won the peace, I found true love. The night I wed my beloved, surrounded by my friends, I slept soundly for the first time in my life—and then I woke up here, six years in the past, alone.”

“And you lost all your friends,” Flayn whispered. “Oh, I am so sorry, Edelgard.” She sat up and pulled herself and her bedroll even closer to Edelgard’s, then laid back down and curled up at her side, resting her head against her shoulder. “Was I there?” she murmured, laying a warm hand atop Edelgard’s.

“Where?”

“At your wedding. You said you were surrounded by your friends. In your world… in the future… was I among them?”

Edelgard curled her hand around Flayn’s. She’d never realized just how sweet and kind this girl really was, nor how much the two of them had ended up having in common here, though they had been on opposite sides of the war in her world. She’d never questioned Byleth’s decision to spare her and Seteth during the Church of Seiros’ counterattack against the Imperial-occupied monastery, and now she was grateful for it. What could she say to her, though? It would be counterproductive to tell Flayn the truth when the not-so-young girl was seeking comfort from her.

“Yes,” she lied. “Yes, Flayn. We were friends.”

“Good,” Flayn said. “I shall miss you terribly, Edelgard.”

“So will I.”

“It is nice on the Rhodos Coast. We often fished there, my father, my mother, and I. When my brother and I go there, I will think of the Professor whenever we go fishing, and the Blue Lions, and you, too. I shall imagine that all of my friends are with me, just like tonight.”

Edelgard nodded, feeling a familiar hollow burrow its way through her heart. 

As though sensing that, Flayn curled up even closer to her. “The wedding must have been lovely, though. Even if it means we shall never meet again, I hope you find a way back to your own world soon.”

“Thank you.”

“I am sure your world’s version of myself misses you as well. Maybe she will feel better when you tell her that whether in your world or mine, or in any other world, we are always friends.”

“Maybe,” Edelgard agreed, feeling the weight of her deception press down on her chest and squeeze her heart like a vise.

Flayn let out a contented sigh and drifted to sleep. She began to snore. Edelgard closed her eyes, careful not to wish that the dawn would never come.

* * *

Morning came too soon, and once the sun had risen over Arianrhod’s gleaming walls, Seteth and Flayn set out, and the Blue Lions saw them off. Seteth left his wyvern behind, offering it to the local garrison, and prepared to drive his carriage past the city’s northern wall and vanish down the winding roads. After however long he and Flayn had lived at Garreg Mach, the two of them would fade once more into the mists of time, and only he knew how long they would remain hidden. As the carriage pulled away from the inn and the horses drew it down the street, Flayn poked her head out of the window and waved goodbye. _“I shall see you all again soon!”_ she called out. _“I promise!”_

“Safe travels, Flayn!” Annette chirped, waving back.

Edelgard offered a halfhearted wave of her own. There went perhaps the most innocent girl she’d ever known; she could only hope that no one who wished her ill would discover where she and Seteth had decided to hide.

With that, there was no further reason for the Blue Lions to remain in Arianrhod, so before the sun could rise too high in the sky, Byleth led the class away to the city’s southern gates, only for a legion of kingdom soldiers on horseback to greet them. Leading the legion was a man who could have been Felix’s or Glenn’s twin if he were not so much older.

The class came to a halt save for Dimitri, who trotted forward on his horse to greet the soldiers. “Rodrigue! Or—Lord Rodrigue, rather. Excuse me. I did not expect to run into you here.”

Edelgard noticed a few heads turn toward Felix, who maintained an absolutely stony and stoic face in front of the man who was obviously some relative of his. One of his eyebrows twitched and his fists clenched the reins of his steed.

“Nor did I. Why are you leaving this fine city so early in the morning?”

“Why are you defiling this fine city so early in the morning?” Felix grumbled under his breath.

“We had business here, but that has been concluded,” Dimitri explained, taking a moment to shoot a sideways glare at Felix. “And what brings you here, my friend?”

“Oh, just a matter to discuss with Lord Arundel and Prince Burkhart of the Empire,” Rodrigue said with a smile. “They were quite keen on meeting me here in this city. Nostalgic, I suppose. Oh, but what is this? Your class seems to have expanded since last I visited Garreg Mach.” His eyes met Edelgard’s; he stroked the fine mustache etched around his lip thoughtfully. “Who is this gorgeous young woman accompanying you?”

Dimitri sheepishly scratched the back of his neck. “Ah. My apologies for not introducing you sooner, Rodrigue. This is Lady Edelgard, one of the Empire’s minor princesses. Edelgard, this is Lord Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius, the lord regent of Faerghus.”

Edelgard tried to hide how much the phrase _‘minor princess’_ stung. “A pleasure to meet you, Lord Fraldarius,” she said, offering Rodrigue a polite bow.

“She transferred into our class a little over a week ago,” Dimitri explained as Rodrigue trotted toward her and dismounted his horse. “She’s quite a hard worker and shows great potential.”

Rodrigue offered Edelgard a placid, friendly smile. He was quite a dashing-looking man, not perpetually sullen like Felix, but with the same strong jawline his elder son had inherited and the same wavy indigo hair that tickled the fur-lined cloak draped over his shoulders. “Lady Edelgard? Ah, you are Volkhard’s niece, are you not?” He bowed down and reached out to her, and before Edelgard knew it, he had taken her hand and planted his lips on it. “A pleasure to meet you,” he said, pulling away, “Your Highness.”

Perhaps Edelgard was imagining it, but there was a familiar glint in his deep, dark amber eyes. She couldn’t quite place it, but it was intensely familiar. He’d been at the siege of Arianrhod in her time, too, hadn’t he? Had she killed him herself? She couldn’t quite remember. _Someone_ had killed him. Perhaps it had been her. That would explain why he seemed so disquietingly familiar.

“The pleasure is all mine,” Edelgard coolly replied, withdrawing her hand.

“Well then,” Rodrigue said, climbing back onto his horse and swinging his leg over its back, “I shan’t keep you, Lady Edelgard. Nor you, Prince Dimitri. I wish you a safe trip back to Garreg Mach.”

“Wait,” Dimitri said. “Now that you are here, I do have some news for you.”

“Yeah,” Sylvain chimed in. “We found your son!”

Rodrigue looked directly at Felix. “I see you have. Good job, Sylvain. I will tell Margrave Gautier to be extra proud of you when next I visit him.”

Felix rolled his eyes. “Your _other_ son, Rodrigue,” he snapped. “You know, Glenn? Turns out he _didn’t_ die in a blaze of glory and fulfill his knightly duty. You must be so disappointed.”

Rodrigue scowled at him. “What have I told you about speaking to me like that, Felix?”

“Draw your sword, old man, and see if you can beat me into remembering.”

Nestled between the folded wings of her pegasus, Ingrid glanced between the two Fraldariuses and cringed from secondhand embarrassment. “Felix, is that any way to speak to your father?” she asked. It seemed from her demeanor that Sylvain wasn’t the only boy in her class she was used to having to clean up after.

Felix let out a bitter laugh. “As though he’s even really my father. You’ve heard the boar’s news, Rodrigue, so go have your tea party with whoever. We’re leaving.”

Rodrigue sighed and gave his son a pitying glance. “Prince Dimitri,” he said, turning to the prince, “I would like to know more. How did you find Glenn? Is he well?”

“I would be happy to tell you everything,” Dimitri said, “unless, of course, you are running late for your meeting with Prince Burkhart—”

“No, that is not until noon. I have plenty of time this morning. Ride with me to the garrison, if you may; we shall talk there.”

Dimitri nodded. “Come along, Dedue. Professor, I apologize, but I will not be long,” he said, tugging on his reins and spurring his horse on after Rodrigue. Dedue, like his shadow, followed.

“Professor,” Annette asked, raising her hand, “since we’ll be here a little longer, can we go out and do some proper sightseeing?”

Byleth smiled and led the remainder of the class along.

As the class explored the streets of Arianrhod, Edelgard inched closer to Felix. “Excuse me,” she said to him in a low voice, “Felix, when you said your father was not your father, what—”

“Mind your own business, Princess,” Felix spat. “If he wants to think that damn boar’s more of a son to him than me, then that’s his business,” he said, and with that, he pressed onward.

Dimitri returned to the Blue Lions later in the morning, and together they set out from Arianrhod. The Silver Maiden slowly sank beneath the horizon like a ship sinking beneath the ocean waves, and Edelgard had to force herself not to imagine javelins of light falling from the heavens behind her and reducing it to dust.


	6. But World Enough and Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard catches a glimpse of home, Byleth has to take a sick day, and Dedue gives Edelgard a dire warning.

It had been well over two weeks now since she’d been trapped in this world, but now Edelgard finally had a lead—a single clue to guide her toward the truth of whatever cosmic accident had brought her here.

The grotesque cemetery in Zanado, where corpses and soon-to-be corpses had protruded from stone and rock like weeds growing between a road’s paving stones. The whispered word, _Remire._ And the dagger, attached to a severed arm that appeared to have been resting in its repose and quietly rotting for months, if not years—the dagger that existed in two places at once, two times at once.

The morning after the class returned to the monastery, Edelgard stood over her desk, one hand gripping the handle to the drawer, the other holding the rusted and rotted dagger from Zanado. The dagger’s lustrous crossguard and pommel, cast from pure gold, were the only parts that did not show signs of age, though dirt and grime had been caught in the elegant etchings adorning them. She’d barely slept at all last night, even though she’d been exhausted—the mystery before her had kept her mind occupied well into the early morning.

She hesitated. It was as though something in the back of her mind was shouting at her in a primal, wordless voice, a howl from the ancient past, begging her not to open the drawer and gaze upon the elder dagger and its younger twin at once. But she had to be sure. She had to know. She had to know that the details were exact.

As the golden light of the rising sun spilled into her bedroom through the window, she pulled the drawer open.

Instantly, she felt the rusty old knife jolt in her grasp; her fingers curled tighter around the rotted leather wrapping of its hilt to keep it from leaping out of her grasp. The other knife, the original, the one that was still pristine, rattled in the drawer, lifting itself up hilt-first and dragging its sheathed blade against the bottom of the drawer. Edelgard felt her entire arm jerk forward as though the old dagger was dragging her along. It was as though she were holding a magnet—a magnet hundreds or even thousands of times stronger than any magnet she’d ever seen.

Something told her that the two daggers could not touch each other—not under _any_ circumstances! No longer how much they wanted to! It was a demanding, wailing _scream_ in her head, a fear as deep-seated and controlling as her fear of rats, panic and terror that seized every muscle in her body, every vein, every organ, every thought in her head!

She slammed the drawer shut—too late; it jammed—the younger dagger’s hilt slammed into the lip of the desk, keeping the drawer open for the briefest instant as it slipped out and flew unencumbered through the air—Edelgard, panicking, let go of the elder dagger as though its hilt had burned her fingers and let it fly toward its counterpart, stumbling backward.

The two met in midair. A thoroughly rusted, mottled brown and red blade met a black sheath and shattered. For an instant, Edelgard saw the crossguards of both daggers, both lustrous gold etched with the images of proud lions, both ageless, kiss—and sink into each other. It was like watching her hand meet its reflection in a mirror, only it kept going, the reflections merging into each other, the perfect reflections, the perfect mirror—

A thousand distinct images flashed before her mind’s eye in an instant, a thousand worlds, a thousand futures, all blurred into a single gestalt before her, every possibility compressed into a single dull roar of sound and color.

Edelgard felt every part of her body, inside and out, burst into flames at once, and a blinding expanse of light erased everything around her.

The next thing she knew, she was lying in bed. A very _nice_ bed, an obscenely soft bed with an obscenely plush mattress supporting her weight and obscenely soft silken sheets caressing her body. Nothing hurt. She felt fine, even, aside from a few lingering and all-too-familiar aches. And when she opened her eyes she saw the familiar canopy of the four-poster bed that sat in her bedroom in the Imperial Palace in Enbarr.

Could it be? Could she possibly be _home?_ Had she somehow sent herself back without realizing it?

Where was Byleth? Where was her wife? Surely she couldn’t be far—

_“Good morning, El.”_

That was her voice. _That was her voice!_ She was home! Edelgard wanted to leap out of bed and pounce on her, coil her arms around her like some fearsome boa constrictor, smother her with kisses—

But her body wouldn’t move.

Not under her command, at least—her head lifted and turned, but she couldn’t feel herself doing it. It was as though some invisible hand had grabbed her head and traced its motions without her input or her consent. And the elation she’d felt—she didn’t feel her pulse quicken in time with it, or her heart leap, or her lips curl into a grateful smile.

It was as though she were a passenger in her own body.

She lifted and turned her head and glimpsed, beyond the pulled-back curtain of the four-poster bed, Empress-Consort Byleth Eisner von Hresvelg sitting on a bedside chair with a worn-out book resting in her lap. Byleth. _Her_ Byleth. The beautiful azure-gray eyes; the gorgeous deep, dark, ocean-colored hair; the gentlest and subtlest hint of a smile—and such a hopeful smile, too; such a wonderful and loving twinkle in her eyes; such a lovely rosy blush to her cheeks.

 _Byleth!_ she wanted to exclaim. _Byleth, my love, my life, my world, how I have missed you!_

“El,” Byleth said, leaning hesitantly toward her, “is it…”

Edelgard shook her head. “Sorry, no,” she said, though they were not the words she chose to say, “it’s… still me.”

Byleth’s smile vanished. “Oh.”

“I’m disappointed, too,” Edelgard said—no, not Edelgard, but the _other_ Edelgard.

Edelgard was possessing her own body, but it was her doppelganger who controlled it. She felt her voice vibrate her throat but had no power over it. She felt her body move but had no say in the matter.

She was trapped.

“No, that’s not what I… How did you sleep?” Byleth asked the other Edelgard.

“Ugh.” The other Edelgard put her hand to her forehead, as though checking herself for a fever. “When I close my eyes I just see more documents for me to sign. Endless documents. Endless signatures. I think I can sign my name in my sleep now.” She sighed. “And your Edelgard _liked_ doing that?”

Byleth laughed. Oh, Goddess, she _laughed!_ Edelgard wanted to cry at the sound of it, but that decision was her doppelganger’s to make. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t say she liked it at all. To her, paperwork is, hmm… how should I put this… a necessary evil.”

“Evil is right.” The other Edelgard yawned. “I think I’ve got a cramp in my hand.”

“I’m sorry.” Byleth took her hand and gave it a gentle pat. “But an emperor’s work is never done. I’m sure Ferdinand will have plenty more for you today, unfortunately.”

“Great.” The other Edelgard let out another pouting sigh, and her voice cracked as a lonely vise set its jaws around her heart. “I wish Burkhart were here. He’s the one who _wanted_ this stupid job. But at least he only wanted to rule over _part_ of Fódlan! Why did your Edelgard want to make so much extra _work_ for herself?”

“That’s the price of ambition,” Byleth told her.

“My world must be like a vacation to her. Hmph. I hope she’s enjoying herself.”

Byleth shook her head. “She’s always told me how much she wished she could take a day for herself and just relax. But knowing her, she’s probably miserable.”

“Yeah?”

“She’s been torn away from her life’s work. And as much as I’m sure she trusts her friends to see her ambitions through, even without her—” Byleth let out a forlorn, lonely sigh. “I just wish I could tell her that everything’s going to be okay.”

 _You can!_ Edelgard wanted to shout at her. _You can tell me that! All you have to do is say it right now and I will hear it!_

“You’ve never… heard from her, have you?” Byleth asked the other Edelgard. “A voice in your head, maybe… or a ghost floating beside you, or something like that?”

“No,” the other Edelgard replied. “Sometimes I have anxiety dreams about her ruining my life, but I’m sure those are just dreams. From what you’ve told me about the other me, she doesn’t seem like the type of person to show up for an exam in nothing but her underwear.”

Byleth laughed in spite of herself. “No, she’s definitely not that type of person. She has a mind like a steel trap. Nothing gets past it.”

“I hope she really _did_ take my place, then,” the other Edelgard said. “For all we know, she might’ve just… disappeared. Maybe there’s an Edelgard-shaped hole in my world now.”

“We can’t afford to think those thoughts without any evidence,” Byleth replied, but the glum turn her voice took made it clear that she had considered such a possibility.

To hear such sadness in her voice was heartbreaking. It had been a long time since Edelgard had wanted so badly to hug and console her and let her know that everything would be alright.

Yet here she was, a prisoner in her own body, impotent in every way. She couldn’t even make herself cry. She couldn’t even tell which _part_ of herself was feeling her own emotions, since it was clear that Edelgard’s body was feeling the other Edelgard’s emotions and not hers. She wondered if this was how Jeritza felt, sometimes.

There was a knock on the door. _“Lady Edelgard,”_ Hubert called out from behind it.

“Come in,” the other Edelgard called out.

The door to the palatial bedroom swung open and Hubert strolled through. He and his rather unconventionally dashing good looks were a sight for sore eyes—after seeing his younger self again, Edelgard had a new appreciation for how well he’d grown into his features over the past six years. However, the dark gray crescents traced under his eyes and the haggard slump of his shoulders were just as bad as they’d been at the height of the war.

The other Edelgard’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of him. Torn between amusement and sympathy, Edelgard thought about what a shock it must have been for the other Edelgard to meet _her_ Hubert instead of the goody-two-shoes she was accustomed to _._ He’d probably interrogated the living daylights out of her and sussed out what had happened within a day of the wedding.

Ferdinand walked in behind him with a stack of papers under his arm, and if Hubert looked haggard, then Ferdinand, poor Ferdinand, looked absolutely bedraggled. It was as though he hadn’t slept a wink in two weeks. He was almost as pale as Hubert; it seemed he could barely hold his eyelids up over his eyes; his hair, which he’d finally cut short after the war’s end, had started to grow out again; she could see it brushing the tips of his ears.

“Good morning, Your Majesties,” Hubert said with a deep bow. “Which Lady Edelgard, may I ask, do I have the pleasure of greeting today?”

“The wrong one,” the other Edelgard answered.

A weary smile, bitter as it was, crossed Hubert’s face. “Fortunately for you,” he said, “when I vowed to serve Lady Edelgard with all my heart, I made no distinction between versions of herself from other worlds.”

“Thanks,” the other Edelgard muttered bitterly.

Ferdinand cleared his throat. “Lady Edelgard,” he said, his voice a little hoarse, “I regret to inform you that there is more paperwork that requires your attention.”

The other Edelgard groaned. “Ugh, why _me?”_

“We can get away with not having you appear in public for quite some time,” Hubert explained, addressing her as though she were a child (which she was, at least compared to Edelgard), “but the Empire requires your seal and signature of approval on every piece of legislation to maintain its legitimacy, especially now. Appointing a lord regent to manage your affairs would send a signal to every corrupt noble who chafes under our rule that we can be easily overthrown.”

“The Minister of the Imperial Household is correct,” Ferdinand said. “This is a delicate time for all of Fódlan—one that demands a strong central authority dedicated to the people. Our government cannot show weakness now.”

“I can’t even understand half the words in these decrees and executive orders! It all just makes my head spin,” she protested.

“Do not worry, Your Majesty,” Ferdinand assured her. “I have read through them most thoroughly and made absolutely sure that they will further our aims. All you need to do is sign them.”

No wonder he looked so tired. He was the kind of man who seemingly effortlessly threaded the needle between hopeless idealist and insufferable policy wonk. A lesser man might have looked at the breadth of Edelgard’s proposed reforms and said, ‘no, that is impossible; let’s be practical here…’ but Ferdinand would always come up with some sort of policy or initiative that Edelgard hadn’t thought of that would _make_ it possible. Now, on top of that, he had to do Edelgard’s job for her, too.

As Ferdinand stifled a yawn, Hubert spoke up again. “You will need to deal with that paperwork immediately, Your Majesty; I’ve called together a meeting of the Black Eagle Strike Force for this afternoon. My investigation into the curious case of our missing emperor has borne strange fruit.”

“So… you think I’ll be going home soon?” the other Edelgard asked, her spirits lifting, and for once Edelgard and her doppelganger were emotionally synchronized.

“Goddess willing,” Ferdinand said, depositing a fat stack of paperwork at the foot of Edelgard’s bed. “Now, Minister Hubert and I must be off… there is no rest for the wicked, I’m afraid. Hubert, please tell me you still have plenty of that disgusting slop I gave you for your birthday. I fear I may have developed a taste for it,” he said, gagging on his words. The self-disgusted grimace on his face made Edelgard wish she could make her body laugh.

Hubert gave him a wry, wicked smile and led him out of the bedroom. “Of course, there is always an urn of coffee with your name on it in my study, Prime Minister Ferdinand.”

When the door had swung shut behind them, the other Edelgard looked forlornly at the stack of paperwork waiting for her. Edelgard desperately wished she could take that whole pile and read through it herself—not because she didn’t trust Ferdinand, but because there was a slim chance he had let some selfish nobleman’s self-defeating amendment or conniving or frivolous earmark through in his sleep-deprived haze.

Edelgard wished she could smile, though. It was heartwarming, as much as it saddened her, to see her friends working so hard to carry out her ambitions in her absence. For so long, before Byleth had chosen to stand by her, she had expected that she would have no true allies that she could depend on unconditionally except for Hubert—just the two of them, alone against the world. But she did have Byleth as well, and Ferdinand, and the rest of the Black Eagles all working together, each lifting each other up, each carrying a small fraction of her burden for themselves in her absence…

The other Edelgard flopped back down onto the bed, the back of her head hitting the pillow. She covered her face in her hands. “I’m ruining their lives,” she moaned.

Byleth patted her on the shoulder. “There, there.”

“And I’m achy all the time and my shoulder always hurts,” she went on, “and I miss Father, and Uncle Volkhard, and even Burky. Why does your Edelgard’s life have to be so _awful?”_

“It’s not _all_ awful,” Byleth said, and Edelgard agreed.

“I just want a quiet, peaceful life.”

“So does our Edelgard.” There was an audible smile in her voice. “But she’s got a harder road to walk before she gets there. Do you want some breakfast before work?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want some tea?”

“Yes,” the other Edelgard mumbled. She pulled her hands away from her face and sat up again. Her eyes met Byleth’s.

Byleth leaned forward, raised her arm, and cupped Edelgard’s cheek in her palm. Edelgard could feel it—that wonderful warmth, that wonderful strong hand, the callous she had on her thumb that Edelgard remembered so well tracing a gentle arc across her cheekbone.

“Everything is going to be okay,” she told the other Edelgard, and Edelgard could almost feel as though Byleth were knowingly, _deliberately_ speaking directly to her as well. “We’ll find a way to fix this and get you back home, and we’ll find it soon.”

 _Lean forward,_ Edelgard pleaded with her counterpart, trying with all her might to project her thoughts into her head. _Lean forward, close your eyes, purse your lips—please—_

Edelgard felt every part of her body, inside and out, burst into flames at once, and a blinding expanse of light erased everything around her.

The next thing she knew, she was lying on the floor of her bedroom at Garreg Mach, and Hubert—a younger, softer, warmer Hubert—was crouched over her, his eyes wide and face drawn with worry.

Goodness, even at twenty years old here he looked so _young_ compared to the version she was accustomed to…

 _“Lady Edelgard,”_ he hissed, panicked, _“are you alright? I heard a loud bang from your room…”_

“I’m fine,” she assured him. She’d never been so disappointed to see his face, but he didn’t have to know that. As he cupped his hand around the back of her head to prop her up, she sat up. Her head ached, and she could taste a strange scent on the air—sharp, metallic, a bit like the air after a nearby lightning strike.

She couldn’t help but feel disappointed, still reeling from her vision. Had it been real? Had she really caught a glimpse of her own world? Why couldn’t she have clung to that world just a few minutes more, long enough to feel more than just her wife’s hand on her cheek? Why couldn’t she have stayed just long enough to see more of her friends?

Ferdinand burst through the door, and this was not the canny yet earnest statesman and general she knew but rather a well-meaning, if buffoonish, boy. Good heavens, he was a _boy._ Seeing him so directly contrasted with his older self drove it home in a way Edelgard had never thought about it before. She had thought herself an adult since she’d been fifteen, if not earlier, and her classmates in the Black Eagles were mostly around her age, so she hadn’t thought of them as anything but adults themselves. But she’d seen them grow up. For six years, she’d watched them grow taller and stronger and more confident in themselves, more hardened by the sights they’d seen and the battles they’d won and lost. Here, now, they weren’t adults. They were all still so young. _Children._ And it was Ferdinand, with his face so soft and boyish and innocent, that made Edelgard realize that for the first time.

“Edelgard, dear, are you injured?” Ferdinand cried out, panicked, rushing to her side and kneeling beside Hubert to help her up.

“I just fell over,” Edelgard said.

“Ah, thank goodness,” he sighed. “That terrible noise, though, did not sound like you had fallen down.”

“It must have echoed strangely,” Edelgard said, “because that is all that happened. Can you all please give me some space?”

The door burst open yet again, nearly falling off its hinges this time, as Dimitri rushed in. “Lady Edelgard, are you alright? I heard a loud bang from your room—”

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” Edelgard insisted, waving Hubert away in vain. “I—I just fell down.”

“Ah, my apologies—it sounded like an explosion,” Dimitri said.

“I hit the floor pretty hard.”

“You two can leave,” Dimitri told Hubert and Ferdinand. “I am her house leader; I will see her to the infirmary.”

“Well, _I_ am her—” Ferdinand huffed.

“I’m fine; I just fell over,” Edelgard insisted for the third and hopefully final time.

“Well, as long as you are alright, Lady Edelgard,” Hubert said, letting out a relieved sigh. “That ghastly boom was so unnerving, though… I feared for a moment the Death Knight had come for you,” he added with a shaky, nervous smile.

“As you can see, there is no Death Knight here,” Dimitri said, shooing him and Ferdinand away. “Edelgard, are you _certain_ you are alright?” he asked, crouching beside her. Ever since Arundel had let slip that he and Edelgard were step-siblings, he’d been… not exactly friendlier to her, but warmer and more concerned with her. Perhaps now he felt guilty about the time he’d backhanded her clear across the room while disguised as the Hurricane King.

“I’m fine. I was just… playing with a dagger, and it slipped, and in my shock I must have fallen down…” Edelgard looked around the floor. She was certain she’d dropped the dagger—dagger _s,_ plural—but couldn’t see them on the floor. “Did… Hubert, did you take it from my room?”

“Take what?” Hubert asked.

“The dagger. The dagger I keep in my desk drawer.”

Hubert’s brow bemusedly furrowed. “I… beg your pardon?”

Following the way his eyes flitted briefly across her room, Edelgard looked to her desk only to find an empty spot on the floor where it had rested. “What happened to my desk?”

“What desk?”

She leaped to her feet and paced around the empty space on the floor. “The desk. The desk that was right here— _my_ desk.”

Ferdinand scratched the back of his head sheepishly. “Er… Edelgard, dear, I do not recall you having a desk in your bedroom. I have requested one of Seteth on numerous occasions, but…”

“Well, of course, I must have! Every other bedroom has a desk in it! How else would I do my homework?” she snapped. What the hell was going on here? Ferdinand recoiled, shocked by her outburst.

“Lady Edelgard,” Hubert said, taking her by the arm. “You’ve clearly become addled again. Allow me to escort you to the infirmary.”

Edelgard wrenched her arm free. “I’m fine,” she repeated for the umpteenth time. “Dimitri, do you ever recall… When you were a young boy, perhaps eight or nine, do you recall giving a girl you’d met a dagger?”

Dimitri’s snowy eyebrows knitted together. “I confess I do not remember much of my childhood,” he confessed, shaking his head, “especially not…”

“But you remember that you did it, don’t you? Don’t your friends—Sylvain and Ingrid—They tease you about the ‘Dagger Girl,’ don’t they?”

A nervous laugh escaped him. “If they have made fun of me for something like that, then… then they certainly have not done it to my face,” he said. He let a hand hover awkwardly over her shoulder as though reminding her of his fearsome strength; unlike Hubert, he couldn’t risk touching her without breaking her, and after his displays of brawn on the road to and from Arianrhod, Edelgard knew it. “Come with me; you are clearly not well.”

Edelgard backed away. Her breath caught in her throat, a vise seizing her heart. When the two daggers—the same daggers—had touched each other, they had vanished, and now nobody but her remembered that they had existed at all. The desk near them had vanished, too, and nobody but her remembered that it had existed. If she hadn’t let go of the elder dagger, if she’d kept it in her grasp and let the younger dagger rise to meet it, if she hadn’t taken a step backward, if she’d been as close to the collision as her desk had been, she would have been… would have been…

Her knees knocked, her legs buckled, the room spun around her in a sickening swirl, and the floor came rushing up to meet her.

* * *

Edelgard spent the rest of the morning in the infirmary. When Manuela had determined after an exhaustive battery of tests that she was not ill or suffering from a concussion, she’d told her to remain there and rest for a few hours, just in case.

She wasn’t quite surprised to see Mercedes in the infirmary as well, nursing a persistent, chest-rattling cough and sipping from a mug full of some steaming concoction as thick as mud and just as colorful; she was quite surprised, however, when Manuela returned to the room after what felt like hours with Byleth in tow. The professor stumbled after her colleague, one hand firmly pressed to her forehead, her fingers burrowing into her nest of dark, ocean-teal hair. Edelgard felt a pang of worry strike her heart at the sight of a thin line of scarlet blood trickling from her nose over her lip.

“Professor,” Edelgard spoke up, rising to her feet. “What happened? Are you alright?”

“Lie back down, Your Highness,” Manuela ordered her. Edelgard laid back down. “Your professor just had a fainting spell, that’s all.”

“I’m fine,” Byleth protested as Manuela all but dragged her along. “It doesn’t hurt so much anymore.” She gingerly rubbed her head.

“I don’t care if you’re fine,” Manuela retorted. “You fell flat on your face right in front of your students!”

“Yes, but I’m better now,” Byleth said, wobbling unsteadily on her feet.

“Better, my foot. Just stay here and take a load off for the rest of the morning. Physician’s orders.” Manuela forced her down onto a cot. Edelgard noted that Byleth didn’t put up much of a fight, despite her protests. Was something wrong with her?

Come to think of it, hadn’t Byleth had some concerning vertigo spells around this time of year in her world, too? But Edelgard could have sworn they hadn’t started until well after the Battle of the Eagle and Lion, which was still more than a month away…

“It’s not as bad as it was,” Byleth said, “so there’s no need to—” She winced and clutched her head again, her eyes squeezing shut.

“Alois will take care of your lecture,” Manuela assured Byleth as she began subjecting her to the same sort of poking and prodding that Edelgard had had to deal with.

“He can’t decipher my lecture notes,” Byleth protested as she made a perfunctory, halfhearted attempt to free herself.

“Oh, please. Don’t tell me you write them in a cipher.”

“They’re really vague bullet points; I mostly just wing it.”

Edelgard smiled. She’d seen plenty of her professor’s lecture notes, which mainly consisted of little slips of paper with things like _talk about swords for an hour_ scrawled on them. Alois would be completely lost.

“Well, you’ll just have to pick up where you left off tomorrow,” Manuela said, dabbing with a damp rag at Byleth’s bloody nose. “You know what I think this is? Overwork. Hanneman and I have both said as much, and do you have any idea how _rare_ it is for me to agree with that stodgy, pompous ass over _anything?”_

Byleth glanced away, locked eyes with Edelgard, and gave her a pleading look.

“Lie down here. I’ll check back in when I’m done with my lecture. Mercedes, be a dear and come get me if an emergency happens or if any of the other patients try to escape.”

With a forlorn sigh, Byleth laid down, still keeping one hand plastered to her forehead, as Manuela strode out of the infirmary.

Mercedes coughed. “What’s wrong, Professor?”

“Nothing, Mercedes,” Byleth mumbled. “I was watching the sunrise and had this horrible splitting headache and lost my balance for a moment. I’ve been a little unsteady since then, but I’m getting better. How are you holding up?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” Mercedes assured her, taking a sip from the mug clasped in her hands. “I just had trouble breathing later last night, but I’m feeling much better.”

“What about you, Edelgard?” Byleth asked. “Dimitri told me you were a bit out of sorts this morning. Is your head okay?”

“It’s nothing,” Edelgard said. “I just… I’ve had a bad habit, lately, of forgetting things, or misremembering things. This morning, I forgot that my room doesn’t have a desk in it.”

“Your room doesn’t have a desk in it?” Byleth asked, her brow furrowing with concern. She sat up. “We’ve got to fix that. You can’t be a student without a desk—” Grimacing and wincing in pain, she flopped back down onto her cot. It was quiet in the infirmary, but for a moment, Edelgard thought she heard the distant sound of a child’s voice. It sounded… indignant.

“I know, I know…” Byleth grumbled to nobody.

“It’s quite unusual to forget that you didn’t have a desk,” Mercedes said. “Lady Edelgard, when you were little, did you ever go swimming in Lake Teutates? They say there are earwigs living in the water there that crawl into the ears of swimmers and lay eggs in their brains. Over time, the victims become quite forgetful and rather clumsy as the eggs hatch and the larvae slowly feed on the meat of their brains from the inside out…”

“Sometimes I feel like a tiny child is eating my brain,” Byleth mumbled.

Again, Edelgard thought she heard, for a split second, the sound of a young girl angrily shouting at someone off in the distance. There must have been kids playing on the lawn outside.

“No, I’ve never been to Lake Teutates,” Edelgard answered. “I can’t even swim. I think I’m safe from your earwigs, Mercedes.”

“Oh, that’s a relief. Something _else_ must be turning your brain into mush, then.” Mercedes said with a mischievous smile.

“Does your head still hurt from the time the Hurricane King threw you against the wall?” Byleth asked.

“No, that hasn’t troubled me in weeks,” Edelgard assured her. “I just… at the crack of dawn, I had the most horrible splitting headache…”

“Me, too,” Byleth said. “It felt like my brain was being torn in two. Mercedes, are there any bugs that can do that?”

Mercedes shook her head. “Not that I know of. But I hear that if you think too much about death, maggots will grow in your brain and chew through it until they come out your eyes—”

“I’ll get you a desk tonight,” Byleth assured Edelgard, mercifully changing the subject. “No wonder your grades were so poor in Hanneman’s class, if you didn’t even have a desk…”

“Yes,” Edelgard said, “it was definitely for want of a desk. You know, Professor, I think Manuela has a point.”

“You do?”

“You and I certainly have a problem with pushing ourselves too hard. And many of the rest of the Blue Lions as well—Annette, Ingrid, Felix, Dimitri… It’s like we don’t actually know how to have fun.”

“We had fun in Arianrhod the other day.”

“Yes, but only for a few hours. One of these days, you and I and the rest of the overachievers need to take a day—an entire day—to do absolutely nothing productive at all,” Edelgard said, fully aware of the fact that outside of her wedding, she couldn’t remember the last time she had taken her own advice.

“We get one of those every week,” Byleth countered. “It’s called Sunday,” she said, as though she’d ever spent a single Sunday _not_ doing something productive. Edelgard knew her wife well enough to know that she always found something to do for someone else.

“Well then, one of these Sundays, we need to get together and do nothing,” Edelgard said. “Perhaps we could go into town and shop for clothes.”

“That sounds like something.”

“Yes, but it’s actually nothing.”

Byleth smiled. “It’s a date.”

Edelgard felt her heart leap into her throat. “I-Is it?” she stammered, suddenly bereft of every last bit of self-control she possessed. With the memory of Byleth’s hand on her cheek so fresh in her mind, she couldn’t help but leap to that conclusion. “A date… I… um… but you’re our professor, and I’m…”

Byleth’s little smile, so rare, so fragile, shrank and evened out. “Oh, um… did I not use that expression right? I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, no, no, I just—I misunderstood,” Edelgard said, flustered. She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten that idiom! “I apologize; I didn’t mean to imply that…”

 _Why don’t I just_ tell _her?_ she found herself asking herself. She’d told Flayn, after all. But she was already stuck in here because her classmates thought she was losing her mind, so what worse would they do to her if she started spouting fanciful stories about Byleth being her wife from the future of another world?

“There are so many odd people in our class,” Mercedes remarked, placidly sipping her concoction. “Oh, that reminds me—did you forget how to be lazy when you hit your head, Lady Edelgard? I heard from Hilda in the Golden Deer that you were particularly skilled at loafing around.”

“I had an epiphany,” Edelgard answered uncomfortably.

“Oh, right. The vision from the Goddess.”

“You know,” Byleth said, “I don’t think I remember doing anything fun as a kid, besides fishing. Fishing is fun. It’s nice to find out what other people think is fun. Like you with your creepy stories, Mercedes, or you, Edelgard, with your, um… What do you think is fun, again?”

“Fishing,” Edelgard decisively answered.

“We should go fishing together,” Byleth said. “I think I feel well enough to stand up. Mercedes, if Edelgard and I were to leave this room, would you try and stop us?”

“I don’t think I would have to try, but no,” Mercedes said with a shake of her head. “I would gladly scream bloody murder, though.”

Byleth sighed. “I’ll take the whole class on a fishing trip,” she resolved. “But,” she added, rubbing her temples, “not today.”

Edelgard thought she saw, for a fraction of a second, a glint of moving light hovering in the air beside Byleth, like motes of dust caught in a passing sunbeam.

* * *

The question of the dagger kept burning in Edelgard’s mind over the next week. And with it, the question of Remire.

 _Remire._ The village she, Claude, and Dimitri had fled to when the Flame Emperor’s hired bandits had struck—or, she supposed, in this world, it had been Ferdinand, Claude, and Dimitri fleeing the Hurricane King’s hired bandits—where they had met Jeralt and Byleth Eisner and their lives had irrevocably changed.

In her world, Solon had been running ghastly experiments in that town, presumably using Flayn’s blood, for whatever reason Edelgard didn’t want to fathom. The village had descended into madness, a sickness of body and mind sweeping through it like a plague, and after a month, it had been reduced to ashes. Edelgard still remembered seeing the town in flames, its inhabitants lurching and staggering through the chaos like marionettes in the hands of an amateur puppeteer, sating their bloodlust on the flesh of their neighbors…

But black-cloaked mages being flung from the town to Zanado, entombed in stone while still alive, and a dagger falling backward through time? These events had no connection to the horror of Remire that Edelgard knew. What was going on in that poor, innocent town? What was Solon doing? And why was it different?

Seeking answers, she spent most of her free time shadowing the only person other than Dimitri and Dedue she knew would have a connection to Those Who Slither in the Dark, or Dedue’s so-called ‘Men in Black.’

Glenn.

Glenn Fraldarius, or rather the monster that had taken his face, was her best lead, and by far the least risky one to pursue as long as she was careful. He’d officially joined the Blue Lions’ class with great gusto after they’d returned from Arianrhod, and his far-too-cheery attitude was so eerie and disconcerting that it had the effect of actually making the rest of the class feel _worse_ just from being around him. Felix flinched whenever Glenn came near him. Ingrid made a point to avoid being in the same room as him whenever she could.

Kronya had been the same way in the Black Eagles while in her guise as Monica von Ochs. Ostensibly, she had been sent to the monastery to assist Edelgard and Hubert, but her actual purpose seemed to have been to drive a wedge between them and the rest of the class, occupy their time with meandering and useless plots and schemes, and keep them from pursuing their own goals. Edelgard could see the same disruption at work here. Glenn was here as a means of controlling Dimitri, not assisting him.

And then he vanished for a few days.

And then he reappeared just as suddenly as he’d disappeared.

It was well over a week, before Edelgard found herself with the perfect opportunity to tail Glenn during one of his late-night jaunts through the monastery. That evening, when the sun had begun to set, she donned a dark cloak, slipped out of the dormitories, and kept a keen and watchful eye on his back, creeping along behind him at a distance as the sky above shifted from vibrant purple to the same dark midnight indigo as his hair. All she had to defend herself with, should the worst befall her, was a steak knife she’d taken from the dining hall.

She watched Glenn slip past the monastery’s walls, tracing in reverse the same pathway Edelgard realized Dimitri and Dedue had walked the night they had met with Byleth and Dimitri had revealed his Crest of Flames to her. This, she reasoned, must be the path they took to whatever meeting ground they used to speak with Those Who Slither.

Far from the grounds of the Officer’s Academy, Glenn vanished into a crumbling and disused guard tower built into the monastery’s wall. Edelgard clung to the wall, her back pressing against the cold stone, and crept closer, inch by inch, until she finally reached the entrance to the tower and carefully peered in, prepared to dart away at a moment’s notice. There wasn’t much she could see; the deep shadows of the tower’s interior were darker even than the night sky, and only the faintest imprint of Glenn’s long waves of dark hair and the curve of the cloak draped over his shoulders could be seen at the foot of the spiral staircase leading up the tower’s height.

An unfamiliar voice, neither Solon nor Thales, spoke to him. There was a strange buzzing undercurrent to the voice, as though a swarm of bees were accompanying it. _“…will have to be more proactive with cleanup operations. If too many people stumble upon our work…”_ His voice dropped too low beneath the crackling and buzzing and became an inaudible murmur. Edelgard leaned in just a bit more, concentrating harder on discerning the voice amid the noise.

“Yes, sir,” Glenn answered. “Got it! I’ll be more careful next time.”

The voice and two more, too low to be discerned, joined it, conversing in incoherent, fuzzy voices among themselves. Edelgard strained her ears. _“Yes, it’s possible,”_ Solon answered, his voice barely a hiss as it slithered through the noise. _“The incident at Zanado suggests that I will start using our own men in our experiments soon. Unless…”_

 _“Perhaps the twin snakes are a single moebius,”_ Thales’ voice rose to answer him, and at the sound of that hideous whisper, Edelgard felt her blood run cold. She’d never wanted to run away from something so badly; she felt like a hare in the presence of a wolf. _“But I suppose all this talk is boring to our little…”_ His voice dipped in and out, weaving around the noise. _“…concern ourselves with practical matters. Do… suspect anything?”_

“Not a thing; the poor saps are clueless.”

“ _See to it they remain that way…”_

Edelgard felt a hand as hard as stone to clamp itself on her shoulder, and the other around her mouth. Her heart beat madly, her pulse fluttering like a hummingbird’s wings. She felt calloused fingertips press into her cheeks and a rough palm seal her mouth shut. Nevertheless, a muffled outcry tried against her will and her assailant’s to escape her lips and squeeze its way out from beneath his stony hand.

 _“Shhhh,”_ Dedue hissed into her ear. Edelgard complied; that rogue whimper cut itself off as abruptly as a dagger’s blade would cut through skin and flesh. She knew that if Glenn and his cohorts heard so much as a peep from either of them, neither of them would likely live to see the sunrise. He began to drag her backward; Edelgard found her legs stumbling onward to keep up with his long-legged strides, the soles of her boots slipping across the grass.

He came to a stop what felt like an eternity later, once the tower was well out of sight and they were far from the monastery’s wall, closer to the grounds of the academy. _“Not a sound,”_ he cautioned her, slowly and tentatively breaking the seal between his hand and her face.

Edelgard nodded, and Dedue took his hands off of her and pulled down the hood of her cloak. “Ah. As I suspected. What are you doing here?” he asked her in a low, accusing voice.

She took a deep breath. “Glenn’s been acting strange. I wanted to know why.”

Dedue’s eyes flitted toward the general direction of the tower he’d dragged her away from. “The first man to taste a mushroom was not rewarded with a long life,” he told her. “Do you understand?”

“And the second man?” Edelgard asked.

Dedue gave her a stern glare. “Do not place yourself in unnecessary danger, Lady Edelgard. Curiosity is seldom rewarded. His Highness would hate for misfortune to befall you… and I am sure your vassal would as well.”

“What is going on here?” she asked him, not expecting an answer.

Dedue didn’t answer. He merely loomed over her, statuesque, his silhouette a monolith against the night. A subtle, sad wrinkle of his brow, nearly invisible in the night, said enough.

“Be careful whose stories you insert yourself into,” he warned her, breaking the silence. “I hear you have a large family, Lady Edelgard,” he said. “I did not. Now I have even less. Now I have nothing. Look after yourself, or one day you may have nothing as well.”

A hollow formed in Edelgard’s chest; gut-wrenching snakes twisted in her stomach. No matter what she had in this world, she had lived too long having nothing. “I’m… I’m sorry, Dedue. I didn’t mean to antagonize you.” She wished she could tell him she empathized with him—but in this world, she always had to remind herself, no matter how it hurt, that that loss did not exist. “Glenn… those men he was speaking with… are they the ones behind it? The Tragedy of—”

“Do not concern yourself with them. Do not speak of them or think of them. Do not get in their way,” he said. What would sound like a threat from Hubert came out as a sincere warning from him. “The dead see no value in knowledge.”

Edelgard nodded. If she’d asked if they’d had any connection to the Hurricane King, or to Flayn’s abduction, she might have given away too much of what she knew and left herself in a dangerous position. Asking if Those Who Slither were behind the Tragedy of Duscur—which they _had_ been in her world—was much safer of a question, even if she couldn’t get a straight answer to it, and didn’t offer Dedue the opportunity to think she suspected Dimitri. “I understand, Dedue,” she said. “Thank you for looking after me.”

A chilly wind blew across the monastery to the north; shifting clouds spread across the night sky above revealed islets of twinkling stars within the abyssal sea above.

 _“Hey! You there!”_ a guard called out, the light from his lantern sweeping across the lawn and casting spiny shadows across the grass like a hail of arrows.

Edelgard’s and Dedue’s heads both snapped toward the sound of the guard’s voice. It was Alois Rangeld, one of the Knights of Seiros; at his side, Ingrid fiercely clutched a steel lance.

“You there with Lady Edelgard, identify yourself!” Alois shouted, holding up his lantern and letting its light wash over them. His free hand went to the sword sheathed at his hip. “I—Oh, it’s just you, Dedue.” He let out a nervous, strained chuckle, his hand slipping from the hilt of his sword and his shoulders casually drooping. “Ingrid said ‘a man from Duscur’ and I didn’t think she meant you! I suppose I’d better get a head start on my breakfast now that I’ve got all this egg on my face…”

“Edelgard,” Ingrid said, a grim frown etched on her face as she furtively darted forward and took her by the wrist, “are you okay?”

“I’m alright,” Edelgard told her.

Ingrid pulled her away from Dedue. “Thank the Goddess. I was worried for you…”

“I’ll say! This isn’t the place for a midnight stroll, regardless of who you’re with,” Alois chided her. “When I was a little sprog, one of my friends used to play by the walls until a chunk of masonry fell and cracked his head wide open! He lived; we got him to the infirmary right away… but he could never quite walk right again.”

“I didn’t know the monastery was in such disrepair,” Edelgard said as Alois led her and the other students back to the dormitories.

“And what were you doing out at this hour, Dedue?” Alois asked.

“His Highness has requested I keep an eye on Lady Edelgard,” he answered. “I apologize if my surveillance gave anybody the wrong impression.” He stared directly at Ingrid.

Chafing under his glare, she took Edelgard aside and put some distance between the two of them and Dedue. _“He didn’t… He hasn’t_ hurt _you,”_ she whispered to her, her eyes darting toward him, _“has he? I saw him creeping after you and…”_

“No, of course not.” Edelgard spared a glance at Dedue, whose stern and stoic expression almost cracked into the barest hint of a bitter, sardonic, quite Hubert-esque grin. Quite to the contrary, he had saved her life—if Glenn, or Kronya, or whoever was underneath that flesh mask had just happened to notice her, it would have been the end for her. “Like he said, he was just keeping me out of trouble.”

“Was he?” Ingrid’s eyes darted between her and him, flitting back and forth. Her grip on Edelgard’s arm tightened; Edelgard felt her thumb press almost uncomfortably into the hollow of her wrist. “Edelgard, if anything happens to you,” she hissed, “if I lose anyone else to Duscur—”

“I understand,” Edelgard told her, pulling her hand free. “And I appreciate your concern. But it’s as he said. If you can’t take his word for it, take mine.”

Ingrid looked down at the ground almost sheepishly. The tip of her lance drooped with her head, the grass tickling its steel blade. “Edelgard, you don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head. “You have to watch your back—”

“Do not worry, Ingrid,” Dedue said to her, making it obvious he’d overheard her despite the distance she’d put between them and the quiet tone of her voice. “The dream of knighthood is not out of reach for those who still fear ghosts.” Before she could sputter some indignant response, he walked past her and Alois both. “Sir Alois, I shall return to my quarters. I apologize for any trouble I have caused you.”

“Um… Y-Yes,” Alois mumbled, nervously fingering the collar of his armor as Dedue headed across the lawn and back toward the dormitories. “And you two ladies can find the way back on your own from here?”

Edelgard looked up to the lantern-lit wall of the dormitories looming in front of her, then to the staircase up ahead that led to the second floor. “I think so,” she said.

“Alright,” Alois said, his genial grin returning, “now no more late-night strolls, either of you.” He wagged his finger at her and Ingrid. “Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” Ingrid said, sharply saluting. She handed her lance back to Alois, who took it from her and strolled back to his post, humming a jaunty tune off-key as he ambled across the lawn, the bobbing light of his lantern slipping into the distance until it vanished behind a hedge.

She and Edelgard walked to the stairwell in silence. “You’re too trusting, Edelgard,” she said to her, sighing, once the two of them reached the foot of the stairs.

Edelgard suppressed the urge to burst out laughing. Evidently, something must have slipped out, because Ingrid gave her an indignant look.

“I mean it,” she said. “You’re from the Empire, so you don’t understand the Tragedy of Duscur. You don’t understand why you aren’t safe around those people.”

“Dimitri seems to think otherwise,” Edelgard pointed out.

“Dimitri is…” Ingrid crossed her arms and exhaled loudly through her nose. “I’m sorry. A knight must dedicate himself fully to his lord, for better or for worse. If he trusts Dedue, then I should, too. But even so…”

“I don’t think I’m the one you should be apologizing to,” Edelgard said.

“But he… I told you his hair wasn’t always white like that, didn’t I? Those two years… They _did_ something to him,” Ingrid said.

“You think he’s been brainwashed. By Duscur.”

She chewed her lower lip anxiously, as though hearing her theory voiced aloud had made her aware of how silly it sounded. “No, that is ridiculous, but there are stories of people, captives of the enemy, who become… Never mind. Just watch your back, Edelgard.”

The correct sentiment, Edelgard noted, but for all the wrong reasons, and aimed at entirely the wrong target. “I appreciate your concern, but be careful about who you keep an eye on. What if Alois hadn’t recognized Dedue when he did? And if you hadn’t recognized him, either, then what would you have done with that lance? You can’t be so eager to protect people that you let your prejudices—”

Ingrid shot her an indignant glare. “My _prejudices?_ Haven’t I told you what those people _took_ from me?”

“It won’t do you any good,” she replied, “to act as though everyone from a certain group is wholly good or evil. It seems the Hurricane King thought the same way about Seteth and Flayn.”

“Don’t you compare those two to—”

The impostor Glenn strolled out of the darkness into the arc of lantern light that hung in front of the stairs. “Good night, Ingrid. Your Imperial Highness.” He gave Edelgard a mocking bow. “What are you two doing out here?”

“What are _you_ doing out here?” Ingrid retorted, still flush with anger.

“No need to sound so accusing!” Glenn gasped, holding his hand over his heart as though she’d just ran him through with a lance. “Nothing but a nice stroll to clear my head and stretch my legs. To help with my insomnia. You know I spent so many nights in a cramped dungeon…”

Edelgard could swear he’d looked straight at her.

“I—” Ingrid bowed her head. “Sorry, Glenn. I’m a little on edge tonight.”

“I understand.” He leaned over her, bracing his outstretched arm against the wall just over her shoulder. The lantern light cast his face in ghoulish chiaroscuro. “You know, what could improve both of our moods is a nice and proper good-night kiss,” he added, pursing his lips.

Ingrid looked as though she’d just eaten an entire tree’s worth of lemons. “Wouldn’t you rather wait until marriage?” she asked, worming her way out from under him.

His hand slipped from the wall and clamped down on her shoulder. “C’mon, Ingry, don’t be _a_ ngry… we both know how short life can be, so why wait?”

Without the slightest hesitation, Edelgard grabbed him by the wrist. “She said _no,_ Glenn.” Emperor Edelgard could probably break his wrist if she’d gripped it with all of her strength, but even after a few weeks working this body into shape, such a feat was still far outside of Princess Edelgard’s abilities. Still, though, it worked to intimidate him, and he let Ingrid go.

A tense, awkward silence descended upon the three of them.

Glenn brushed Edelgard’s hand away from him, a smile as wry as it was pained twisting upward the corners of his lips as his eyes slid past Ingrid and turned toward her. “You’re the kind of girl who has trouble minding her own business, aren’t you?” he asked coyly, rubbing his wrist.

Edelgard swallowed a newly formed lump in her throat as an icy finger traced itself up her spine. Did he know she had been spying on him? How foolish had she been?

“I’m the kind of _princess_ who has trouble minding her own business,” she corrected him, as though she hoped the weight of her title could intimidate him.

“Sure you are, Miss… What did your friends call you in the Black Eagles again? ‘Miss Ninth-In-Line?’ Or _Your Highness_ Ninth-In-Line?” Glenn’s smile inched a little wider, his eyebrows lifting. The dark amber of his eyes sparkled in the light of the lantern hanging above him. “How does it feel, being born to royalty, and yet still knowing that no one would notice or care at all if you… disappeared?”

“Glenn, stop.” Ingrid held her arm out across Edelgard’s chest, creating a barrier between her and him. “I don’t know what happened to you, but whatever they did to you, I don’t like what you’ve become.” Her voice trembled.

“So does that mean the wedding’s off?”

“I don’t know,” she spat, “just—go away!”

Glenn pretended to look hurt. His lips curled into a frown and his brow furrowed sadly. “Okay then,” he mumbled, looking away from her. “Okay. I’ll see you in class tomorrow, then.”

He shuffled off, slipping into the shadows, and neither Edelgard nor Ingrid budged until he was well out of sight. Then, her pulse still racing, Edelgard helped Ingrid up the stairs and into the dormitories’ second floor hallway. Ingrid’s room was just across the hall from the stairwell; Edelgard’s was farther down the hall.

“Are you going to be okay tonight?” Edelgard asked Ingrid, keeping one hand resting gently on her back.

Ingrid nodded. “I’ll be fine. Thank you. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Her tone was curt now, her voice clipped, but with a trembling hand that belied her facade she opened the door to her room. “Do you understand now?” she added, anger dripping into her voice, before slipping into her bedroom and shutting the door behind her.

Edelgard put her foot in the door. “Wait, Ingrid. I know what being a knight means to you. If you let your own prejudices blind you, you won’t be able to protect people from _real_ threats—”

“And what would you know about that,” Ingrid snarled back at her, her face red, _“Your Highness?”_

Edelgard pulled her foot away before the door that slammed shut in her face could crush her toes. There were other downsides, she mused, to being a mature and experienced woman trapped in the body of an irresponsible layabout of a princess. For one, something that should have sounded like sage wisdom came out sounding like sanctimonious pablum.

As she headed down the hallway toward her room, Edelgard thought about the misguided hatred Ingrid had for the people of Duscur and wondered just how much good she could do if only she knew who her true enemies were… and how much harm she could do if she never found out.

_The dead see no value in knowledge._

That night, Edelgard slept fitfully with a knife beneath her pillow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edelgard: "I just saw a trillion different realities, folding onto each other like thin sheets of metal... forming a single blade."  
> Sothis: "Yeah, yeah, the Time-Knife, we've all seen it, let's get back on track."


	7. The Flame and the Wind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard and Dimitri share some sibling bonding time, Byleth makes surprising changes to the curriculum, and the plot thickens.

Edelgard had begun to keep a journal, keeping it carefully tucked away in the new desk Byleth had brought into her room. It was not so much for her benefit, though, as it was for her counterpart’s. It was not a typical diary; she did not record in its pages her innermost longings and desires, her heartaches, the struggles she’d had adjusting to her new life here, the random pains of melancholy that struck her from time to time—those, she kept buried deep inside herself, for she was no stranger to pushing aside her emotions.

Instead, because she had learned from her vision that Hubert was investigating the incident that had brought her to this world, and because she fancied that he and the rest of her friends might devise a way to pull her back to her own world at any moment without her knowledge, she kept a detailed record of what she had done, the steps along the path she had chosen, and the goal she was working toward so that the other Edelgard could make sense of the direction she had taken her life in.

She included in her desk drawer books of advanced sword and axe techniques, as well as her lessons with the lance, with citations to relevant pages and diagrams listed in the journal, so that when the other Edelgard replaced her, she would be able to make use of all the strength she had gained. It all went in the journal, meticulously backdated to the last week of the Verdant Rain Moon. What she had done. The steps along the path she had chosen. The goal she was working toward. What she had learned so far…

And the questions she still needed answered.

Who was this new Dimitri who had taken her scars for himself? Were his aims the same as Edelgard’s had been?

What was his relationship with Those Who Slither in the Dark? What were they doing in Remire? Did he know?

Would Edelgard be best suited to join him, usurp him, or oppose him? Would Byleth? Most critically—would _Fódlan?_

* * *

The Horsebow Moon gave way to the Wyvern Moon, marking just over a month since Edelgard had arrived in this world. She’d had no more visions of home since the morning she’d lost her desk, much to her dismay. The oncoming mock battle at Gronder Field, though, gave her something to focus on and strive toward, taking her mind off of the homesickness that sometimes struck her like a knife to her heart.

Edelgard had to look at the advantages her new body gave her. In this world, she had been mercifully spared a lonely adolescence of honing her body to be the ultimate weapon—it was soft and weak and her muscles were disappointingly underdeveloped. But it was still her body, and thus had the same potential. In fact, since she’d never had to go through the long months of recuperation and physical therapy that had followed her torture and imprisonment, if anything this body had the potential to be even _stronger_ —all she had to do was make up for lost time. The only thing she was missing that she couldn’t gain back was the Crest of Flames, and as powerful as it was, she was sure she could get by without it.

And she _was_ becoming stronger. She was slowly inching her way back up to the exercise regimen she was familiar with—if she had to quantify her progress, she was perhaps halfway or more to where she’d been at this time in her world. Her muscles didn’t ache nearly as much in the morning anymore; their daily complaints had lessened considerably. She had more stamina in this world than she had in her own, too, which surely was helping her catch up to herself even faster. And now, after nearly a month of catch-up with spears and lances, now that her muscles had grown firmer and her reflexes swifter, she was starting to regain her skills with swords and axes as well.

That said, even so, Dimitri was perhaps not the best choice of sparring partner. She’d asked Felix, who also probably wasn’t the best choice, but Dimitri had stepped in and insisted. He’d _wanted_ to fight her, which had particularly unnerved her.

He was fighting her with a wooden training sword in his left hand and his right arm tied behind his back. And unlike Edelgard, he was _not_ ambidextrous.

And he was _still_ trouncing her.

“I think that’s enough,” Dimitri said, his chest heaving and beads of sweat glistening on his brow like dewdrops on grass. Though he’d disarmed Edelgard five times and left her with quite a few bruises, his well of stamina had run dry first—Edelgard had expected no less.

Edelgard was worn out, too—her lungs felt as though they were filled with fire—but Dimitri had a hard cap on his stamina, a byproduct of the same experiments that had turned his hair white, while she could still train herself to go farther and withstand more punishment.

“I agree,” Edelgard said, collecting her training sword from the floor and setting it in the rack mounted on the wall among its peers. Her gait was unsteady; her legs burned and feet screamed with every step. The sand-covered floor of the training hall felt especially inviting, calling her with a seductive whisper as it shifted under her feet, begging her to fall down and make a bed for herself right there. “That was…”

“Exhausting?”

“Exhilarating. Do you need help untying your—”

Dimitri gritted his teeth and ripped his arm free of the binding holding it to his back; the rope tied around his wrist and midsection went slack and flopped to the floor, circling his feet like a lazy snake. Edelgard shouldn’t have been the least bit surprised. “No, but thank you for offering. You did well, Edelgard; you are certainly a natural wonder when it comes to close-quarters combat.”

“Thank you. You’re quite good yourself,” Edelgard replied. His compliment felt hollow to her. This body was still weak compared to the one she knew best; _she_ was still weak.

“Yes,” he said, “but I’m no savant. Going from almost nothing to _this_ so quickly is quite impressive. What do you say we use real steel next time?”

 _“Next_ time?”

“Well, if you’d rather practice your swordsmanship with Ingrid or Felix, I understand—”

She rubbed the throbbing bruise on the side of her hip where one of Dimitri’s blows had struck her. “I don’t think we should switch to steel until I’m more capable of defending myself from you.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“It’s nothing. Just a bruise. It’ll be gone by morning.”

It was pouring outside when the two of them left the training hall; cold rain soaked the lawn and pattered against the stone steps and walkways that crossed the monastery’s hilly landscape, falling in great thick sheets. Dimitri took the long blue cape draped over his shoulder in his hand and held it out over Edelgard’s head; rain tapped relentlessly on its surface, but only a tiny fraction of the rainwater seeped through the fabric. “Here,” he said, “this might keep you dry.”

“It’s only rain,” Edelgard said to him, though she was touched by the gesture. She was already soaked head to toe with sweat, after all. Her blouse couldn’t cling any tighter to her back. “If anything,” she said as she and Dimitri ventured outside, “I could use a shower right about now.”

“Is that so? Then why don’t I save you a trip to the bathhouse tonight?” he asked, rivulets of rainwater dripping from his white hair and trickling over the curve of a growing smile. He pulled his cape away and Edelgard immediately felt a bucketful of ice cold water pour itself down her back. It was like stepping under a glacial waterfall.

She let out a yelp; his face fell and he hurriedly held the cape back over her. The mischievous grin vanished from his face. “Ah—S-Sorry,” he stammered. “I suppose I became overexcited. Forgive me; it’s just been a long time since I… well, since I had family.”

“I’ll th-think a-about it.” Edelgard clenched her hands around her arms and shivered, her teeth chattering from the cold. She knew all too well the wistful tone in his voice. She had known that loneliness herself for far too long. But still, it was hard for her to be too sympathetic with gooseflesh prickling her skin.

“I just thought, since you have so many older siblings… you might be accustomed to, er…” Dimitri shook his head. Frigid rainwater flew everywhere. He didn’t seem affected at all by the cold. “I was an only child, as you can probably tell. Or, well—I thought I was. Who would have imagined we both had the same Uncle Volkhard?”

“H-How is he y-your uncle, anyway?”

“He was my stepmother’s brother,” he explained. “I… All this time, I had no idea that she was one of the Emperor’s mistresses.”

“S-So that’s where sh-she went,” Edelgard muttered. She’d never known. After Arundel had taken her and her mother to Fhirdiad, she’d never seen or heard from her again. Whenever she asked where her mother had gone, Arundel had always told her it was a secret and that it was for her own protection.

And then the Tragedy of Duscur had happened, had happened in both worlds, and in both worlds, she had…

Edelgard sighed. “I’m s-sorry, Dimitri.”

 _“I_ am sorry,” he replied. “I do not remember much of her, but what little I do makes me feel… guilty, I suppose, that she was taken from you. She was as kind and caring toward me as she would have been to her own flesh and bl—Again, I apologize.”

He was so _awkward,_ Edelgard noted, when he was trying to be sincere. The clumsy lack of guile might have made him seem earnest, immature even, to anyone else… but knowing what she knew about him, she wondered if his unease and difficulty speaking and acting was the sign of a particularly ill-fitting mask. Back when she’d been attending the academy for the first time, in her weaker moments, the moments when the prospect of being herself for just one more second had been agony, she’d wondered if every kind word and deed she’d done had just been a poorly-applied mask over a wicked face.

Unsurprisingly, doing terrible things for a noble goal tended to make one feel irredeemably rotten. And Edelgard had already seen firsthand that Dimitri had done terrible things. Unrepentantly wicked people, such as Thales and his cohorts, who had wholly wicked and self-serving aims, though, never felt remorse or self-loathing; if they did, they were pretending.

Edelgard had feared at many points before Byleth had chosen to take her side that she was just as wicked as the monsters she’d reluctantly considered allies and was only fooling herself. If it had been so hard for her to understand her own self, then could _Dimitri_ hope to comprehend his own thoughts and his own nature? Could _she_ possibly hope to understand him?

The rain shower subsided; the pattering of rain against the ground slowed to a light drizzle, then a few occasional drips. Dimitri made a vain attempt to shake some of the rainwater from his sodden hair like a dog. “Well, we’ve had our showers, it seems,” he said, seemingly eager to change the subject, “so why not head to the bathhouse anyway to dry off and… oh, Goddess, Edelgard! You must be freezing! I am so, so sorry—I hadn’t realized how cold it was—”

He grabbed her by the shoulders none too gently—although Edelgard wasn’t sure he had the capability to be _too gentle_ about anything—and before she knew it, he’d whisked her away.

The Officer’s Academy at Garreg Mach had a communal bathhouse; springwater from the misty mountains was carried into the monastery via an aqueduct and piped into the showers. Right now, a few students were rinsing themselves off under the miniature waterfalls that poured from the walls. In her world, when she had been a student here, Edelgard only ever used the bathhouse very late at night or very early in the morning when nobody else used it so that no one would see the complex network of surgical scars that marred her body; she still wasn’t used to coming here and seeing other people, since she’d mostly kept that routine when possible.

Dimitri had no such reservations. He didn’t hesitate to peel his waterlogged uniform off of his body, letting sodden cloth and rain-slicked plates of armor fall wetly to the floor, and reveal to the handful of other students present the ghostly white scars that covered every inch of his body from the neck down. They wrapped around his toned, muscular arms and legs, circled his torso, ran up and down his back and across his broad chest in purposeful, symmetrical, surgically-precise patterns. It almost vaguely resembled some form of ritual scarification.

Edelgard recognized those scars well—she remembered seeing the exact same ones carved into her flesh in the exact same patterns. For a moment, she felt acutely every single one of those scars, every single one of those long-healed wounds that her body had never suffered but her mind would never forget.

Seemingly oblivious to how exposed he was, Dimitri dried himself off with a fresh towel, leaving his white hair a disheveled and damp rat’s-nest that stuck out at every angle, wrapped the towel around his waist when he was done, and scooped up his clothes and hung them up to dry.

Some of the few students in the bathhouse stared; most did not. They’d seen this before, Edelgard realized. Unlike hers, Dimitri’s suffering was common knowledge. None of the public had known what had happened to Edelgard and her siblings, why a family of eleven had so suddenly become a family of one, most who did chalking it up only to an unfortunate illness that had spread through the palace—but everybody in the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus knew the Tragedy of Duscur intimately. It was a bloody trauma, a still-festering open wound, spread across the entire kingdom and shared by noble and commoner alike. And while nobody knew the deeper truth behind those superficial details, just as nobody had known the deeper truth behind what had happened to Edelgard’s siblings, they all knew full well that he had been missing and presumably tortured for years. His trauma and the marks it had left on his skin had been rendered for public consumption, like the stained-glass images of martyrs in the monastery’s cathedral.

Did he realize, she wondered, that every scar he showed to the public gave his people renewed excuses to hate the people of Duscur? Did he realize that allowing his people to vicariously experience his pain only bred more prejudiced people like Ingrid? Why, if he knew that the people of Duscur were innocent, did he indulge in that?

Edelgard’s thoughts were interrupted when a dry towel flew into her face.

“I’m sorry,” Dimitri said as she fumbled with the towel and tousled her hair dry. “Since you were staring, I thought you would see me throw that.”

Staring? Had she been staring? “I’m just surprised,” she said to him, rubbing some warmth into the gooseflesh prickling her skin, “that you aren’t self-conscious about your…”

With his thumb, Dimitri absentmindedly traced one of the neat white scars, like seam lines on a doll, that circled his wrist. “Why would I be? I have nothing to hide.” The way he said it, it almost sounded like a challenge.

Apprehensive and flustered, Edelgard slipped out of her waterlogged boots and began to unbutton her blouse. She had nothing to hide, didn’t she? Except that she was not of this world, that she was as much of an impostor as Glenn…

She heard Ferdinand’s voice ring out and before she knew it, he was standing in front of her, stark naked, holding up a damp towel between the two of them and everyone else. “Lady Edelgard, what are you doing?” he cried out. “Exposing yourself like this in front of—”

“It’s okay,” Edelgard assured him. “I take showers here all the time.”

“That is not what I mean,” he said, glancing at Dimitri and just as quickly looking away. “Should you really be so casual toward—”

Dimitri laughed. “Don’t worry, Ferdinand. She’s my step-sister, that’s all.”

Ferdinand was silent for a few seconds. “Here, Lady Edelgard,” he said, pointedly averting his eyes and standing with his back to her and his towel forming a protective barrier. His face had turned as red as his hair all the way up to the tips of his ears. “I will see to it the others give you your privacy, at least.”

“Of course,” Edelgard sighed. She disrobed and set to work drying herself off. “Thank you, Ferdinand. How fortunate you happened to be here. When I’ve finished, would you please go to my room and bring me some dry clothes?”

“It would be an honor and a pleasure,” he assured her.

Dimitri, who was looking away from her as well and had his eyes closed, chuckled. “You two already sound like quite the married couple,” he remarked.

“What about you?” Edelgard asked him. “You aren’t going to wander the grounds in nothing but a damp towel, are you? I can’t imagine Seteth—” Her mind corrected herself too late. Seteth, she reminded herself, was miles and miles away, hiding out in the farther northwestern reaches of Fódlan. “You wouldn’t make a good impression on your subjects.”

“It is not that far of a walk back to the dormitories,” he said. “I do not think I would leave much of an impression.”

“Or you could catch pneumonia.”

Dimitri laughed. “The cold does not bother me. You should know from the time you spent in Fhirdiad how cold it gets there at this time of year.”

“Mercifully, I forgot,” she said. Once she was dry, she wrapped her towel around her chest and pinned it to her side with a loose knot. “Thank you for your help, Ferdinand.”

Satisfied with a job well done, Ferdinand reapplied his towel to his waist and headed over to the rack he’d set his dry clothes on. “I shall have you dressed in no time at all, Lady Edelgard,” he assured her.

“And if you would be so kind,” Dimitri said to him, “as to collect Dedue from the greenhouse and tell him I am in need…”

“Ah, certainly,” Ferdinand said as he dressed himself, “but only as a favor to Lady Edelgard. We are enemies after all, you and I.”

Dimitri chuckled. “I see you’re wasting no time in preparing for the Battle of the Eagle and Lion. You’re even getting into character.”

“Of course. And when the Black Eagles trounce your class, Lady Edelgard will surely be inspired to transfer back to us!”

Edelgard wouldn’t bet on it. She didn’t have a doubt in her mind that Byleth’s class would win, and she would be a part of that victory.

Once Ferdinand had left, Dimitri crossed his arms; his expression turned dark and moody. He glanced around the emptying bathhouse, watching the few remaining students trickle out. “I must confess,” he said to Edelgard in a low voice, “I have had an ulterior motive for spending time with you today, Edelgard.”

“Did you?” Edelgard asked darkly, raising an eyebrow. A thousand morbid possibilities ran through her mind. If he suspected her… If he thought she was a changeling like Glenn, or worse…

“I’ve noticed the analytical mindset you bring to Professor Byleth’s lectures. You aren’t just hiding formidable strength and skill in fighting, but in tactics as well.” A smile crossed his face. “You could give Claude von Riegan a run for his money.”

“Be careful you don’t underestimate Claude.”

“Right you are. But more to the point—we have a month to prepare for the Battle of the Eagle and Lion, and I want you to put that sharp mind of yours to use in bringing victory to our house. You aren’t… squeamish about facing your former friends in the Black Eagles, are you?”

“Of course not,” Edelgard said, as much as she didn’t relish the thought of raising a weapon against the people who, in another world, had grown to be her closest and dearest friends. “I intend on giving my all, and that leaves no room for such sentiments.”

Dimitri’s smile grew a little wider. “I am not the least bit surprised. Now, I would like to begin planning our strategy before our professor brings it up in class, so that we can…”

“…Impress her?” Edelgard asked with a coy smile.

“That goes without saying; we must be the best students we can be, given that our professor is such a neophyte herself and has so much to prove against the others. We must show the academy the decisive superiority of her teaching methods.”

“So you already want to talk strategy?”

“Yes, and I would like to start with your former classmates in the Black Eagles. I want to know how to formulate a plan against them. What are their strengths? Their weaknesses? Which strategies do they prefer, and how can we counter them?”

Edelgard laughed. “I’m sorry, Dimitri, but I promised I wouldn’t betray them like that.”

“Professor Byleth would be quite disappointed if we lose because you withheld crucial information from us,” Dimitri teased her.

Edelgard sighed. He was right. She couldn’t let Byleth down. Apparently he had identified her as a dyed-in-the-wool teacher’s pet through and through. “Hubert gets vertigo, Linhardt faints at the sight of blood, Caspar is—”

Dimitri held up his hand and shook his head. “Those are not the weaknesses I had in mind. Come on, I want to hear strategy from the girl who speaks with such authority in our class.”

Edelgard couldn’t quite summon a blush on command the way Dorothea could, but she could muster a coy little smile. “Authority? What do you mean?”

“I mean exactly what I say,” Dimitri said, returning the smile. “Edelgard, when you offer your opinion in class, sometimes I feel as though a general with years of experience on the battlefield is saying those words. For someone who is set to inherit almost nothing from her father aside from a dowry, sizable as it will be, you speak with the confidence of a born leader.”

“Oh, please.”

He put his hands on his hips, further securing the towel wrapped around his waist. “I mean it. It is enough to make me feel you might have deserved to be born in Faerghus.”

“I think I prefer warmer climes.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he said, shaking his head. “Things are… different in Faerghus. I understand that in Adrestia, the firstborn inherits their parents’ lands and titles, but we award such inheritances to those with Crests no matter if they are the eldest, the middle children, or youngest.”

Edelgard crossed her arms. How barbaric. It was bad enough that the firstborn traditionally inherited the lion’s share. At least in her world she’d reformed that cruel practice. “That still happens in the Empire,” she said, trying not to sound _too_ judgmental even though her insides were boiling, “in some houses, but yes, your reverence of Crests isn’t so widespread in our culture.”

“Anyway, if Adrestia were more like Faerghus,” Dimitri continued, “you would be… You bear the Crest of Seiros, correct?” he asked her, furrowing his brow.

Of course he knew, Edelgard thought. He’d probably had Dedue snoop through Hanneman’s records at the beginning of the school year. “That’s correct,” she said, nodding along.

“And Prince Burkhart does not?”

“No, he doesn’t. Just me and…” She racked her brain. One of her other older siblings, just one of them, had that Crest as well. Their blurred, barely-remembered face swam in front of her mind’s eye almost mockingly, as though they themselves were insulted that she’d tried to remember them for such a frivolous purpose. “Anselm. My older brother,” she said, “by about eight months.”

“So you would be second in line for the throne,” Dimitri concluded. “And if something were to happen to him…”

“Perish the thought,” Edelgard blurted out before her stomach could heave.

Dimitri must have noticed a change in her complexion, because he took a little step back and loosened up. “I—I am sorry, Edelgard; it was wrong of me to suggest something so morbid. What I meant to say is that, as a Crest-bearing heir, perhaps wielding authority comes naturally to you.”

She tried to keep a neutral expression on her face. “Is that what Crests mean to you, Dimitri? Do you think somebody is lesser for not having one?”

“I certainly wouldn’t say that,” Dimitri protested. “But Crests are a source of great power, and as Rodrigue once told me, with great power comes great responsibility.”

“Such as the responsibility to lift entire carriages over your head and entertain little girls?” Edelgard asked.

“Such as the responsibility to defend others,” he countered. “In Faerghus, those with Crests have a noble and sacred duty to be the blades and shields with which the kingdom protects its people. We are weapons and vessels for the greater good…”

Listening to him talk, Edelgard found herself clenching her fists and shifted her arms to try and hide them. Weapons and vessels. Edelgard had been molded into a weapon, and Byleth had been forged to be a vessel, and both had yearned and struggled to recapture their humanity—or, it sometimes felt like, to _become_ human in the first place. To be human, with all that entailed—strengths, weaknesses, foibles and frailties, wonder and whimsy—was paramount. To be a weapon was to be a slave, a perversion of nature, an evil however necessary—and yet the way he spoke of it! With such admiration in his voice! As though it were not a grim fate but an _aspiration,_ an _ideal_ to strive toward! Was he _proud_ of his scars?

“Is that what you believe, Dimitri?” she asked him, her voice coming out colder than she’d meant it— _far_ colder, icy, _frigid._ “Do you have any hopes and dreams of your own, or are you resigned to being only someone else’s tool?”

Dimitri bowed his head and held his hand to his chin in a way Edelgard found intensely familiar. It was something that reminded her of… who? Another long-forgotten member of her family? Her mother, perhaps?

“I… suppose…” he answered, teasing out his words. He didn’t sound so sure of himself anymore, as though Edelgard’s castigation had humbled him just a little. “I have not had dreams in a long time, Edelgard,” he said as he shook his head slowly and ruefully.

“If you’re a sword, then whose hand grasps your hilt?” she asked him, feeling an unexpected lump in her throat straining her words. The prospect of how he might answer somehow frightened her that much.

Dimitri said nothing in response.

Even though she tried to pry a little more, he didn’t respond to a word she said after that, and when Ferdinand and Dedue entered the now-empty bathhouse with dry clothes in hand, he seemed to feel far more grateful than she was to part ways.

* * *

The next morning, Edelgard stepped over the threshold into the Blue Lions classroom, still momentarily taken aback to see the azure and cerulean banners of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus instead of the crimson flags she was accustomed to seeing. Most of the class had yet to arrive, but Byleth was already there, and so were Dimitri, Dedue, and Glenn.

There was another person there, too—Sir Gilbert Pronislav of the Knights of Seiros. He wasn’t entirely a stranger to Edelgard—in the academy, he had taught seminars on lancefaire and axefaire when he wasn’t away on church business, and years after that he’d been one of the last knights to defend the Immaculate One in the burning ruins of Fhirdiad. He was a tall man, tall and broad, like a living wall. Even outside of his knightly armor, he seemed impenetrable and impassable.

But this morning as he loomed in front of Glenn, his stern and stony face, its broad jawline seemingly hewn from granite, was softened by resurfaced grief.

“Is it really you, Glenn?” he asked, his voice low and threatening to quaver. “When the church informed me of your recovery, I could scarcely believe it, and even now I can hardly believe my eyes…”

Edelgard wished she could tell him he was right not to.

“You may be getting old and your eyesight may be fading,” Glenn said with a smile, “but your eyes aren’t lying to you. It’s good to see you again, ol’ Gusty.” He reached up to comfortingly clap Gilbert on the shoulder.

The fragile smile crossing Gilbert’s sad face tightened, his rusty eyebrows knitting in bemusement.

“You’ll have to pardon Glenn’s… oddness, Sir Gilbert,” Dimitri said to him. “He’s been isolated for so long, I’m afraid he’s… not quite himself.”

Edelgard watched Glenn’s eyes dart toward Dimitri for a brief instant, shooting him a split-second glare.

“But it _is_ you,” Gilbert asked, “is it?” He rested a tentative, furtive hand on Glenn’s shoulder, as though afraid the slightest touch would make him shatter like glass or vanish like mist. “Young Glenn, you were my best squire, and for so long I despaired that my incompetence had not only lost us our royal family but _your_ bright future as a knight…”

“Well, despair no more, Gusty,” Glenn said with Kronya’s typical way-too-chipper smile. “I’m fine, and that bright future of mine is more than back on track thanks to Professor B here.” He gestured to Byleth with a jerk of his thumb. “Hey, you teach seminars here when you’re not out on business, right? Stick around and we’ll see each other again soon!”

The door to the classroom swung open; Edelgard glanced over her shoulder to see Felix, Ingrid, and Sylvain walk into the room. Felix caught sight of Glenn and immediately did an about-face, only for Ingrid to grab him by the collar and haul him to his seat.

As Gilbert caught up with the monster wearing his long-lost squire’s face, the rest of the Blue Lions trickled in. When Annette arrived, she saw Gilbert and gasped, hurriedly setting down her books on the nearest desk, but as soon as Gilbert saw her he cut off his discussion with Glenn and hastily exited the room, brushing past her without a word. With downcast eyes and a sad sigh, Annette slumped into her desk and rested her cheeks in her hands. Mercedes gave her a consoling pat on the back.

The rest of the class went to their desks. Glenn, of course, hung close to Felix, who seemed to be doing his best not to look as though he’d just bitten into a lemon. “So, Feelie,” Glenn said, leaning close to his ‘brother,’ “what do you think Professor B will teach us today?”

Felix said nothing, busying himself with his textbooks and notebook.

“Still giving your own brother the cold shoulder?” Glenn asked him, leaning in closer until he was almost on top of him.

“Shut up,” Felix finally hissed, shoving him aside. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t _breathe_ on me. You can wear his face, but the brother I knew died seven years ago.”

There was a momentary hot flash of anger on Glenn’s face, and Edelgard’s blood ran cold. Did Felix know of his deception, or was he simply speaking metaphorically? Either way, he’d painted a target on his back, just as Edelgard had. Now Glenn suspected _both_ of them of blowing his cover.

“Class, I have an announcement,” Byleth announced, standing at the head of the room in front of her podium. In an instant, all whispered discussion between classmates ceased and all heads turned forward. All eyes were upon her; each student waited with bated breath for the news they were all expecting to hear. “We have one month until the Battle of the Eagle and Lion, so I’m going to alter your training schedules a bit. Dedue, could you lock the doors? We’re going to need privacy.”

She didn’t continue until the doors to the classroom had been closed and locked.

“We’re going to catch the other houses off guard,” she explained, “by mastering the fundamentals of other disciplines. This will enable us to use tactics the others won’t expect from us. I’m breaking you up into groups and assigning each of you a subject. It’ll be up to you to find a place to train in secret. You can’t let anyone see you.”

Edelgard had to suppress a smile. Skulking around in secret and dealing in the shadows was something her life in her own world had prepared her for. She would have to be wary of Hubert, though, who was definitely keeping an eye on her nearly as much as Dedue was.

“Dimitri, Ashe, Ingrid, and Felix—” Byleth took four slips of paper from a jar on her desk and set them facedown on each of the three students’ desks in turn. “You’re Team One. I wrote the subject your peers are going to train you in on these slips of paper. Don’t look at them yet.”

Glenn raised his hand. “Professor, I want to be in Dimitri’s group. Can I trade places with Ashe?”

“No.” She took three more slips. “Glenn, Annette, Dedue—Team Two.”

Edelgard couldn’t quite place the look on Dedue’s face, although that was the norm with him. She imagined he was uneasy at the prospect of being separated from Dimitri, but relieved that he could keep Glenn away from him. She looked to Felix next, who wore a sour expression as usual, but was probably grateful to be kept away from his false brother. Giving Dedue Glenn’s leash might just keep him alive at least for a few weeks more.

Byleth took three more slips of paper. “Edelgard, Sylvain, Mercedes—Team Three.”

Edelgard looked down at the slip of paper sitting on her desk, then looked over at the other two members of her group. Mercedes gave her a warm, genuine smile and waved at her from across the room. Sylvain flashed her a grin that she supposed was meant to be charming and seductive.

“These are all going to be skills that you have little to no experience in, so I’ve grouped you all with partners you can learn them from,” Byleth said. “I’ll be here if you need any additional guidance over the next month.”

When Byleth gave the order, the class separated into their teams and revealed their new subjects. Edelgard read from the slip of paper Byleth had given her as she and the other two members of Team Three huddled in a corner of the classroom. _Reason,_ it said.

She’d never studied black magic before. Where had Byleth gotten the idea to teach her that? But regardless, Edelgard assured herself that she would learn it and learn it well. If Byleth thought it was a good fit for her, then she couldn’t be wrong.

“Reason, huh? Funny, that’s what it says on mine,” Sylvain said to her, grinning. “Well, Princess, looks like the two of us are Mercie’s new black magic apprentices. What does yours say?” he asked Mercedes.

“I can’t imagine what you two could teach me that I’d actually be good at,” she said, flustered, as she turned over her slip of paper. “I’m so clumsy, after all; there’s no way I could handle a lance or an axe like—Oh, horseback riding. I suppose I might be good at that.”

“I suppose I can teach you some basic lance skills,” Edelgard said to her, feeling like a fifth wheel on a wagon. “You’ll still be primarily using magic offensively, so there’s no need for anything more than the basics. Knowing your way around a horse will really improve your range and maneuverability on the battlefield.” In her world, Mercedes had been quite a skilled holy knight, but in this world, with her even frailer than usual, following that same path might be difficult—but not impossible.

“Don’t feel so left out, Lady Edelgard,” Mercedes assured her. “I’m sure you two will have your work cut out for you. I’ll try not to let you down. Now, when do you want your first lesson in the dark arts? I know an abandoned guard tower near the monastery wall where no one will bother us… Perhaps we should meet there at the stroke of midnight tonight?”

“Sure,” Sylvain said. “That works for me. But how are we gonna teach you to ride a horse in _secret?”_

Mercedes gasped. “I hadn’t thought of that! You’re right; we can’t just take one of the horses from the stables in the dead of night, and everybody in the monastery will notice if we train during the day.”

“Not if we train outside the monastery,” Edelgard said. “There are stables we can rent from in town.”

“Well, we’re certainly lucky to have you on the team, Princess,” Sylvain said. “You and your massive… imperial coffers,” he added, his voice dripping with innuendo.

Edelgard stepped on his foot.

Across the room in his little group with Dedue and Annette, Glenn fixed his eyes on Felix in Dimitri’s group. Then his eyes slowly roved, his head slowly turning, until he met Edelgard’s gaze. A baleful smile crawled across his face and one eye closed in a gleefully sinister wink.

He had his eyes on his targets.

Ingrid raised her hand. “Professor? What else is on the agenda today?”

“Nothing,” Byleth said. “We’re all going into town for the day. It’ll be… fun.”

The murmurs that rippled through the classroom were a mix of excitement and confusion. Most students were taken aback.

“You’re all going to be working extremely hard,” she explained, “balancing your normal studies with your secret ones, so I wanted to give you one last day of freedom. Class dismissed; meet me at the monastery gates when the bell tolls nine.”

Still a little bemused from their short lesson, the Blue Lions filtered out of the classroom. Edelgard lingered behind and walked up to Byleth as she sorted her cue cards for tomorrow’s lecture. “Excuse me, Professor?” she asked.

Byleth looked up at her. Her azure eyes looked particularly warm today. “Yes? What is it, Edelgard?”

Edelgard felt her heart skip a beat. What a lovesick fool she was! “I-I, um… I have a question about our team composition,” she said, trying to dispel the fog clouding her brain.

“I know Sylvain has… problems with women,” Byleth told her, “but I selected you and Mercedes specifically because you two can put him in his—”

“No, it’s not that,” Edelgard said. “I wanted to ask you about Felix. Since one of our teams has to have four people in it anyway, I was wondering if you could transfer him to ours. I know you put a great deal of thought into building these teams, but I think he has plenty of untapped potential for black magic as well.” She was bluffing; she had no idea if Felix had any unrealized affinity for that subject. She just wanted to have eyes on one of Glenn’s other targets and have a means to secretly warn him about the danger he was in.

Byleth shook her head. “No, I can’t do that. I put him where he is for a reason. Besides, having Mercedes teach him magic in addition to you and Sylvain will put too much strain on her.”

“I understand,” Edelgard said, her heart feeling heavy. After all this time, being scolded by her professor still hurt. “I’m sorry for questioning your methods, Professor.”

“It’s fine,” Byleth assured her. “You have a lot of good ideas— _great_ ones, even—so I value your input.”

“Th-Thank you,” Edelgard found herself stammering, trying hard not to blush. “I… By the way, how did you come up with such an unorthodox lesson plan?” she asked. Byleth had never done anything like this in her world.

“Actually, Glenn suggested it to me,” Byleth said. “We talked about it about a week or so ago. I liked the idea, so I told him I’d put it into place as soon as I figured out how to split up the class.”

Of course it had been Glenn’s idea. It seemed he’d been counting on her putting him in a group with Dimitri and Felix, though, so at least things hadn’t gone entirely to plan for him. It was little relief, but it was relief nonetheless.

“Well, I would ask that you consider transferring Felix to our group,” Edelgard said, “but I understand. No need to alter your plans to suit my whims. Also… we’re not going fishing?”

Byleth’s lips curled in a smile. “I’ve decided to hold off on the class fishing trip until Dad—until Captain Jeralt returns from his business in the Kingdom. We’ll go out for the weekend after we win the Battle of the Eagle and Lion. It just doesn’t feel right to not go fishing without him.”

“Of course,” Edelgard said, feeling an ache in her chest as she recalled Jeralt. He had been a good man. The greatest regret she’d ever had about her uneasy alliance with Those Who Slither in the Dark (of which she had _many)_ had been that she’d been implicated in his tragic and unnecessary death—a death which, if things continued to trace a similar trajectory as they had in her world, would approach more swiftly than anyone could imagine. Unless she could change it…

“Flayn would have liked it, too,” Byleth said, packing up her stuff and heading for the doors, “but at least she’s safe.”

Edelgard nodded and followed along after her. “Wherever she is,” she replied, thinking with a wistful smile of the sandy beaches of the Rhodos Coast, “I hope she and Seteth can go fishing to their hearts’ contents. Anyway, it’ll be a fine celebration of our victory.”

“That’s right,” Byleth said. “By the way, why do they call it the Battle of the Eagle and Lion if the Golden Deer are in it, too?”

“It commemorates the War of the Eagle and Lion.”

“And the Golden Deer…”

“The Leicester Alliance hadn’t broken away from the Kingdom yet at that point.”

“I know. But we let the Deer participate, even though they weren’t in the war to begin with?”

“We cannot just leave them out, Professor,” Edelgard said, chuckling, as she and Byleth headed into the sunlight. She and Byleth had had this exact conversation six years ago; it felt so good to retrace those old steps. “Although it would make victory much more attainable if we needed not worry about Claude.”

“Well, we should change the name to include them, then. It should be the Battle of the Eagle and Lion and Deer.”

“I agree, but the more tradition-minded nobles would probably be up in arms if they changed it.” Edelgard sighed. “Think of how many great ideas never get their day because of people who would rather the world stay the same. It would be wonderful if more people were like you, Professor.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. When the unexpected happens and change comes, you don’t dig in your heels and stand in its way; you flow around it and adapt to it, like water taking the shape of its vessel. The world grows and advances because of people like you.”

With a little smile crossing her face that glowed as brightly as a sunbeam, Byleth nodded. “You’re quite kind, Edelgard. I’ll see you at the gates; I have something to get from my quarters.”

“Yes,” Edelgard said, “and I suppose I should trade in my uniform for the day. I’ll see you later, By—Professor.”

As she watched Byleth walk away, she thought she saw another glimmer of light hovering beside her and heard, faintly but clearly, a little girl’s voice saying, _“Quite the charmer, is she not?”_

* * *

Unlike yesterday, it was a beautiful day in the town that clung to Garreg Mach Monastery like a bear cub clinging to its mother. Fluffy white clouds filled the periwinkle sky, but the sun’s golden rays were unobstructed and filled the cobblestone streets. The chirps and trills of birdsong occasionally drifted through the air on brisk, cold wind. Edelgard almost found it hard to believe that the first snowfall of the year was only a month away.

The town of Garreg Mach was not a wealthy town or a large town, but its merchants were flush with money from visiting Knights of Seiros and the nobles attending the Officer’s Academy, and as a result, catered to quite cosmopolitan tastes. One could find food from Derdriu in the delicatessens, the latest fashions from Enbarr in the boutiques, and furs from the wilds of northern Faerghus in the market stalls. Occasionally, goods from as far away as Albinea or Brigid, or even Dagda, could be found—goods that the town’s denizens couldn’t afford, but the students and faculty certainly could. There was something perverse about that disparity—people making their livings selling things their own neighbors themselves couldn’t afford. Edelgard hoped to change that with her reforms some day—some day, when she returned to her own world, whenever that was.

The town square and the shops were not very busy, considering it was a Wednesday morning, and Edelgard didn’t expect to see any other students besides the other Blue Lions, as the other two houses were stuck with far more orthodox teachers—

Oh. There was Linhardt, sleeping in a bush.

She broke away from the rest of the class and approached him. He was sprawled atop the bush, arms and legs akimbo, with little twigs and leaves clinging to his uniform and sticking out of his forest-green hair; and as he was wont to do, he was snoring very loudly. Despite the uncomfortable position of his body, his face was completely placid—he could fall asleep anywhere, and often did. He was lucky his brilliant mind made him so indispensable.

When Edelgard’s shadow fell in front of the sunbeam that had been shining down on his face, he winced, groaned, twitched, and opened his eyes. He blinked a few times.

“Hello, Linhardt,” Edelgard said to him. “Skipping lectures again?”

“Oh. Hello, Edelgard?” He yawned and rubbed the sleep from his eyes, then wiped some dried drool from his chin on his sleeve. “Back to your old habits already? Damn. Dorothea had a bet going. I think I just lost.”

“Wh— _I’m_ not skipping class; Professor Byleth brought us all down here,” she explained. “What’s this about a bet?”

“Oh, nothing,” Linhardt said, gingerly extracting himself from his impromptu bed. He stretched his arms over and behind his back, his chest swelling as he took a deep, relaxed breath. “Ah, that hit the spot. I’ve been awake for two days and two nights straight, you see.” He blinked. “What day is it now?”

“The first Wednesday of the Wyvern Moon.”

“Ah. And the year?”

“Th—The year?” Edelgard was taken aback. Linhardt was a bit of an odd duck, but what an odd question _that_ was! She’d asked the same when she’d come here; why in heaven’s name would anyone _else_ have to ask that? “Imperial Year 1180. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. I’d been reading the legend of that one Faerghus sniper who fell asleep at his post during the Battle of the Tailtean Plains and slept for one hundred fifty years, and I just wanted to make sure I hadn’t done the same.” He rubbed his hairless chin carefully and slowly, as if expecting to find a beard to stroke there.

“That,” Edelgard admitted, “is quite a reasonable fear for you to have. Perhaps you should try not falling asleep where no one can find you.”

“Ugh. The cure sounds worse than the ailment,” Linhardt sighed. “Anyway, Dorothea was betting you’d break down and go back to being—uh, what did she call you, again? A ‘lazy, spoiled brat?’—in under five weeks; I said it would be _over_ five weeks.”

“I’m glad you had such faith in me. I have no intent on changing any time soon,” Edelgard assured him. “I think you have a good chance of winning the bet, then.”

“Yes, just hang on for another week. I’m sure it won’t be difficult. Like Caspar said, it’s like you’ve become a totally different person.” He let out another yawn. “Anyway, I’m off. It’s too noisy here.”

Linhardt stumbled a bit on his feet and nearly collapsed, slipping against the road, and collided with Edelgard’s shoulder. Edelgard caught him and helped him back onto his feet. “Careful,” she told him. “I think your legs are still asleep, Linhardt.”

“So they are. Well, perhaps I’ll rest a bit longer here, then.”

_“Linhardt.”_

“Ugh. When you say my name like that, you sound like Ferdinand.” He rolled his eyes. “Okay, okay. I’m off. See you later, Edelgard. Or not.”

With that, he ambled away, a little unsteady on his feet, but at least he didn’t keel over again.

Edelgard spent the rest of the morning idly browsing the shops, her ambling path through town occasionally aligning with those of her classmates. She found Ashe helping Dedue haggle with a merchant from the north for spices and crossed paths with Ingrid as she perused scale polish and ointments for taking care of wyverns (as part of her duties to Team One, she was tasked with teaching Dimitri flying). Annette was carrying armloads of flour, sugar, fruit preserves, and other baking supplies for Mercedes; the very sight of such a haul made Edelgard’s sweet tooth ache. Sylvain was getting a new red handprint on his face from a local girl he’d apparently met, dated, and broken up with before. Dimitri was sticking to Felix like glue and was engaged in a spirited, if one-sided conversation about the proper way to wield a lance, demonstrating his technique with a broomstick to his friend (“That looks like work, Dimitri; Professor Byleth will be mad at you,” Edelgard teased him).

She studied shelves of oils for polishing swords and armor in one of the local shops, her thoughts turning to Ferdinand. Weapons maintenance was a hobby he particularly enjoyed; he found it both useful and relaxing. This world’s Ferdinand may have been a touch more irritating than her own, but he was still Ferdinand. Perhaps she could give it to him as a consolation gift after the Blue Lions won the Battle of the Eagle and Lion.

She was so lost in her thoughts as she drifted across the shop’s shelves that she nearly cracked her nose against Byleth’s shoulder. “Ah, P-Professor,” she stammered, hastily stepping away, “I apologize; I didn’t see you there…”

“Hmm?” Byleth looked up, her eyes wide and curious. “Oh, hi, Edelgard. I was just looking for sword polish. Would you happen to know what’s good for Heroes’ Relics?” She turned her attention back to the shelves. “I won’t be using the Sword of the Creator against students, of course, but I’d like to have it on my hip as a decorative thing for morale, so I should probably give it a good polishing.”

Edelgard studied the shelves with her for a moment. Heroes’ Relics were made of an arcane, bonelike metal dubbed ‘umbral steel,’ and thanks to years of being at Byleth’s side (along with being acquainted with other Relics used by the Black Eagle Strike Force, such as Thrysus and Blutgang), she knew exactly which of these jars of oil and polish would work best on that steel.

She picked out a jar of thin, blood-red liquid. “You always use th—I, I mean, this will work best, I think. I read it in a book once.”

“Oh.” Byleth took it from her. “Thank you, Edelgard. Can you let me know if you find that book?”

“Of course. I hope it works.”

With another one of her tantalizing little smiles, Byleth nodded. “I’ll think of you whenever I polish my blade.”

Edelgard found it very hard to breathe for a few seconds.

The day went by quickly; she found herself amazed, as the sun began to descend from its zenith, just how quickly time could fly even when she had nothing to occupy herself but trivial and frivolous affairs. Buying a sandwich from a local deli and eating it under the shade of a tree, browsing a boutique for the latest fashions from Enbarr, helping Ingrid buy far too much cured and brined meats for one person and insisting on paying for it… As inconvenient as it was to relive her school days, Edelgard was glad that she could have a day like this again.

The last thing she made sure to do was take Sylvain and Mercedes to the stables to show them where they could rent horses for Mercedes’ secret training. The logistics would still be tricky, but Edelgard welcomed the challenge. On the way back to rendezvous with the rest of the class, though, she ran into something wholly unexpected.

There was a blur of pink, she heard a voice call out her name, and Edelgard felt a stinging on her cheek and realized that she’d just been slapped across the face.

A girl from the Officer’s Academy was standing in front of her, her pink hair tied back and trailing behind her in two long streams and glossy lips curled in an indignant pout.

Edelgard grabbed the girl by the wrist automatically, without thinking—her heart was beating intensely, as though her body had feared her life was in danger, but the danger passed as she got a better look at her assailant.

She couldn’t believe it. She’d been slapped across the face.

Slapped across the face by _Hilda Valentine Goneril,_ of all people.

 _“Hilda?”_ she gasped.

Hilda pulled her wrist free of Edelgard’s grip and put her hands on her hips, scowling at her with pink brows furrowed angrily over her pink eyes. “We _live_ next to each other _,_ and you can’t even say so much as ‘hello’ to me for a whole _month?”_

“E-Excuse me?” Edelgard stammered, still reeling from the blow. Was she supposed to know Hilda in this world? If so, then why was this happening _now?_ Hilda could have yelled at her two or three weeks ago, or even a few days after she’d ended up in this world…

Oh, why hadn’t the other Edelgard kept a diary? That would have made things so much easier for her…

“Excuse _you?”_ Hilda asked, only growing more irate.

“I’m… sorry?”

“Ugh.” She spun on her heel and stomped off. “See you at Gronder Field, Edelgard.”

Edelgard stood there, dumbfounded, as she watched Hilda stomp all the way down the street and vanish into a curio shop.

Sylvain caught up to her. “Wow. And they call _me_ a heartbreaker.”

“Was that an old flame, Lady Edelgard?” Mercedes spoke up.

“I, um… suppose,” Edelgard said, “perhaps.”

“You can’t remember? My, my, your brain worms must be getting worse.”

“You know, I _did_ see you two hanging out a lot before you decided to join our class, Edelgard,” Sylvain said, stroking his chin. There was a hard, thoughtful glint in his amber eyes. “You sure you don’t remember her?”

“I-I mean, I don’t recall us _dating,”_ Edelgard said, fumbling for an answer that didn’t make her look incredibly suspicious. In her world, Hilda had never given her so much as the time of day. How was she supposed to have known that they’d been friends in this world? “I—I suppose I must have given her mixed signals.”

“Mixed signals.” Sylvain shook his head and clucked his tongue disapprovingly.

“As though _you_ have a leg to stand on,” Edelgard shot back at him. “How many new handprints did you add to your face today?”

“That’s between me and those girls.”

“Maybe,” Mercedes said, “two heartbreakers like you are perfect for each other.”

Edelgard gagged. It wasn’t so much that she found men unattractive—plenty had caught her eye over the years—but her heart belonged mainly to women, and _one_ in particular.

“I dunno,” Sylvain said. “I can see it. Although I bet your fiance would be pretty mad if we eloped, huh, Princess? So… wanna start an international incident?”

She rolled her eyes and sighed. It was going to be a long, long month.

With that awkward incident behind them (though it still lingered on Edelgard’s mind), they headed for the edge of town and met with the rest of the class at the gates to the monastery as the sun began to dip closer toward the horizon, casting splashes of warm orange light onto the underbellies of the cotton-fluff clouds crowding the darkening sky.

“Has anyone seen Glenn?” Annette asked, taking a cursory head count. “Did he just go off on his own or something?”

 _“Here!”_ Glenn’s voice rang out behind Edelgard, and she shuddered and all but leaped out of the way as he slipped past her. “Sorry,” he said, “I decided to go for a hike and stretch my legs. The woods are beautiful this time of year, aren’t they?”

Ingrid wearily placed her hand on her forehead. “Glenn, _please,_ for the love of Seiros, don’t do that,” she said, her voice falling from her mouth as a frustrated, put-upon sigh.

Edelgard caught her breath and held her bag closer to her side. How could she have let him sneak up on her like that? He could have knifed her in the back so easily… Was he toying with her? Why? What did he think about her? What did he _know?_

* * *

Once the sun had set and the sky had turned black, pinpricks of stars twinkling in the gaps between the clouds, Edelgard put on a black rain cloak and went out to meet Mercedes and Sylvain for their secret training. She found the two of them skulking in the courtyard, also wearing black, like a pair of thieves scouting the layout of a nobleman’s manor they’d been planning to rob.

“Are we ready?” Mercedes asked her new apprentices after Sylvain had tried a few minutes of ‘small talk’ on Edelgard.

“Just a second,” Edelgard said. She looked around, trying to discern shapes in the darkness. “I know you’re here, Hubert.”

A pale face popped out from behind one of the hedges and failed to call her bluff. “H-How did you know I was following you, Lady Edelgard?” Hubert gasped.

“I thought it was likely,” she told him. “Hubert, you can’t follow us.”

“I am your retainer. I’m supposed to look after you,” he said. “Especially if you mean to go cavorting around with…” His gaze focused on Sylvain and his eyes narrowed. _“Him._ Do your vows to Ferdinand mean _nothing,_ Lady Edelgard?”

“Simmer down, Hubert,” Sylvain said, throwing up his hands in a gesture of goodwill. “I know she’s engaged; I’ve got no intentions of stealing her away.”

“Good,” Hubert said, a dark and sinister smile—the kind that made him seem more like Edelgard’s own Hubert—crossing his face. “I swear this in the Goddess’ holy name, Sylvain; If you dare seduce Lady Edelgard, and by some miracle manage to pull it off, you would break Ferdinand’s heart, and in retaliation I would see to it that you wake up the next morning to find yourself six feet beneath these very grounds.”

“That,” Mercedes interjected, smiling, “would probably be a very big miracle.”

Sylvain’s face fell. “M-Mercie!”

“Yes, you will be begging for mercy should you try anything,” Hubert told him. “Lady Edelgard, I must ask, though, what in the Goddess’ name are you doing out here at this hour? Don’t you have class tomorrow? Or is Professor Byleth giving you another ‘vacation’ day?”

“Oh, so you heard about that?” Sylvain interjected. “Sounds fun, doesn’t it? _Your_ professor would never…”

“Hubert, we have business here that we cannot discuss with anyone from the other houses,” Edelgard said to her dogged retainer. “I cannot have you following me or spying on me. If you don’t like it, take it up with Professor Byleth. For now, you’ll just have to trust me.”

Hubert gave her a hangdog look, not unlike a puppy that had just been scolded, and shot another venomous glance at Sylvain.

“Don’t worry, Hubert,” Mercedes assured him. “Lady Edelgard has become quite strong, apart from the worms feasting on her brain, and so if Sylvain tries anything, she will break every bone in his hand. Especially the little ones!”

He looked relieved. “True, you have become quite st—Er, excuse me, _what_ did you say about worms?”

She smiled. “Oh, nothing, just a joke.”

“I think you two would get along very well,” Edelgard said to Hubert and Mercedes, “but it will have to wait until after we have completed our secret mission. Run along now, Hubert. Back to bed. That’s an order.”

Hubert bowed deeply. “Yes, Lady Edelgard,” he hissed, and he retreated into the night.

A few minutes of silence passed. The only sound was the cold wind rustling through the hedges and rosebushes.

“Shall we head for the tow—” Mercedes started.

Edelgard held up her hand. “Wait,” she whispered. She waited. “I _mean_ it, Hubert.” In her world, Hubert, as fiercely loyal as he was, sometimes had a bad habit of countermanding her orders if he saw it as for her own good. He was dead set on bloodying his hands for her sake, whether she wanted it or not. People sometimes ended up frightened out of their wits or simply disappeared when they stood in Edelgard’s way. She didn’t always have to tell Hubert. He just _did_ it.

She waited for Hubert’s response. Nothing.

“Okay,” she said, “we’re free to go.”

They crossed the monastery grounds in darkness and silence, Mercedes lighting the way with a small, faint orb of white light cradled in one outstretched hand. Sure enough, just as Edelgard had feared, they came to the same tower where Glenn had had his tryst with Those Who Slither in the Dark. Edelgard wondered if they had left anything behind… if they were trespassing and would find themselves facing terrible consequences for it.

“Are you sure about this place, Mercedes?” Edelgard asked.

“What, don’t tell me you’re scared,” Sylvain teased her. “I saw you at Mercie’s story session. You barely flinched.”

“I’m worried about the tower’s structural integrity.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Mercedes said. “I come here all the time to study in private. It’s the perfect place. I even keep some of my spellbooks and supplies up here.”

Edelgard relaxed. “Ah, well… okay then.”

The three of them ventured into the tower, up the spiral staircase to the guardhouse posted atop its round crenelations. With an echoing snap of her fingers, Mercedes lit the lanterns hanging from the walls with violet flames that cast an eerie, subdued hue across the room.

Sylvain peered out one of the tower’s thin embrasures. “Are you sure it’s wise to be lighting torches, Mercedes?”

“The violet light doesn’t carry far,” Mercedes assured him, “and it’s dim to human eyes. If anyone sees it, they’ll simply write it off as a trick of the light.” She sat cross-legged on the floor, propped a book open in front of her, and bade the others to join her. “Now, do either of you have any magical experience?”

“No,” both Edelgard and Sylvain answered.

“Then we’ll start with the basics of magic seals. I assume you both are proficient in trigonometry?”

“Yes,” Edelgard said.

Sylvain sheepishly scratched the back of his head. “That’s the… sine, cosine stuff, right? Yeah, I think I know it.”

“Good,” Mercedes said, taking a bag from the floor and pulling out pencils, rulers, protractors, and compasses. “For creating magic seals, getting the angles and curves right is absolutely essential. Also necessary is good recall; when you commit these seals to memory, you can call upon them without needing to draw them on the ground or inscribe them on gauntlets—Oh, Lady Edelgard, I do hope you can keep up, considering your forgetfulness…”

“I think I’ll manage,” Edelgard said.

“That’s the spirit. Oh, and you’re aware of calculus, right? By the end of the month, I hope to introduce you to the basics of Fourier transforms, which are required for more advanced dark magic, and those require knowledge of derivatives and integrals…”

Edelgard could tell from the way Sylvain bit his lip that she was moving past the limits of his mathematical knowledge.

The lesson began, and ran well into the night. The moon began to sink below the opposite horizon. By the end, though, Edelgard managed to produce a flurry of amber sparks and a single flickering flame in the palm of her hand. Her eyes burned from tiredness and curves and angles had been inscribed on the backs of her eyelids, but seeing that little flame filled her with a wondrous, warm sense of pride.

To her surprise, Sylvain did quite a good job keeping up. Perhaps her eyes were playing tricks on her, but it almost seemed like the little candle flame he’d summoned was just a little stronger and steadier than her.

“Black magic is called ‘reason,’” Mercedes said, yawning, “because it’s based on understanding the natural world. Not like white magic, which draws on your connection to the unseen. It seems you both have a good understanding of the nature of fire.”

Edelgard smiled. Now the Flame Emperor truly had mastery over fire.

“What about those _other_ reason spells you use?” Sylvain said. “You know, those black flames, clouds of miasma, little… purple… cube thingies…”

“Oh, that? A very _esoteric_ branch of reason—dark magic,” Mercedes intoned ominously.

Edelgard recognized that school of magic. Hubert’s magic. Lysithea’s magic. The magic of Those Who Slither in the Dark. Unsurprisingly, Mercedes knew it as well.

“Perhaps,” Mercedes added, “we will get to it by the end of the month, especially if you continue to show such great progress! You two are wonderful apprentices so far.”

“Well, we’ve got a wonderful teacher.”

“Tomorrow,” she said, snapping her heavy tome closed and packing away her tools, wiping away the chalk seal she’d drawn on the floor, “we will get to the ritual leech scarification and boiled newt eyeball tinctures. I hope neither of you are allergic!”

Sylvain’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. “L-Leech s-scarification? Mercie, baby, I—”

She laughed at him. “Just kidding.”

Edelgard stifled a laugh at his expense.

The three of them left the tower as a faint line of violet began to creep over the horizon, bleeding into the night’s abyssal black. Edelgard yawned. Was it already so early in the morning? These midnight trysts were going to be harder than she’d thought…

“So this is what the professor meant,” Sylvain said, yawning, “when she said we’d have our noses to the grindstone. Phew, I’m gonna look like a zombie a week from now.”

“Oh, don’t spoil my future lesson plans,” Mercedes teased him. “Zombification isn’t going to be for another _two_ weeks, though.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re making good progress, though,” Edelgard assured him, though she shared his concerns about exhaustion. Perhaps midnight was not such a great time for secret lessons, especially if they ran for hours. “I never took you for such a quick study, Sylvain. You’re quite smart, just like your bro—”

“Just like my _what?”_ he asked, a hard flash in his eyes.

“I… heard about the mission you went on before I joined your class,” Edelgard said, carefully choosing her words. “Your brother… Miklan, was it?”

“What about him?”

“I heard he had raised a small army of bandits and taken control of an old fortress near Gaspard territory. That takes great leadership skills… and to have made himself a problem for the Knights of Seiros, a cunning intellect. It’s truly a shame the course his life took.”

Sylvain squinted suspiciously at her. “You talk about him like you were there.”

“Pardon me if I spoke out of turn. I only wanted to say that you seem to share his good qualities. The ones I’ve _heard_ about, that is.”

He let out a bitter laugh and stuffed his hands in his cloak’s pockets. “Huh. Yeah. A shame the course his life took. And do you know _why?”_

“He was disinherited, wasn’t he?” Edelgard asked, feigning ignorance. “But… he was your older brother.”

“Yeah. But that doesn’t matter in Faerghus. I was born with a Crest. _He_ wasn’t. Just by existing, I took away everything he expected to have.”

“Perhaps he shouldn’t have expected to have those things,” Edelgard said coolly, masking her true feelings. She was glad, though, to find someone else in this class who didn’t share the typical Faerghus view of Crests that Dimitri had espoused the other day. Surprisingly, Sylvain of all people seemed to be a kindred spirit.

Yet another person, like Ingrid, who had suffered under the status quo Edelgard had aimed to upend, and yet had fought against her all the same.

“You’ve got a Crest, though, right, Edelgard?” Sylvain asked her. “But you’re still ninth in line of the throne?”

“That’s correct. Adrestia isn’t so concerned with matters of people’s Crests. Inheritance typically goes to the eldest.”

“Sounds nice,” he said.

“I don’t think inheritance should depend on age or Crest, though,” Edelgard added before she could stop herself. “Inherent qualities, the circumstances of one’s birth, don’t tell you anything about a person. The best suited child of a given house should be the heir apparent, based on the skills they develop in life. People should _earn_ their power, not simply inherit it.”

“Hmm?” Sylvain gave her an odd look. “Those are some strange sentiments for a princess. You really have changed a lot, huh?”

“It’s amazing,” she said, hoping to once again deflect suspicion, “what a revelation from the Goddess can do to a person.”

He didn’t seem convinced.

* * *

That night—or, rather, early in the morning—Edelgard took her bag and emptied it onto her desk, taking stock of the things she had bought in town, even though her eyes were burning and her legs felt like jelly and her bed seemed to be exerting a magnetic force on her body. She set her haul neatly on her desk in organized rows. Sword and armor polish, a few nice blouses that had caught her fancy, a necklace she thought she would surprise Byleth with after the upcoming mock battle, a few seeds to plant in the greenhouse…

A slip of paper fluttered to the floor like an errant feather, catching her eye—curious, as she was sure she’d removed all of her academic materials from the bag before heading to town that morning. She must have missed a loose page from her notebook and let it sit in the bottom without noticing.

She crouched down to pick up the slip of paper, its blank surface sparkling in the sunlight like fresh snow, and idly flipped it over. There, on the opposite side, someone had written a message in big, crude block letters—disguised handwriting—and when she saw the four words scrawled on the page, she felt as though Dimitri had dumped another gallon of ice-cold rainwater down her back.

YOU DON’T BELONG HERE


	8. Falling Short of Heaven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard strategizes with the Blue Lions, Archbishop Rhea investigates the girl who received a revelation from the Goddess, and Ashe has an emotional confrontation with the men responsible for Lonato's death.

The landscape of Gronder Field stretched out before the Blue Lions. The breadbasket of the Empire, it lay south of Garreg Mach in Bergliez territory. In Faerghus, the poor soil and cooler climate permitted little more than rye and oats; in Leicester, the soil supported mostly millet and barley; but at Gronder Field, fertile plains filled with rolling waves of wheat and corn and sorghum and other staple crops stretched across the landscape, and these rich and diverse fields fed all of Fódlan.

But nestled amid the vast amber seas, a forested plain surrounded the ancient and lovingly preserved ruins of a long-dormant, yet never-forgotten battleground. At Gronder Field, well over one thousand years ago, blood had watered the ground when the forces of the then-nascent Adrestian Empire had clashed with and triumphed over the armies of Nemesis, the mad King of Liberation. It had not been the last battle of the War of Heroes, but it had been the turning point of the war.

The version of Gronder Field that was laid out before Edelgard and her fellow Blue Lions was notably flatter, though, and certainly much smaller, as it only nearly covered part of a table in the library. Candlelight cast a dusky amber glow across the unrolled parchment, like the dying light of the setting sun in its last seconds over the horizon.

“It sure was nice of Brother Tomas to lend us this map,” Ashe said, marveling at the detail the old map showed. The forests, the river, the fortified hill in the middle of the field on which sat an old, but painstakingly well-maintained ballista… everything was clearly marked, even the starting positions of all three houses. Edelgard wondered how many previous classes had used this map to plan their strategies.

“What do you think is in it for him?” Sylvain asked. “Think he’s got a bet riding on us?”

“He’s a man of the cloth,” Annette said. “It’s hard to imagine him gambling.”

“Even if you cannot imagine it, it may still be true,” Dedue told her. “As for me, I think he is playing each side.”

“That makes sense,” Byleth said, nodding. “That way, he’ll make everyone feel special.”

Sylvain shook his head. “Nah. Those things always end poorly. Someone catches on, finds out you’ve got a girl on the side… or two…” He gingerly rubbed his cheek.

“That’s right, Sylvain,” Mercedes chimed in. “I like to think he’s smarter than that.”

“He would certainly _think_ so,” Edelgard said, but it wasn’t Tomas she was thinking of—Tomas had died eight years ago and had been replaced by Solon, one of Those Who Slither in the Dark. It would be an understatement to say Solon had a swelled head. To say he had an ego did not come remotely close to doing justice to the depth and breadth of his megalomania.

“So we know that we will be positioned here, north of the river,” Byleth said, interrupting the chatter as she set a handful of blue tokens down on the map. “The Black Eagles will be here in the southwest, around this fortification here,” she added, setting down a few red tokens, “and the Golden Deer will be here in the southeast, in the forest.”

As Edelgard watched Byleth put down a few yellow tokens to represent the Golden Deer, she thought back to how the Battle of the Eagle and Lion had gone in her world. The Black Eagles’ and Blue Lions’ positions had been reversed, with Dimitri and his classmates striking from the southwest while Edelgard and her classmates had swept across the field from the north.

“Edelgard,” Dimitri asked her, “any theories as to how Ferdinand might deploy your old class?”

“If he’s smart—and despite how he might come across, he _is—_ his first priority will be to wrest control of the ballista here,” she said, pointing to the hill in the center of the map. “Bernadetta will be his best option; if he can get her up there, he’ll control the battlefield.”

“Bernadetta? That one girl who never leaves her room?” Glenn inquired, seemingly surprised.

“She might not look it, but she’s the best archer in the Black Eagles.”

“Don’t underestimate Bernadetta,” Felix said, crossing his arms and glowering at the creature pretending to be his brother. “She’s quick and nimble; the other day she stole my sword right out of my hands. I can only imagine she was practicing how she can disarm her opponents in battle.”

Edelgard went through the rest of her theories regarding the Black Eagles’ deployment, watching Byleth move the tokens standing in for her old class around the map, and then moved on to the Golden Deer. “Knowing Claude, he won’t be rushing to seize control of the area; he’ll be hiding in the forested area, waiting for the Eagle and the Lion to tire each other out.”

“Ah, I see,” Byleth said, nodding. “That’s the Deer’s revenge for not being included in the battle’s name.”

“For that reason,” Edelgard said, suppressing a smile (she saw Dimitri trying to hold one back as well), “I think we should punish him for his hubris by dividing our forces.”

“Wait, hold on,” Dimitri said. “If we split up, we’ll be engaging with each class using only half of our forces.”

“I mean, yeah,” Sylvain said, “but facing them one after another means we’ll be fighting at least one class with half our strength anyway.”

“I think at our current strength, dividing our forces is risky,” Byleth said, shaking her head.

“No, I _insist_ it will work,” Edelgard said. It was the same strategy Byleth had suggested in her world—why was she rejecting it here and now? “It was the same stra—I… I mean… I read it in a book.”

Byleth blinked. “You’ll have to do better than that to convince me,” she said. “It just seems like an unnecessary risk.”

“And when have you not been one for unnecessary risks?” Edelgard asked, losing her patience—and only remembering once the words had left her mouth that this Byleth was a well-trained mercenary but not the virtuoso general she’d married. “I mean—Professor, listen. We’re plenty capable of holding our own against the other two classes together as a single unit, are we not? Splitting our class and fighting each house separately doesn’t change the ratio.”

“As long as we take care to divide our forces properly, it will work,” Dedue said, taking Edelgard’s side. “The Eagles and the Deer are fighting each other anyway. If we surround them in a pincer movement and corral them in the center, they will be forced to weaken each other while we pick apart their defenses.”

“Hmm…” Byleth nodded. She seemed a bit more convinced now.

“If we split up, I should be on whichever team heads down the west bridge,” Ashe said, “so you can get me onto that hill before Bernadetta.”

“Good idea, Ashe,” she said. “And Dimitri, if you’ve mastered flying by then, you and Ingrid can be our air support…”

Edelgard watched Byleth go to work. This late-night tryst in the library, when everyone else was supposed to be sleeping, reminded her of the war council sessions she’d had with the Black Eagles Strike Force. Except here, the future of Fódlan was not at stake, and there was no need for her to worry that anybody in this improvised war council might not live to see the day after the battle.

So why was she still worried?

While the strategy meeting dragged late into the evening, Edelgard found it harder and harder to stifle her yawns and keep her eyes open. Her eyelids felt like lead. She needed to talk to Mercedes about rescheduling her and Sylvain’s late-night magic lessons, since she could see him struggling not to yawn as well.

“Claude’s strategies are hard to predict,” she said when offered her opinion on the Deer’s potential tactics, “but that’s because he doesn’t rely on—” She held her hand up over her mouth, but couldn’t stop herself from yawning so hard her jaw hurt. “Excuse me. He doesn’t rely on tactics most people from Fódlan have seen. He prefers to borrow them from Almyra. Our worst-case scenario is if he comes to the battle on a wyvern.”

Sylvain nodded and hastily filled in while she stifled another yawn. “Right. I heard the Almyran elite soldiers have special archery techniques adapted for flying. The… Immortal Corps or something?”

“Yes, exactly,” Edelgard noted, surprised by his insight and knowledge. These past few days, between strategy meetings and lessons with Mercedes, he’d been showing that there was quite a lot more to himself than a simple louse. “If Claude’s been training to do that—”

The door to the library swung open; the rush of displaced air made all of the candles around the map dance and flicker. Byleth hastily swept all of the little tokens she’d been using aside and started folding up the map as Claude and the rest of the Golden Deer walked in.

He sniffled and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Dunno what it is, Hilda, but I’ve been sneezing like crazy these past few minutes—I guess this mountainous climate just doesn’t really agree with me…” He and the rest of his class stopped in their tracks as soon as they caught sight of the Blue Lions.

Dimitri stood up and tried to position himself in front of Byleth so that they wouldn’t catch sight of her stowing away the map. “Claude? What are you doing here at this hour?” he asked, trying to sound accusing.

In response, Claude offered to Dimitri a deep, mocking bow. “Why, Your Princeliness. I didn’t expect to run into you here. I could ask you the same thing.”

“Oh, I was just regaling the class with another one of my spooky ghost stories,” Mercedes chimed in, a bright and wide smile on her face.

“And what better place,” Annette added, “for spooky ghost stories than a spooky library?”

“Oh, neat,” Claude said. “Can we hear the story, too?”

“No,” Dedue said.

“Claude,” Lorenz sighed, exasperatedly pinching the bridge of his long, thin nose, “can you not go two minutes without becoming waylaid by some whimsical diversion?”

“Actually,” Byleth said, the map of Gronder Field safely folded and stowed in her bag, “Mercedes just finished her story, so we were about to leave.”

“I hadn’t noticed how late it’s gotten,” Edelgard added, pretending to look as though she hadn’t noticed how late it had gotten and hastily scooping up her bag. “Dimitri, we really should be going. We don’t want to get in trouble for staying here after hours!”

“Ah, that’s right,” Dimitri said, “it must be almost midnight. How foolish of us to lose track of time. Claude, you and your classmates might want to make yourselves scarce as well, lest Tomas find you…”

Claude offered him a roguish smile and a wink. “How about you guys keep us being here a secret… and we’ll keep you guys being here a secret? It’s only fair, right, Teach?” he asked Byleth.

“Either way,” Dedue said, “our business here is concluded. We will leave.”

They left. On her way out with the rest of her class, Edelgard passed by Claude and kept a wary hand on her satchel. Perhaps it had been him who’d somehow slipped her that letter the other night. He was, of course, nothing if not incredibly perceptive—surely he’d figured out that something was amiss with her, though even a mind with as unorthodox an imagination as his might struggle to reach the correct conclusion that she’d traveled through time. But why antagonize her? What was he planning?

She met his gaze and she saw nothing in his verdant eyes, not even suspicion.

* * *

The next morning, the Blue Lions and their professor convened in their classroom, outwardly weary yet energized from last night’s mock war council. The air felt electrified, as though lightning had struck nearby. Ashe could hardly stay still in his seat, he was so excited. “I’d never imagined just how much fun planning for the Battle of the Eagle and Lion would be,” he said. “I knew it would be exciting but… it’s like I’m standing in the presence of Loog and Kyphon as they prepare for the _original_ battle. And between Edelgard, the professor, and Dedue, well…” His grin widened. “Loog and Kyphon accomplished so much with just _one_ Pan, and our classroom gets three! It’s silly, but… being in the same room as all of you, I really feel like I’m a part of history.”

Felix rolled his eyes. “Don’t get carried away. Does the word ‘mock battle’ mean anything to you?” Despite his harsh words, though, it seemed there was a faint smile struggling to make itself seen on his face.

“Pan? What does baking have to do with the War of the Eagle and Lion?” Byleth asked.

“Pan was a person, not a tool, professor,” Ingrid said, suppressing an amused smirk. “He was Loog and Kyphon’s adviser in the war. They say that every winning strategy Faerghus deployed was his brainchild.”

“His skills were beyond belief,” Ashe said, even further enthused. Byleth’s ignorance seemed to have delighted him. “Faerghus would have never been able to rebel against the Empire if not for him—uh, no offense, Edelgard.”

“None taken. It’s ancient history,” Edelgard said. What was past may have been prologue, but all the same, Ashe’s enthusiasm when he started talking about history and legend was infectious. He was a voracious reader and, generous to a fault, loved to share what he’d read with others.

“Huh. I’ve never heard of him,” Byleth said.

“I’m not surprised, Professor,” Dimitri said. “Few have, actually. The history books say very little about him.”

Edelgard had heard of him, of course—but she’d also heard a lot more about him than the rest of the few intrepid historians who’d ventured into that murky period of history had. In particular, in his research against Those Who Slither, her world’s Hubert had uncovered information suggesting that he had been allied with them, or had even been _one_ of them. He had proclaimed the theory plausible, but lacked enough supporting evidence to confidently claim it as a fact. (Of course, Edelgard had forbidden him from saying a word of it to her world’s Ashe, confirmed or not.)

“At the height of the war, rumor had it the resources he commanded made him the most powerful man in all of Fódlan,” Ashe continued. “Some said he could have taken the entire continent if he wished. But he never sought any sort of power for himself—that’s why they called him the Undesiring Strategist.”

“He dedicated everything to Loog,” Ingrid added, her voice tinged with awe. “The perfect image of a knight, with no greater ambition than to serve his lord. He was so unconcerned about taking any sort of land or power for himself that he barely left a mark on history at all. He did his duty to his king and wanted nothing more.”

“That sounds like a lonely existence,” Edelgard said, finding herself thinking of Hubert… and of Dimitri, who had no dreams but to be a sword for another to wield. And Ingrid, who fancied herself a knight… “Is it truly virtuous to live out someone else’s life and ambitions instead of your own?” Perhaps Pan had been an obedient sword for Those Who Slither, she wondered, just like Dimitri.

“Maybe he and Loog were secret lovers,” Byleth said.

Utter silence descended upon the class. Nothing save for a stray cough from Mercedes and the muffled sound of a few wisps of birdsong through the window broke the silence.

“It’s… possible,” Dimitri conceded. “But Professor, why are you constantly theorizing that great duos in history were romantically entangled? Emperor Wilhelm and Saint Seiros, Blaiddyd and, uh… F-Fraldarius…”

Byleth shrugged.

“Anyway,” Ashe concluded, “after the war, he just seemed to vanish. Where he came from, where he went, how his plans led to our kingdom’s independence… those are some of history’s biggest mysteries.”

“And you think I remind you of him?” Dedue spoke up.

“It’s flattering,” Edelgard said, “but I don’t think the moniker ‘Undesiring Strategist’ particularly suits me.”

“I guess lots of people call me a mystery,” Byleth said, more accepting of the comparison.

“Well…” Ashe scratched his cheek thoughtfully. “I’m just entertaining the idea… right here in this class, we have the descendants of Loog and Kyphon working together to achieve victory in a reenactment of one of the war’s greatest battles. Wouldn’t it be amazing if one of Pan’s descendants was among us as well? It could easily be you, Dedue. Or you, Professor.”

Dedue shook his head. “Your history books would have mentioned if Pan was of Duscur. Our complexion is not so easily ignored.”

Glenn laughed. “They hardly mention that he existed at all. Surely they could ignore his complexion, my enormous friend.”

“Or even you, Edelgard,” Ashe added. “Sure, you’re a Hresvelg on your father’s side, but who knows what you’ll find if you follow your mother’s lineage back far enough?”

Dimitri laughed. “It is possible, Ashe, but I think you are overlooking someone.”

“You think so, Your Highness? Who?”

“For all we know, Pan may have settled down with a commoner family so as not to attract attention to himself. Perhaps one with the surname ‘Ubert’…”

Ashe’s milky white cheeks turned an almost cherry shade of red, his freckles vanishing. “I’m… Y-You think I… Y-Your Highness, there’s no need to flatter me like that…” he sputtered, vehemently shaking his head. “I’m nothing special…”

“Well, who says you have to be someone special just because you’re descended from a great man?” Annette asked. “Plenty of kids and grandkids of legendary people end up totally ordinary. They can’t _all_ be legends. Otherwise, there’d be too many legends!”

“Yeah,” Sylvain said, “and if all of us had to live up to the legacies of our ancestors, then Edelgard here had better get started on uniting Fódlan under the Empire again! And Dimitri, you’d better start fighting back for our kingdom’s independence!”

There was a chorus of laughter that Edelgard (as well as Dimitri) did not take part in. She crossed her arms, unamused and disconcerted. There it was again—more evidence that perhaps Sylvain knew more than he was letting on. Had he passed onto her that cryptic note? Was he a time traveler from her world, too? Or was she merely jumping at shadows?

Ashe wasn’t laughing, either. His boot pawed at the ground like a nervous colt’s hoof. “Guys, I… No need to take it so far—it was just a funny little thought I had. Forget about it.”

“I’m sorry,” Mercedes said, patting him on the shoulder. “We didn’t mean it as a joke. I think there’s something beautiful about it. Imagine Pan’s descendant, drawn to study his ancestor and follow in his footsteps as if by fate!”

“So, when do we want to have our next strategy meeting, Professor?” Dimitri asked Byleth. “And where? Dedue and I fear that if we try to use the library again, someone may try to eavesdrop.”

Byleth had scarcely opened her mouth before the doors to the classroom swung open and Lady Catherine of the Knights of Seiros strode through.

Edelgard would not say that she _hated_ Catherine, but she would readily admit that on a personal level and not a tactical one, she thought very little of Catherine.

Catherine was strong, her body ruthlessly honed into a living weapon from years of relentless training. She was beautiful, with a sun-kissed tawny complexion, an effortlessly-tousled short mop of feathery, sandy blonde hair, and battle scars that somehow only made her look _more_ handsome. She was renowned for her bravery and heroism, and feared above all on the battlefield for wielding the legendary Hero’s Relic Thunderbrand, which had six prongs sprouting from the sides of its blade to give it a wicked silhouette. She was a force to be reckoned with, and only a fool would deny that.

But despite all those rather admirable qualities, Catherine was also hopelessly pigheaded and utterly, completely, mindlessly obedient to Archbishop Rhea. By her own admission, Catherine would gladly kill children if Rhea commanded it. Such an attitude disgusted Edelgard. All that beauty, grace, and power wasted on a woman so weak-willed that on the last day of the war she had even gone so far as to set fire to Fhirdiad on Rhea’s orders. There was a point at which loyalty turned from a virtue to a vice, and Catherine was far, far, _far_ beyond that point. Edelgard had nothing to say to her. They were in every way natural enemies.

“There you are, Professor,” Catherine said, zeroing in on Byleth. She was dressed in her full plate armor, her boots making heavy thuds against the stone floor as she strode up to her. “I have a request for you. It has to do with that plot to assassinate Lady Rhea from a few months ago.”

“Huh.” Byleth put a hand to her chin, as she always did when she was thinking. “The Western Church was involved in that, right?”

“Yes, and we’ve just discovered that the plot went all the way up to its bishop. Enough is enough, Lady Rhea says, so now the Knights of Seiros have been tasked with putting him down. I thought you and your students could come with us.”

The mirth had vanished from the room. Everybody was staring up at Catherine from their seats with stony expressions. Edelgard felt disgusted. As enjoyable as her time in school had been, she hadn’t been keen on reliving this part of her education—getting a firsthand glimpse of what happened to those who defied the Immaculate One’s subtle tyranny. Archbishop Rhea may have put on a kind and caring exterior, but the manner in which she indoctrinated the nobility—forcing the children of the aristocracy, the future leaders of Fódlan, to carry out her judgments against nonbelievers—demonstrated the rot in her heart.

“Why do you want us to help?” Byleth asked Catherine.

“Why else? You wield the Sword of the Creator,” Catherine responded. “Lady Rhea is going to personally execute the bishop, and I’ve been appointed as her guard. I want your help protecting her.”

“And the students?”

“It’s educational.”

“You don’t think you can do it on your own, Lady Catherine?” Dimitri asked.

Catherine smiled. “It never hurts to bring backup, Your Highness,” she told him. “So, what do you say, Professor? Will you come along?”

Byleth frowned, pondering the question.

“It’ll give us a good opportunity to practice what we’re learning for Gronder Field,” Sylvain offered, “since it’s just gonna be our class.”

“Good point.” Byleth looked to Ashe. “Ashe, will you be okay with this?”

Catherine found her gaze drawing her to him as well. Ashe was deep in thought, his eyes downcast and focused on the floor. “I think you should stay behind, Ashe,” she said. “This isn’t a place for personal feelings—”

“I can do it,” Ashe answered sharply, his head jerking up so he could look her in the eyes. The hard edge to his gaze didn’t suit him, but Edelgard understood it. Catherine had turned his adoptive brother Christophe over to the Knights of Seiros to be executed and had suppressed Lonato’s rebellion. He had lost two families in his life, and Catherine had been responsible for taking one of them. “I have to know why they took advantage of Lonato like that.”

Catherine shook her head. “This is about punishing the wicked, not investigating their misdeeds. If you bring that kind of attitude with you, you’ll jeopardize the mission.”

“I won’t get in the way,” Ashe insisted, standing up from his seat. He swallowed a lump in his throat. “I promise.”

Catherine raised her eyebrows. “Alright. I’ll give you some time to prepare, Professor, but Lady Rhea and I are hoping to set out at noon today.”

With that, she strode out of the classroom, leaving a gloomy and dour mood in her wake.

“Okay,” Byleth said, “everyone, go get ready to leave. We’ll meet up at the monastery gates with Lady Catherine and Archbishop Rhea. Um… and I guess you should all be on your best behavior, too. Because of Lady Rhea. Anyway, class dismissed.”

Everyone got up and began heading for the doors. Dimitri headed straight for Ashe. “Excuse me—Ashe, I’d like to have a word with you,” he said as Ashe whirled around to face him, surprised. “I just want to make sure you are—”

Glenn grabbed him. “Um, hey, Dimi, that reminds me—we need to talk, too.”

“Can it wait a few minutes?” Dimitri asked, letting loose an uneasy chuckle. “Ashe and I—”

“It’s fine,” Ashe said, holding his books close to his chest. “We can talk later, Your Highness.”

With a smile, Glenn dragged Dimitri off and they left with the rest of the class. Edelgard followed behind.

“Wait, Edelgard,” Byleth called out to her. “Can I talk to you for a moment?”

She stopped dead in her tracks and turned to face her professor. “Yes, of course, Professor. What is it?”

Byleth waited for the other students to leave, then shut the doors. “I need to talk to you about last night. In general, you’ve been making good progress with your physical training, and you bring up a lot of good ideas in my lectures, but I’m worried you’re developing a… a bit of an ego.”

Edelgard’s first, instinctual inclination was to bristle at the accusation—from Byleth, of all people—but she tempered her reaction. “I… certainly don’t mean to appear that way, Professor.”

“What I mean is that when you have an idea, you can’t expect me to go for it just because it’s _you_ suggesting it. You still have to prove to me that it’s a good idea. Especially some of the… weirder ones you come up with in class.”

 _But those were_ your _ideas,_ Edelgard wanted to say, though of course she couldn’t. She felt so foolish. Here, Byleth was her _teacher,_ not her wife. The battles they’d fought together, the trials they’d faced, the moments they’d bared their souls to each other hadn’t happened. Edelgard wasn’t even a crown princess or an emperor—she was just a girl.

And that was all this world’s Byleth saw.

Just a _girl._ Nothing special. Nothing eye-catching. Nothing to draw her toward her. Edelgard had always always loved her Byleth for treating her as though she were special—not because of her royal title, not because of the crown she eventually wore, not because of her Crest, but because she was _Edelgard,_ and _that_ was special enough—but this Byleth treated her like a promising student and nothing more. What was she doing wrong? Was this Byleth really so different?

“I’m sorry, Professor,” she said instead, putting on a contrite mask. “I’m not used to projecting such unfounded arrogance. I suppose your teaching has been so effective, it’s gone straight to my head.”

There was a little smile on Byleth’s face. Just a little one. “I guess that’s a compliment.”

“I’ll take care to be more humble from now on,” Edelgard told her. “Thank you for talking to me about this.”

“It’s just my job,” Byleth said with a shrug.

“Oh—that reminds me,” Edelgard said, only just now recalling the little trinket she’d picked up in town the other week. She rummaged through her bag. “I… I found something for you in town the other day. I hope you’ll appreciate it.” She knew Byleth wouldn’t just appreciate it—she’d _love_ it. She’d gotten the very same thing for her as a gift in her own world—a silver brooch, on which was painted with black enamel the Adrestian emblem of the double-headed eagle—and when she’d seen it in one of the shops, her heart had nearly shot out of her chest. What better symbol was there for the trust she had in Byleth?

She gave Byleth the brooch. Byleth took it, her lips gently pursing and brow faintly furrowing. “It’s nice,” she said rather flatly, putting it in her pocket. “Thank you, Edelgard.”

“It’s nothing,” Edelgard said, just a little unsettled by the flat reaction. “You’re welcome. It’s a symbol that means a lot to me—the Adrestian seal—so…”

“I really appreciate it.”

They were silent for a while. What she’d expected to see in Byleth’s beautiful blue eyes wasn’t there.

Byleth cleared her throat. “Well, we should be going now.”

“I suppose so,” Edelgard said. Though Byleth was standing barely a foot away from her, she hadn’t felt so alone in over ten years.

Byleth headed out, and Edelgard stayed behind for a bit to collect herself before leaving the now-empty room.

On her way out, she caught sight of the top of Dimitri’s snow-white head bobbing gently above the tall hedges of the courtyard. He was talking to someone. Glenn, perhaps? Or maybe he’d moved on to Ashe?

Edelgard crept closer. The hedge was thick enough that she couldn’t see through it, but when she was right up against it, she could hear Glenn’s voice.

 _“All I’m saying, Your Highness,”_ he said, the royal epithet dripping with half-restrained mockery, _“is that you’ve been spending too much time with…”_

 _“With whom? My classmates? My professor? I_ am _a student here, am I not?”_ Dimitri retorted.

_“With people who may not stand with you when the time comes.”_

_“I trust Dedue to vouch for them. Have you forgotten that the Men in Black taught him everything he knows?”_

_“To err is… human. Be careful who you trust, Dimi. Remember who saved you from the Knights of Seiros.”_

_“I can never forget. But even so, I am the head of my class. I cannot simply distance myself from my peers.”_

_“Father doesn’t want his future king to be so eager to bare his soul. Especially not around Princess E—”_

The bush convulsed violently, startling Edelgard and throwing her to the ground; she could only hope the sound of the bush’s rustling had masked the dull thump of her backside hitting the grass. Dimitri must have thrown Glenn against the bush.

 _“You stay away from Edelgard,”_ Dimitri hissed.

 _“Look at—the facts—Dimitri—”_ Glenn gurgled, every syllable lurching its way through a crushed throat as Dimitri pressed him into the hedge. _“Her friends all say—her personality completely changed—right—before we took Flayn… And then—she joins_ your _class? How do you know—she isn’t a changeling, just—like—me? How—do you know—_ Rhea _didn’t install her in your class?”_

Edelgard’s heart skipped a beat. Dimitri wouldn’t believe she was a spy for the Church of Seiros, would he?

Glenn’s gurgling grew more strained and less coherent as Dimitri’s iron grip around his throat tightened. _“You—can’t—Your Highness—Remember who—your—allies…”_

The hedge rustled again and there was a loud thump as Glenn fell to the ground, coughing and hacking as he struggled to suck lungfuls of air down his bruised, crushed throat.

 _“I will keep your words in mind, Glenn,”_ Dimitri said icily, _“but don’t tell me who I can and cannot speak to again.”_

_“Yes… Your Highness.”_

Dimitri’s muffled footsteps traced a path along the hedge, and Edelgard darted away as quickly and as silently as she could before he had a chance to turn the corner and spot her.

She felt tense, butterflies fluttering in her stomach and her mind racing, as she went to her room and packed up her clothes, bedroll, and other supplies for the trip. The Brionnac Plateau was just a little farther from Garreg Mach than Arianrhod, so the journey would likely be about six days there and back, not counting however long it took to bring down the bishop. As she packed, she thought about what she could do to make absolutely sure she could distance herself from the Church of Seiros. Starting today, she’d have to avoid any sort of suspicious-looking interactions with any knights or people of the faith. That wouldn’t be too hard… it just meant she wouldn’t be joining Hubert in his early-morning prayer sessions at the cathedral… and perhaps she could drop some hints to Dedue, who certainly wouldn’t think less of her for speaking ill of a religion he didn’t follow…

Once she was packed, she headed out to join the rest of her class at the gates to the monastery. Catherine and Rhea, of course, were already waiting for her, and Byleth as well; the rest of the class trickled out of the monastery behind her. Rhea wore her ornate regalia, a flowing gown of almost opalescent white silk that clung to and draped itself over her tall and shapely body, a midnight-blue cape embroidered with ostentatious patterns of gold thread and tassels, and a magnificent gold headdress that crowned her head and guided the waterfalls of lush and shimmering mint-green hair that spilled down her back and shoulders. She and her entourage waited in front of a carriage almost as resplendent and gilded as her clothes.

“Lady Rhea, Your Holiness,” Dimitri said, offering her a polite bow. “It is an honor to escort you.”

Rhea smiled. “I thank you for your willingness, Prince Dimitri.”

Edelgard studied the two of them as they interacted. If Dimitri was putting on a show for her, then should she bow, too? Or would that make him trust her less?

The rest of the class bowed to Rhea, and Edelgard, not wanting to make a fool out of herself by being left out, offered her a bow as well.

“Such pious students,” Rhea cooed, clasping her hands. “Professor, you seem to be doing an excellent job of guiding your flock. Now, all of you take to your mounts and let us depart. We shall not waste a moment.”

Edelgard headed to the armory to procure some light armor and a sword (she still felt a little too shaky with an axe to trust her skills in a life-or-death scenario) and went to the stables to rent out a horse for the journey, but Rhea stopped her and called her away.

“Excuse me,” the archbishop said, a false little smile plastered on her face, “Princess Edelgard von Hresvelg? Would you care to ride in the carriage with me?”

Edelgard’s eyes darted toward Dimitri. He was watching her. “Oh, um… L-Lady Rhea, I don’t think I’m worthy of such an honor…”

“Nonsense,” Rhea said. “For one thousand years, the children of Hresvelg have a special connection to Saint Seiros herself. And I have something I dearly wish to discuss with you.” She offered Edelgard her hand. “Come, my child.”

“Lady Rhea,” Catherine interjected, “I thought you wanted me to ride in the carriage with you—”

“I would like you to drive the carriage up front with Professor Byleth,” Rhea told her. “I have been meaning to talk to this one for quite some time,” she said, and she seemed to be gazing almost _hungrily_ at Edelgard.

Edelgard took a deep breath and spared another glance at Dimitri. He wasn’t staring at her anymore, instead checking his equipment for the umpteenth time. “I suppose I cannot refuse such a generous offer from Her Holiness herself,” she sighed, and despite the hammering of her heart against her ribs, she followed Rhea into the carriage, knowing there was a distinct possibility she might not make it out.

* * *

The archbishop’s carriage and the convoy of students circling it set out at noon for the Brionnac Plateau, traveling westward down the path that cut gentle slopes through the Oghma Mountains. Edelgard found herself watching the scenery drift by—anything to avoid the elephant in the room, or rather, the thousand-year-old dragon in the room.

Finally, Rhea made the prospect of avoiding her unattainable.

“Princess Edelgard, I heard,” Rhea said, idly staring out the carriage’s window with a faraway look in her eyes, “that you received a revelation from the Goddess a few weeks ago.”

“Yes,” Edelgard lied. “Yes, Lady Rhea, I did.”

“Normally, I would discount such claims. You would not believe how many students in this academy’s long history have claimed to have received visions from the Goddess or the saints in order to get out of class for the day or make themselves into minor celebrities among their peers. I have been disappointed by such frauds on many occasions. But you… your experience allowed you to help Seteth find his sister, and that is something no mere charlatan could have done—unless you were in a conspiracy with her abductors…”

Edelgard kept her face blank as her stomach lurched to and fro. Rhea’s words had the cadence of a stormy ocean—intermittent stretches of peace in between the rough, choppy waves. Which of those waves would condemn her ship to the ocean’s depths?

“And you have one thing those immature, blasphemous students did not,” Rhea said. “I have been watching you carefully, Princess Edelgard. When you experienced your revelation, you completely and utterly changed. You ceased spending time with your old friends. You devoted yourself wholly to your studies. You became stronger.” Her eyes left the window and met Edelgard’s. “Saint Seiros was anointed by the Goddess, and Seiros bequeathed her Crest to Emperor Wilhelm. In a way, then, I suppose it is only natural that a scion of Hresvelg would be so blessed.”

Edelgard had never felt more transparent in her life. For an instant, it felt as though all her schemes and plots, her heretical thoughts and seditious plans, the history of the future she had wrought, had become nakedly visible to Rhea.

“People emit a certain… energy, Edelgard,” Rhea went on. “May I simply call you Edelgard? I do not wish to cause you discomfort.”

Edelgard, who’d been so far resisting the urge to squirm uncomfortably in her seat for nearly an hour now, nodded.

“People emit energy, Edelgard, that only those exceptionally trained in the holy arts may see. When you came to Garreg Mach, that energy was undisciplined and unfocused; it radiated from you in all directions. But now I see it focused, collected, tamed into something strong and purposeful. And it happened in the span of a day.”

“Is that so,” Edelgard said, completely and utterly noncommittal. Did Rhea suspect that she’d been replaced? Was she luring her into a trap? Had _Rhea_ of all people left that cryptic message for her? As amusing as it was to think of the archbishop herself doing something so petty as to hide a note in her bag, the prospect only filled her with dread.

“It is so. It is said that when Saint Seiros received her revelation from the Goddess, a similar transformation took place.” A wistful smile tugged at the corners of Rhea’s mouth. “Her doubt and fears vanished, and it was then that she found within herself the strength to lead the people of Fódlan and the Ten Elites against the Nemesis. So please,” she said, reaching out and taking Edelgard’s hand, “tell me… what did the Goddess show you, Princess Edelgard?”

Edelgard wanted to recoil. She wanted to slip her hand out of Rhea’s grasp, but—

It was _warm,_ she realized, so warm it was almost _hot,_ and softer than she’d imagined. And _firm._

“There is no need to be afraid,” Rhea told her, her voice low and soft. “You may speak freely to me here. Please, to hear from the Goddess is such a rare thing. May I please live vicariously through your experience?”

Edelgard felt a lump grow in her throat. It was going to be a long ride to the Brionnac Plateau, and this carriage would not be stopping during the journey until nightfall at the very least. Until then, she was trapped in here with Rhea.

“Um… excuse me, Your Holiness,” she said—the words felt like broken glass on her tongue—“but… does the Goddess really speak to you so infrequently?”

There was a sad, wet shimmer in Rhea’s eyes for a second. They sparkled like freshly-polished emeralds. “Oh. I see,” she said, letting her soft hands slip away and return to her lap. “Perhaps I gave you the wrong impression. The Goddess works through me; I am blessed with being the instrument of her will. But I wish to know what it is like to see her, to hear her, to _know_ her, from a more… grounded perspective than my… lofty position.”

“I don’t know if I remember much of the vision,” Edelgard said. She had to play along, she realized. Surely Rhea was trying to catch her in a lie, something that would expose her duplicity—and perhaps everything else. If Rhea knew about Those Who Slither, then perhaps she even suspected that Edelgard was among them. “The Goddess showed me the catacombs, where Flayn was… other than that, it was overwhelming. So much light and noise that I… lost sense of myself.”

“But the Goddess did speak to you. And did she not appear to you as well?”

“Pardon me, Archbishop, but it can’t have been so long since the Goddess spoke to you.”

Rhea shook her head. “You have much to learn of faith, my child. She speaks to me in more subtle ways. But do tell me of her voice, of her face. Please.”

“She was beautiful,” Edelgard said. “Like… sunlight in human form. Her voice was… soft? Yet strong. She spoke kindly and yet with authority.”

“The tone,” Rhea said to her, leaning forward. “The timbre.”

“Like yours. Low… cold, yet somehow warm.” The Goddess had never spoken to her, not once, and she hadn’t spoken to her in turn since she had been twelve. But she could easily lie.

“I suppose that makes sense.” Rhea seemed disappointed by her answer, though. “Forgive my indulgence, my child. I am, of course, quite interested in those who seem… touched by the Goddess’ hand.” She glanced out the window again, and Edelgard could tell that her thoughts had turned to Byleth.

Byleth, the woman with a stone in her heart. Byleth, the woman whose hair would turn such a bright mint-green it was nearly luminous, just like Rhea’s, and whose eyes would turn a shining emerald, just like Rhea’s. Byleth, the woman meant by Rhea to be a vessel for the Goddess. A hot, possessive flash of anger crawled through Edelgard; she had to set her jaw and bite her tongue to keep it from spilling out.

Edelgard found that Rhea’s hand had slithered out of her lap and rested itself on her knee. “And her face,” Rhea added, an almost pleading look in her eyes. What could the point of this charade possibly be? “Tell me of her face.”

“She looked like you. She had hair like fresh mint leaves, so bright and lustrous it was almost luminous, and eyes like freshly polished emeralds.”

“I see. So you are saying the Goddess looked like me?” Rhea said with a little smile and a hint of a twinkle in her eyes.

“Are you flattered, Your Holiness?”

“Why, yes, certainly, I am.” She looked again out the window. “Do you think that the Goddess would take a different form for all who see her?”

“I cannot see why she wouldn’t.”

“Hmm. And she takes my form to appear before you. I suppose there is no greater honor. Thank you for enlightening me, Edelgard. Oh, and… may we speak together more in the future? Over tea, perhaps? I find you quite fascinating, my child…”

The carriage rode by in silence for a while after that, occasionally passing a bump in the road that rattled its frame. Rhea seemed satisfied by Edelgard’s answers, much to Edelgard’s relief. She couldn’t believe she’d convinced the supreme head of the church that she’d had a genuine encounter with the divine. But how was she going to convince Rhea to leave her alone from now on?

The rest of the way to the campsite where the class was to rest for the night passed by with Rhea making a few awkward attempts at small talk. Edelgard had never been more glad to leave a carriage than when the convoy came to a stop at Remire’s nearby inn for the night.

_Remire._

What, Edelgard wondered as she laid awake in her bed in the town’s homely little inn, was Solon doing here? Were his plans in motion even now?

* * *

The battle against the Bishop of the Western Church on the Brionnac Plateau days later was fierce and frantic; the fog enveloping the plateau, like the mist that had enshrouded Magdred Way where Lonato had made his last stand, made it nearly impossible to discern friend from foe. Edelgard kept a flame in her palm to banish the mist with light, but even so, the thick, heavy air around her was oppressive and opaque. The blazing lights from three Heroes’ Relics—Byleth’s Sword of the Creator, Catherine’s Thunderbrand, and Sylvain’s Lance of Ruin—occasionally cut through the gray, their fiery silhouettes muted and muddled. As the fighting dragged on through the day, though, and the bishop’s forces slowly diminished, the fog thinned, though the battle was no less chaotic.

Edelgard may have lost much of her strength and coordination when she’d come to this world, but her mind was no less sharp, and while she didn’t quite command the same authority in this world as she’d gotten used to, the Blue Lions had begun to know her well enough to follow her lead in battle. While Catherine and Byleth hung back to guard Rhea (what a charade, Edelgard thought—she knew full well from crossing blades with that woman that she needed no such protection), she and Dimitri led the rest of the class and swept through the area, rooting out the rogue priests and knights from the copses and thickets that dotted the plateau.

She was the first to come face-to-face with the bishop, an old yet spry man whose white vestments and armor were already stained and spattered with mud and blood. Fury twisted his face—a self-righteous, self-assured fury Edelgard knew all too well. With a wave of his hand, he summoned tendrils of white light and threw them toward her, compelling them to snake through the air in long, shimmering arcs. _“Apostates will suffer the punishment of the Goddess!”_ he howled, his voice echoing across the grassy plain.

Edelgard zigzagged across the field to avoid his attack as she bore down on him, the tendrils of white light striking the ground behind her and leaving scorch marks on the dewy grass. The sharp, metallic scent of burnt air hung in the wake of the bishop’s volley. She felt a wry smile play on her lips. Being called an apostate was well-trod territory to her and didn’t have the sting of an insult he’d probably expected. As she closed the distance between him and herself, she conjured a fireball and lobbed it at him; he deflected it with a burst of white light and an arrogant smirk on his face, amused that a child would trifle him with such a weak and simple spell.

The distraction worked perfectly. By the time she’d closed in and drawn her sword, he was already primed to treat her like an unskilled little girl. He barely dodged her strike by the skin of her teeth; her sword cut a red ribbon through his white vestments and forced him to retreat, his ornate stole and chasuble fluttering in the gust of wind that blew in the wake of her blade.

With an enraged grunt, and one reddening hand plastered to the wound he’d suffered, the bishop cast another spell; more motes of light spilled from his outstretched hand. Edelgard was less successful at dodging these, as he’d cast the spell at nearly point-blank range—and when the motes of light set upon her, she felt the life drain from her body. It suddenly felt as though she’d just finished running five miles in heavy armor: in an instant she was exhausted, panting for breath, hardly able to keep her legs from crumpling beneath her weight. The motes of light flowed back to the bishop and sank through his clothes, revitalizing him, softening the bruises on his face and slowing the ribbons of blood seeping into his vestments to a trickle. His confident smirk returned.

Edelgard hated those kinds of spells.

Someone less experienced might have beaten a hasty retreat right there, but Edelgard knew better. However far she could run, she’d still be well within the bishop’s range, and besides, putting her back to him would be suicide. She would have to keep close and strike him down before he could finish her off.

Her next strike got him in the shoulder; blossoms of blood bloomed down his billowing white sleeve. His teeth were bared and lips curled back, grimacing like a cornered dog, as his now-useless left arm hung at his side. She’d effectively halved his spellcasting ability, unless he could drain more of her life out of her to repair the severed muscle and tendons in his arm.

She stumbled. She’d have to finish this quickly. The bishop waved his remaining arm, preparing a globe of blue-white light, but suddenly jerked to the side and let his shot fly wild. An arrow had struck him in his side, the impact forcing him to jerk backward and pivot at the last second. The fog around the light evaporated as it shot off into the air.

 _“You!”_ Ashe cried out, charging forward on his horse and swapping his bow for a lance as his steed closed in on the bishop. “Lonato’s blood is on your hands…” His voice was trembling, equal parts aggrieved and enraged.

The bishop beat a hasty retreat, narrowly avoiding a stab of Ashe’s lance. “Huh? Were you Lord Lonato’s page or something?” he sneered.

Ashe winced as though struck, but didn’t allow himself to be goaded. While the bishop fled to the nearest copse—he wouldn’t be able to gain much distance on foot that couldn’t easily be closed on horseback—he offered Edelgard his hand and pulled her onto his horse. “Are you alright, Your Highness?”

“Fine,” she said, “but a little drained. Thank you. Now hurry—before he reaches that copse.”

With a snap of his reins, Ashe spurred his steed onward, swiftly closing the gap between him and the bishop. The copse loomed ahead. He circled around the bishop, cutting off his escape route. “You took advantage of his faith and grief—how could you?”

“Indeed,” the bishop taunted him, “he was a devout believer. But to say we took advantage of him? All we did was provide him salvation from his misery!”

 _“Salvation?!”_ Ashe’s voice was reduced to a snarl now. It was rare to see him so _angry._ “You used him and threw him away!”

“Anything to rid Fódlan of that witch!”

Ashe’s lance found its mark, its steel blade burying itself in the bishop’s side. Near death, the bishop cast one last spell and swept he horse’s legs out from under it—Edelgard and Ashe were thrown to the ground as the mount let out a deafening and agonized scream. Edelgard felt the world whirl around her in a dizzying maelstrom before she felt her spine crack against the ground. She tasted blood. Ashe fared worse; as she came to her senses, she saw that he’d fallen under his horse’s side. Blood stained his silvery gray hair and clung to his pale skin.

“Regardless of my doing, Lord Lonato fought for the Goddess he believed in,” the bishop told Ashe, his voice a bitter hiss, spitting wads of blood from his mouth as he propped himself up. He was preparing to cast another life-draining spell—he’d need to drain both Edelgard and Ashe of everything they had left to restore his broken body. “Had he been stronger, he would have lived.”

With the last of her strength, Edelgard readied a fireball. If her aim was true, if she could strike him in the chest…

Motes of light lanced out from the bishop’s outstretched, grasping hand—and froze in midair. Edelgard saw the tongues of flames coalescing in her own palm come to a complete stop. She couldn’t feel her pulse. She couldn’t even turn her head or move her eyes.

In fact, nothing in the world was moving. Not a single blade of grass, not a single dry, dying leaf on a single branch of a single tree. The world was frozen solid. The triumphant, yet pained grin on the bishop’s face was as immutable as a statue’s; the melange of despair and pain on Ashe’s face and the tears rolling down his cheeks were as well. His horse’s thrashing legs stuck up at odd angles like the branches of a felled, dead tree.

Nothing was moving except for one thing. In the distance, Byleth was emerging from the fog, the Sword of the Creator alight in her hand, and while she herself was frozen (with shock and horror etched permanently onto her face), the green-haired young girl floating at her side was quite animated.

The green-haired girl. Floating at her side. _Floating._

She couldn’t have been more than twelve or so. She wore flowing midnight-blue and gold regalia, with red and white ribbons braided into a cascade of forest-green hair that made her resemble less a person and more a pine tree dressed up for the winter solstice. Her gown, ribbons, and hair swayed from a nonexistent wind.

“Oh, dear,” the little girl said, putting her hands on her hips. “How far back do you think I need to take you to undo _this,_ I wonder?”

The entire world seemed to lurch away from Edelgard. A thousand distinct images flashed before her mind’s eye in an instant, a thousand worlds, a thousand futures, all blurred into a single gestalt before her, every possibility compressed into a single dull roar of sound and color.

She felt every part of her body, inside and out, burst into flames at once, and a blinding expanse of light erased everything around her.

And suddenly, she found herself staring at herself in a mirror. Her face stared back at her. Not the younger face she wore now, the face framed by light chestnut locks, but rather the one she knew—older, harder, firmer, stronger, battle-scarred. Her silvery-white hair was tied back into two tight, severe buns that accentuated the curved horns of her imperial crown. She wore a red dress with a high collar and arm-length gloves to obscure every last one of the scars that riddled her body; a flowing cape, bright scarlet with a pristine white lining, draped itself over her shoulders.

The look she wore in the mirror, though, was suspiciously and strikingly incongruous with the face she knew. Her eyes were wide and darting nervously to and fro; her teeth chewed compulsively on her bottom lip, kneading the soft pink flesh. In her lap, her gloved hands wrung themselves worryingly.

“D-Do I have to do this?” the other Edelgard stammered, a nervous and lopsided fear-smile twisting the corners of her lips upward.

“It won’t be so bad, Edie,” Dorothea assured her, draping herself over her shoulder. Her long, wavy hair, a deep, dark oaken color, spilled over the both of them. “You just have to make the Emperor’s speeches until we can get you back home.”

“But I can’t—There’s no way I can stand up in front of every noble in Fódlan and read _this!”_ she said, tapping on a few sheets of paper laid out on the desk in front of her.

“Sure you can.”

“They’ll know I’m a fake!”

“That speech is airtight, Edie. Between Ferdie and Bernie, we’ve got your policies and your manner of speaking down perfectly.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake. Now in addition to doing her job for her, her friends had to _speak_ for her, too?

“Let’s go through it from the top,” Dorothea said, picking up the sheets of paper and pressing them into Edelgard’s hands.

“I can’t—”

“Just give it a try,” she said, and her smile could have melted glaciers. “I’m here with you, Edie. So if you embarrass yourself, I’m the only one who’ll see it.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” The other Edelgard took a deep breath and looked down at the speech. Edelgard skimmed it and was amazed. It really did feel like _she’d_ written it. If Ferdinand ever had to take power for himself, whether because Edelgard decided to retire or passed away, all he had to do was find a body double and it could take years before anyone noticed anything was amiss—a thought equal parts heartwarming and frightening.

“My fellow citizens of the United Adrestian Empire,” she read, “today I am proud to announce that the trial implementation of the Public Imperial Educational Standard across Fódlan has begun. The Public Imperial Educational Standard, or PIES—”

Dorothea clapped both of her hands over her mouth and snorted into them. “O—Oh, Goddess, I’m sorry. Sorry. I’m going to have to talk with Ferdie about changing that. Go on.”

She would, indeed, Edelgard thought. She couldn’t allow such a monumental reform to go by such a ridiculous acronym.

The other Edelgard cleared her throat and continued. “The Public Imperial Educational Standard, or PIES, will perform a crucial role in applying the high literacy rates among commoners enjoyed by the people of the former Leicester Alliance across former Faerghus and Adrestian territory as well. This will also ensure that children and adults of all backgrounds also receive basic instruction in mathematics, civics, and history.”

Edelgard realized with mounting horror that this was her first State of the Empire address since the end of the war—and she wouldn’t even be around to give it.

“Why, some among you may ask, is this such an important initiative? What is the point of teaching commoners to read? To answer your questions, I implore you to look to the former Leicester Alliance. With its public schoolhouses, many of its commoners were able to rise through society and become successful merchants and business-owners nearly on equal terms with the nobility, enjoying upward mobility on a scale unprecedented in all of Fódlan. Until recently, we the people of Fódlan were a divided and weakened people, each of our nations hoarding their talents for themselves—pause for effect—but now we are united under one banner, no longer stingy, self-interested neighbors but a single family of eagles, lions, and deer, and we must share our methods for a healthy society among ourselves as a family would.”

“Don’t say the ‘pause for effect’ part,” Dorothea said.

“Right. Sorry,” the other Edelgard said. “Some of you may be concerned as to how so many schoolhouses can be built across Fódlan within the next year, and how we can produce enough of a volume of consistent, standardized educational materials to meet the system’s demand. Without dipping too deeply into your coffers, of course. The answer lies in the revolutionary movable type printing press our scientists have recently invented. Take a look at the pamphlets under each of your chairs. You will notice the exceptional print quality—and compare them with your neighbors’ and see how consistent they are. Movable type will make books, pamphlets, and other forms of the written word easier to mass-produce than ever before. In the future, such technology will allow for news to travel quickly across all of Fódlan, allowing everybody, even commoners, to be informed of the affairs of not only their towns but also nearby cities, their neighboring counties, and even the entire empire.”

There were a few things Edelgard would have removed—turns of phrases she would rather not use, and perhaps a few details here and there the nobles didn’t have to know about for now—but overall, she was rather pleased with the contents of the speech. If only she could _tell_ Ferdinand what she wanted revised!

“Perhaps,” the other Edelgard kept reading, “the prospect of commoners knowing what is going on in your counties and dukedoms frightens you just a little. If that is the case, then I would happily set up a one-on-one meeting between you and our Minister of the Imperial Household, Hubert von Vestra, so that he may show you that there are far worse things to fear than an educated populace. Now, moving on to matters of inheritance reform—”

Hubert must have written that part. It was a little too self-indulgent. Hopefully Ferdinand would be able to persuade him to cut it out in the final draft.

“I think that’s a good stopping point for now,” Dorothea said, setting her hand atop Edelgard’s and guiding the pages back to the desk. “See? Not so bad, huh?”

The other Edelgard nodded, but Edelgard could feel the twisting knots of anxiety in her stomach.

“Now we just need to work on your presentation. Remember, for the more direct threats to your audience, you’ll need to deliver them in a lighter tone. Don’t try to be as dour as Hubie. Let them laugh it off.”

“Okay.”

“And we’ll need to work on your diction. Emperor Edelgard doesn’t give these speeches in a casual tone. She speaks seriously, powerfully. Let’s try it from the top. Seriously and powerfully.”

The other Edelgard nodded and picked up the speech again. “My fellow citizens of the United Adrestian Empire,” she read in a much deeper, lower, growlier voice—oh, dear Goddess, was she trying to sound like Hubert?

“Not like that,” Dorothea said, holding a hand to her mouth as though holding back vomit, although the twinkling in her beautiful green eyes suggested that she was actually trying not to bust a gut laughing. “Just talk… like yourself, but put more force behind it. Speak like you’re singing—from the diaphragm. Remember, you’ll need your voice to carry across the whole audience chamber. Every noble head in Fódlan has to hear you.”

“Please don’t remind me,” the other Edelgard mumbled. “So… how do I do that?”

“It’s a little unintuitive at first,” Dorothea told her, “but you get used to it quickly.” She rested her hand on Edelgard’s stomach. “Feel this, right here?”

Edelgard _could_ feel Dorothea’s hand against her stomach, and it felt _very_ good.

“That’s your diaphragm. It’s a muscle attached to the bottom of your ribcage. Now sit up straight, shoulders back, take a deep breath—as deep as you can—and focus on the rise and fall of your belly, not your chest.”

Edelgard inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly, repeating the exercise over and over again. To Edelgard, it felt as natural as—well, breathing. To the other Edelgard, though, it almost felt like exercise, and not a kind she was used to.

“There. That’s how opera singers breathe. That’s how Emperor Edelgard breathes. Now, breathing like this, let’s try the speech again.”

“My fellow citizens of the United Adrestian Empire,” the other Edelgard began, speaking more strongly now, projecting her voice, “today I am proud to announce that the trial implementation of the Public Imperial Educational Standard across Fódlan has begun…”

Edelgard felt almost proud of her other self. Maybe she could actually pull this off!

The other Edelgard got a little farther into the speech this time, accepting tips from Dorothea about when to use a lighter or more serious tone here and there. She still had to work on sounding confident, but she was making astounding progress under Dorothea’s tutelage. When she got into the next section on inheritance reform, though, she broke down.

“I can’t do this,” the other Edelgard blurted out, letting the pages fall from her hands and flutter like feathers to her feet. She shook her head. “I—I can’t—There’s no way I can read this in front of all those people…”

“Come on, you’re doing great, Edie,” Dorothea assured her, rubbing her shoulders. Edelgard could feel the other Edelgard’s emotions, though, the turmoil wracking her body—she was so nervous that she might vomit. “It’s okay. This is just your first practice run. You know how many times I need to practice an aria before I nail it?”

“I—I can’t, I _can’t—”_ Her vision was blurring, muddying, turning into runny watercolor whorls of scarlet and silver and gold and brown, and Edelgard could feel tears that weren’t hers streaming down her cheeks. “I—I can’t be Emperor Edelgard, I’m not supposed to be here, I’m not supposed to _be_ the emperor of _anything!”_

“There, there.” Dorothea wrapped her arms around her and drew her in close, resting her head on her shoulder; her fingers deftly snaked through Edelgard’s hair, softly, gently, and pried away her crown, loosening the curled buns holding her white hair in place. Her touch was warm, electric. “It’s okay. You’re doing great; we’re going to get through this, Edie.”

“I never wanted to be emperor,” the other Edelgard sobbed, eyes squeezed shut, voice muffled in Dorothea’s shoulder. “I never wanted to be _anything._ I can’t…”

“Shh. It’s okay, Edie. It’ll be alright. You can do this; _we_ can do this.”

“I can’t.” The other Edelgard shook her head. “I can’t be your Edelgard. She’s so… so strong, and so smart, and so brave, and so many other things that I could never be…”

“Edie. Look at me, Edie.” Dorothea gently guided her head off her shoulder, cupping her chin in her hand and lifting her eyes. With her sleeve, she dried her tears, bringing her vision back into focus. “There were so many things I didn’t think I could be before I met you… _our_ you. But if Edelgard believes one thing, truly and with all of her heart, it’s that _anyone can be anything._ It’s the reason behind everything she’s been doing—a world where everyone has an equal chance of rising to the top. When you have friends and mentors, people who can lift you up and bring out the best in you, a commoner whose only talent is singing and looking pretty can become one of the emperor’s most trusted friends.”

“You were good at a lot of other things besides singing and looking pretty,” the other Edelgard said, sniffling. She wiped her nose on her cape—oh, oh no, that was _silk,_ Edelgard despaired, and now it had her snot on it!

“Really?” Dorothea looked a little flustered. “Well, I—I certainly didn’t _feel_ that way back then.”

“No, you were amazing. You’d beat me up every other training session.”

“I can’t see myself doing that.”

“Well, um… we weren’t, uh… we weren’t exactly friends,” the other Edelgard admitted. “Actually, I was… your enemy?”

Dorothea’s mouth hung open in shock. “I… I suppose that isn’t so hard to believe, actually. When Edie and I first met, I overheard her complaining about lazy, stupid, useless nobles, and it was practically love at first sight—”

The other Edelgard started crying again.

“No, no, I didn’t mean—”

“I never wanted to go to any stupid officer’s academy anyway! Those places are for people who want to _do something_ with their lives and—what am I supposed to do? I was _born_ lazy, stupid, and useless! I’m not the oldest, I’m not the youngest, I’m not meant to _be_ anyone, no one knows I even _exist_ unless they need to yell at me—”

“I’m so, so, sorry,” Dorothea said, cradling her in her arms again. “Edie, I didn’t mean it…”

“I’m sorry I replaced such a great person—I’m sure you just wish I’d _die_ already!”

As much as her heart ached for her poor, put-upon doppelganger, who was well past being in way over her head, Edelgard felt she could almost die of embarrassment listening to—and _feeling—_ the teenager in her adult body throwing a tantrum like a child.

“Edie, Edie. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” Dorothea said, rubbing her back as she waited for the next round of tears to run their course. “I don’t think that of you. You’re my friend. And do you know what else you are?”

The other Edelgard dried the rest of her tears on her sleeve. “I… I’m the kind of person your Edelgard would complain about.”

“Well, um… that’s not what I mean. You’re _Edelgard,”_ Dorothea answered. “You were born the same Edelgard that Edelgard was, weren’t you? You had the same father, the same mother, the same sisters and brothers, and the same home, didn’t you?”

“I… guess?”

“You have everything she has,” she said, laying her hand over Edelgard’s heart, “in here. You were born with the same body, mind, and soul. You could just as easily have been her as she could’ve been you!” She smiled, showing off a wide sliver of ivory-white teeth framed by her soft, glossy, scarlet lips. “I know you can be her, just as I’m sure _she_ could be _you_ if she set her mind to it—though I’m sure she’d have just as much trouble.”

The other Edelgard shook her head. “I don’t know. The way you and Professor Byleth and Hubert and everyone else talk about her—it’s like she can do _anything.”_

“Oh, there are plenty of things Edie can’t do. Like admit she’s wrong when her pride is on the line. Or cook.”

Edelgard felt insulted. That was rich coming from Dorothea, whose special skill was rendering anything completely and utterly inedible. The worst that could be said about Edelgard’s culinary skills was that her axe would make a mess in the kitchen!

Dorothea smirked. “Or swim,” she added.

The other Edelgard was dumbfounded. “Edelgard can’t swim?”

“She won’t even put a toe in any body of water deeper than she is tall. It terrifies her.”

 _Now see here, Dorothea, I have a perfectly rational fear of drowning,_ Edelgard wanted to snap at her, desperate to defend her wounded pride, but she had no idea how to wrest control of her own body—

 _“Now see here—”_ she snapped at Dorothea.

She stopped. Had she done that? Had she spoken? She’d felt her vocal chords vibrate, but not with the other Edelgard’s words— _her_ words.

She lifted a hand to her face. It rose at her command. Her fingers traced her cheek up to her ear at her command.

Dorothea stared at her, her green eyes wide with surprise and her jaw hanging open. _“Edie?”_ she gasped. _“Our_ Edie? Is that _you?”_

“Dorothea…” Edelgard took a deep breath. She felt the aches of all her scars pressing into her muscles. “How did you know?”

Dorothea smiled, though tears welled up in her eyes, making her emerald irises gleam and shimmer. “Only _you_ would use that tone of voice with me. Oh, Edie—” Her voice cracked.

And then Edelgard felt her spine crack as Dorothea threw her arms around her and swept her up in a tight, needy embrace.

_“I missed you so much!”_

Edelgard held her just as tightly, delighted to be able to run her fingers through her luscious, thick waves of her lustrous brown hair. She was so delighted, she had to struggle not to laugh for joy. “I missed you so much, too, Dorothea!”

“It must’ve been hell living in a world where I hated your guts!”

“It was!”

Dorothea planted a wet kiss on her cheek, and then another, and then another, leaving a row of kisses down her jaw and the side of her neck, digging into her as though she were a wild beast feasting on her flesh. “I can’t believe you’re back! And so suddenly—How’d you do it?”

“I don’t know,” Edelgard said. “Time stopped, and—” She felt a shudder run through her body, as though something deep inside her was fighting her. For a moment, she felt like a fish on a hook, and then it passed.

“Edie? Is something wrong?”

“I feel…” There was that tug again, deep inside her stomach—like something was trying to drag her out of her own body. Was her mind being forced out? How long could she keep control of her own body before she was cast back to the other world? “Dorothea, where’s Byleth? _My_ Byleth?”

“She’s with Mercie and Jeritza, taking care of some top-secret business in Hrym territory.”

“You can tell me what the top-secret business is,” Edelgard said. “I’m the Emperor.”

Dorothea laughed, then pulled herself up to her feet. “Right. Just—Hold on, I’ve got to get Hubie; he’s gonna be so happy to see you, I think he might cry!”

 _“No!”_ Edelgard hissed urgently, gritting her teeth as another fishhook took root in her—her stomach? Her mind? Her _soul?_ “No, Dorothea, I—I don’t know how much time I have. When Byleth gets back, tell her—” The words she wanted so desperately to say came pouring out almost faster than she could speak them. “Tell her I love her more than I have words to say, and I miss her more than I have words to say, and I will do anything— _anything—_ to walk by her side again, my Byleth, my love—tell her I promise not to—”

She felt every part of her body, inside and out, burst into flames at once, and a blinding expanse of light erased everything around her.

Edelgard returned to the other world with a sickening jolt, and when her younger eyes snapped open, she saw a sunlit sky free of fog. More than that, she saw Ashe’s face staring down at her, and it was a face remarkably free of dried blood pouring from his brow or leaving his silver hair sticky and matted. Her back wasn’t screaming in agony; someone must have healed her while she’d been… unconscious? What exactly had happened to this body while her soul had returned to her own world? Had she simply been catatonic?

A broken smile crossed Ashe’s face. “Your Highness, you’re alright! You were passed out when I found you; I was so worried…”

“Keep… her waiting…” she moaned, splitting parched lips, her voice little more than a quiet croak. “My… By… leth…”

“I’m here,” Byleth assured her, helping her prop her head up and holding a canteen to her lips.

Edelgard drank greedily enough that her chest hurt. Though this professor wasn’t her darling Byleth, the steady pressure of one of her warm hands cradling the back of her head while the other rested on her stomach was no less soothing, at least for the moment.

“Don’t worry,” Byleth said. “The rest of the class took care of the rest of the priests and knights, and the bishop is…”

The bishop’s voice rang clearly across the plateau. _“Apostates!”_ he spat, his voice echoing from copse to copse. _“You sully the name of the Goddess!”_

“You _are the apostates,”_ Rhea retorted, her normally calm voice laced with the slightest hint of a rattled tremolo. _“The Goddess is with_ me!”

Edelgard lifted her head, though it throbbed from the exertion, and caught sight of the wounded and bloodied bishop, forced to his knees with his hands behind his back by Catherine and kneeling before Rhea. The archbishop had a frightening executioner’s blade in her hand—a sword with a flat, blunt tip but razor-sharp edges, meant only for decapitating—and was already prepared to bring it down. The rest of the class was circled along with Edelgard, Ashe, and Byleth in a scattered, loose group around the impromptu execution ground. Ashe watched, too, with rapt attention, his pale green eyes wide.

The bishop, moments away from death, looked to Dimitri. “Your Highness, please,” he blubbered, his bravado long since having deserted him. “I was only following orders; don’t—Don’t let her do this to me, Prince Di—”

Ashe flinched and looked away, squeezing his eyes shut at the exact moment Rhea’s blade swung down and severed the bishop’s head from his shoulders with a sickening crunch. The soft thump of his head rolling onto the grass as the rest of his body slumped over was an anticlimax of a period at the end of the man’s life.

“Goddess have mercy,” Rhea said as she crouched down and wiped the blood from her sword on the grass. Her voice had regained its firmness. “Forgive this man and those he led astray of their sins and save their souls.”

The class quietly, morosely packed up to leave and prepared to head back to their camp and begin their journey back to Garreg Mach, and Edelgard tried to clear her head of her latest vision and set her mind back on this world and not her own. Ashe tended to his horse—how strange, Edelgard noted, that it didn’t seem at all harmed by its fall, as though it had never even happened—and as he did so, his gaze kept slipping over to the bloody smear on the grass that had marked the end of the bishop of the Western Church’s life.

Edelgard set a hand on his shoulder. “Ashe,” she told him, “it’s alright. It’s over—Lord Lonato’s soul is surely at peace now.”

He offered her a smile, but the effort made his face crumple like paper. He sank into her, his face nestled in her shoulder, his shoulders quivering and quaking, and as his fingernails dug into her back, he began to weep.


	9. The Gryphon at Gronder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard fights on the eastern front at Gronder Field, has a little family reunion, and spends some quality time with her father-in-law.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's Gronder Field time, babey...... you know what that means..... A double-length chapter! I am so generous!
> 
> Also, you've probably noticed that the fic has a new title! I hope you like it! And if you don't, I'm sorry. Just pretend it's still called "Princess Edelgard and the Mystery of the Hurricane King," just like I pretend that everything's going to be okay! Hahahahahaha... haha... ha...

The Airmid River was, while not the longest river in all of Fódlan, certainly the mightiest and even _more_ certainly the _widest._ It ran from its source in the Oghma Mountains east all the way to the sea, forming a natural border between the Adrestian Empire and the Leicester Alliance; its current, when fed by springtime storms, could sweep away a house were one to somehow find itself in the middle of it; at its widest point, it looked to someone standing on its banks more like a small lake than a river. It was a wonder of the natural world. And astride that natural wonder that was the Airmid River, stretching from bank to bank, was a much more artificial wonder—the Great Bridge of Myrddin. 

The Great Bridge of Myrddin resembled a bridge in only two respects. One, one end of it stood on the north bank of Airmid and the other end stood on the south bank. Two, it was possible to walk across it from one side of the river to the other. In every other respect, Myrddin was not a bridge but a fortress. The road spanning the river was wide enough and its foundations sturdy enough that the Empire’s army could march across it—and, in fact, Edelgard recalled doing just that. Not that an army could simply march across it without preparing itself for the fight of its life, though: the bridge was zealously guarded, with its stout and thick-walled guardhouses and garrisons flanking every inch of the road. Within its walls, it could hold more than enough soldiers to defend itself from any attack and had enough stockpiles to withstand a siege for a month or more. The entire structure, a mammoth mass of stone, stood suspended over the rushing water below by huge stone columns distributing its incredible weight.

Tonight, though, there was little more than a skeleton crew of Alliance soldiers defending the bridge, for these were peaceful times; instead, the majority of the soldiers’ quarters were being used by the students and faculty of the Garreg Mach Officer’s Academy on their way to the long-awaited Battle of the Eagle and Lion.

Gronder Field, where the mock battle would be taking place, was practically next door to Garreg Mach as the wyvern flies, but Edelgard, her classmates, and the students of the other houses were not traveling by wyvern; they were traveling on the road, and the road from Garreg Mach to Gronder Field meandered through the foothills of the Oghma Mountains and through Alliance territory until it reached its destination. Tomorrow night, the students would arrive at Gronder Field, and the morning after that, they would take up their positions. And on Archbishop Rhea’s command, they would pretend that they were fighting a war against each other. A prelude to the war to come, fought with blunted weapons and fake bloodlust.

Edelgard couldn’t sleep. The simple, sparse cot that sat in the corner of her austere quarters sat unused, its thin bedsheets torn off of it and crumpled at the foot of the bed showing that she had made a perfunctory, but ultimately fruitless attempt to lie down and fall asleep. She paced around the cramped confines of the room—though in this little room, there was little room to pace—her cold, bare feet padding against cold, bare stone, her breath coming to her in anxious spurts.

It was perfectly normal, she knew, to be nervous about a mock battle in which she would see her old friends’ faces in the opposing army. Even though it was all just a giant game of make-believe, after all—sport with the trappings of war—it was a measure of how well she’d trained and how much she’d learned, as well as Professor Byleth’s pedagogical skills.

But that wasn’t what was keeping her from falling asleep.

It was the cryptic note—YOU DON’T BELONG HERE—that had thrown her deception in her face. Between her normal training and Byleth’s secret curriculum, she’d hardly had the time or energy to investigate its origin or determine its author this past month, but it weighed on her mind nevertheless. The rational part of her brain kept telling her that the most likely explanation was that someone in the Black Eagles was bitter about her defection (perhaps Ferdinand, or even Hubert?), or perhaps that one of the Blue Lions found her an unwelcome intruder (she had her eye on Sylvain or Felix—Ingrid, Mercedes, Ashe, and Annette seemed to like her). However, she couldn’t help but entertain the possibility that somebody suspected her of not being who she claimed to be—that Dimitri or Dedue suspected her of being a changeling like Glenn, or possibly that somebody _knew_ that she did not come from this world.

It was that she was still here at all. For two months, she’d been here. She’d learned nothing. She’d found out nothing. She was just as close now to undoing whatever had been done to her as she had been on the first day. If anybody in her world was still working on a way to retrieve her—and at the very least, Hubert _must_ be—she had no idea how close their plans were to fruition, but even so, every morning she woke up at Garreg Mach was a disappointment. She’d worked so hard and sacrificed so much to bring her vision of the world to fruition, and now all she could do was stand aside and twiddle her thumbs idly, completely ignorant, and trust blindly that her friends could maintain her work in her stead.

It was that she was paranoid—not only from the letter, but from Glenn’s teasing little threats, the looks he gave her, the baleful little half-smile that would cross his face, no doubt to signal to her that he was currently imagining what it would be like to stick a knife in her belly and gut her like a fish—and jumping at shadows. It was exhausting, being so vigilant and so _alone._ At least in her world, she’d had her Hubert to be vigilant with her.

And on top of that, the walls were cold, bare stone, and the floor as well, and Edelgard could almost feel phantom shackles resting on her wrists and ankles, steel so cold it burned; she could almost feel the scars she didn’t have moan and ache and throb the way they always had when she was stressed. And she wondered with growing apprehension which of her siblings would greet her at Gronder Field and how easily the sight of the smiles on their faces, their wonderful grown-up faces, would break her…

Restless, she lit the lamp in her room—thank goodness for Mercedes’ lessons; now she never needed matches—and went to her bag, rifling through it until she found her journal. She sat on the side of her bed, opened the journal to the most recent page, inked her quill pen and set the nib to the page, and began writing. Her handwriting was, like herself, small, neat, and precise.

_Saturday, 26th of the Wyvern Moon, Imperial Year 1180_

_I originally had no plans to use this journal to record my thoughts and emotions, only to chart my progress for you, my other self. However, I can no longer keep how I feel locked away in my heart with no release, and I have no one else to confide in—and so this journal entry must suffice._

She raised her pen from the freshly-inked script lining the top of the page and let it hover just over the paper, collected her thoughts, and dipped the nib back into her inkwell.

_I want to go home._

When Edelgard saw those five simple words written by her hand, all of the complex feeling squeezing her heart collapsed into that one succinct sentiment. She wanted to go home. Feeling no better, she sighed, set down her pen, and leaned back against the wall.

Suddenly, with her back pressed against the cold, bare stone bricks that formed Myrddin’s austere facade, she forgot how to breathe. And then when she remembered, the air came in wrong, and came out wrong, and burned her lungs and throat, and her pulse pounded, and her heartbeat throbbed in her ears, and her ribcage felt full enough to burst. Jolted out of her melancholy by a wave of panic that washed over and flooded her mind, she leaped to her feet. Her journal, pen, inkwell and all tumbled to the floor—the journal with a heavy and muffled thump of leather and paper on stone, the inkwell with a sharper, clearer noise.

And then she fell to the floor, too, and felt something wet (though too cold to be blood) soak into the soft and smooth silk of her pajamas.

While the room spun mockingly around her, she picked herself up off the ground, her chest still heaving, her heart still beating a tattoo against her ribs, her breath still short. The growing pool of black ink on the stone floor, pouring from the overturned inkwell, stared up at her as she stared down at it.

Too late, she realized the ink was soaking into her journal’s pages and hurriedly grasped the little book with hands just as stained as the paper. Pulse racing, panicked, with muttered curses flying from her lips, she threw the journal into the corner of the room as far away from the puddle as possible; it flopped open to display a haphazard pattern of black fingerprints and thumbprints marring the painstaking notes she’d been leaving for her other self. Big, ugly splotches of ink ate at the edges of the pages. Her quill pen sat in the ink puddle, ruined, the feather soaked through and dyed black.

She looked down at her upraised hands. Her palms, which had broken her fall, stung and smarted; they were covered in ink that disguised the scrapes she’d gotten, as black as the night sky outside the room’s narrow slit of a window. The ink puddle had stained the cuff and elbow of one sleeve and as she knelt in front of it, she felt the ink creep up to her knees and leave new stains there. Her chest hurt even more now.

 _“Edelgard? Is everything okay in there?”_ Mercedes’ soft, sweet, hushed voice bled through the door. The sound that came out of Edelgard’s mouth in response was not the sort of noise she ever wanted to make with someone else in earshot.

The door creaked open and Mercedes poked her head through to glance at her. A heavy woolen shawl hung from her shoulders, draped over her nightgown to ward off the cold. “Are you feeling—Oh, my goodness!” she exclaimed, her pale violet eyes widening as they took in the carnage on the floor. “Oh, dear, are you okay? Are you hurt?” She knelt beside her, wary of the ink staining the floor, and took Edelgard’s hands by her wrists. “Here. Let me have a look, okay?”

Edelgard didn’t put up any resistance as Mercedes checked her hands. “It’s fine,” she told Mercedes, though. “I was just… pacing and I lost my balance. Not from brain worms. I’m sorry for troubling you.”

“It’s nothing,” Mercedes assured her. “I was just getting some fresh air outside when I noticed a light in your room, so I decided to stop by and pay my best apprentice a visit.”

Despite how humiliated she felt, Edelgard had to admit that hearing the phrase ‘best apprentice’ did bring a little smile to her face. “You couldn’t sleep either?”

“Oh, no, I’m just a bundle of nerves tonight. Can you stand?” Mercedes asked her. She nodded, a little uneasily, and Mercedes helped her rise to her feet. “Careful with the floor. Are you hurt?”

“Only my pride,” Edelgard said. “And perhaps I might have bruised my hands and knees. Other than that, there’s nothing wrong.”

“Do you feel better now?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. But—oh, your poor pajamas… I packed a spare nightgown, so why don’t you come with me to my quarters?”

Edelgard nodded and let Mercedes bring her to her room (which, unsurprisingly, was just as sparse and spartan as the one she had just left).

“Nervous about the battle?” Mercedes asked her, scrubbing away the last remnants of the stubborn ink stains on her skin with soap and cloth as the two of them sat on the side of the bed, Edelgard in a linen nightgown that was too big for her but much warmer than her pajamas.

“Yes,” Edelgard said, “a bit. And you?”

“Perhaps a little. Is there anything else I can do to help?”

“No, I think—” Edelgard’s eyes fixed themselves on Mercedes’ bag, then returned to study Mercedes’ face, the wispy, feathery white locks of long hair that fell in simple curves to frame her soft face and poured over her shoulder. “Would you mind if I brushed your hair?”

Mercedes’ hand rose to brush aside a few stray locks of her hair, her fingers hooking into them. A bit of pink stood out on her cheeks.

“I know it must sound silly,” Edelgard said, “but…” She’d always taken good care of her hair—it had been the only part of her scarred, mutilated, violated body she could still control—and she had come to find it soothing to offer that same care to her friends during those five years of war without Byleth at her side and with nobody in the world to confide in but her former classmates.

“Oh, no, no, not at all!” Mercedes said, reaching for her bag and taking out her comb. “That’s very kind of you; I’m so scatter-brained sometimes, I forget to do it myself…”

Edelgard took the comb and started running it through Mercedes’ hair. As Mercedes was nearly half a foot taller than her (some things never changed), she had to reach up to do it. She noted with little surprise, but a small pang of involuntary disappointment, how brittle Mercedes’ hair was. The Mercedes of her world had lovely, luxurious hair; thick and voluminous even after she’d gotten it cut short; and colored the same pale, sandy gold as fine champagne. This world’s Mercedes’ hair was stark white, though, not so thick, and plagued with flyaways and split ends. “What kind of conditioning oils do you use in your hair?” she asked, working very carefully through a small knot the comb’s teeth had run up against.

“Oh, nothing special,” Mercedes noted. “Honestly, I’m lucky if I remember to wash it.”

“If I might recommend something,” Edelgard said, “try rosemary oil for strength and lavender oil for volume and shine. I had a friend with hair like this, once.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, it all went stark white at the age of eight or nine or so. But with the right treatment, it would shine like fresh snow in the sunlight.” 

She felt her heart grow warmer as her thoughts turned not to herself but to Lysithea, the girl she’d thought of for so many years as a long-lost sister. When last she’d seen her at the wedding, her roots had started to grow in a vinaceous wine red at the base of her scalp, peeking out from under the snowy tresses of her long white hair—a heartening aftereffect of the work Linhardt and Hanneman had done to remove her Crests. Edelgard had almost expected to see a younger Lysithea here in the monastery, one with perhaps her natural hair color in all its glory, but she was not among the Golden Deer (obviously—without her shortened lifespan, she likely saw no reason to enroll in the academy at such a young age, if at all).

“Hmm? What was your friend’s name?” Mercedes asked her.

“You wouldn’t know her,” Edelgard said. “Was your hair always this color?”

“No, it used to be blonde. I started going gray very early; I must have had a very stressful childhood,” she said, the warmth of her smile creeping into her voice.

“Ah. I thought you must have seen a ghost.” A very stressful childhood indeed, Edelgard thought—she was amazed Mercedes still had such a positive disposition in spite of all that. Then again, in her world, Mercedes had had a grim childhood, too, and yet she’d still been the same gentle soul. Perhaps nothing, not even torture, could break her.

“Oh, ghosts are just stories,” Mercedes assured her. “Thank you for the recommendation, though. I’ll have to suggest it to Dimitri, too. He takes even less care of his hair than I do.”

Edelgard kept brushing, working her way through Mercedes’ hair with long, soft strokes. “I can’t help but be curious—one has to wonder why you decided to enroll here, given your… frailty.”

“Well, for starters,” Mercedes said with a smile, “I couldn’t exactly leave Annie on her own, could I? And Dimitri…”

“You knew him before you came here?” It seemed so—Edelgard had noticed plenty of times that Mercedes did seem rather familiar with him, and he with her.

“A bit. He asked that I enroll this year, actually.”

“If it’s too taxing, you should have turned him down.”

“It’s not quite as simple as that, Edelgard,” Mercedes told her with a disarmed little laugh. Her eyes avoided her.

Edelgard noticed a dribble of blood roll down her upper lip from her left nostril and reached over to wipe it away on her finger. “You’re dying, aren’t you?”

Mercedes blinked. Her mouth hung agape, but no sound came out. She took a handkerchief and held it to her nose, her movements slow and automatic.

“I told you, I knew a friend who had white hair like yours. She had a… condition,” Edelgard said, “and even the best doctors in the Empire agreed that she likely wouldn’t live past twenty-five. She’s about your age now. And she has… episodes, just like you.”

Still taken aback, Mercedes took a deep, shaking breath and rested her hand on her chest. “Are you… sure I wouldn’t know your friend?”

“Positive. But it’s true, isn’t it?” Edelgard pulled the comb away and set it aside. “The seizures and breathing issues you’ve been having are symptoms of your condition. They’re getting worse, and you’re growing weaker—because you only have a few years left.”

Mercedes bowed her head, her shoulders slumping. “Yes. It’s true, I’m only expected to live another two or three years.”

“Then why spend one of those years here at Garreg Mach, straining and taxing yourself? Dimitri is quite a nice man, I must say, but to give him an entire year out of all the precious few you have left simply because he _asked_ you to?”

Mercedes shook her head. “It’s not so simple.”

“What do you want from your life, Mercedes? Do you truly desire nothing but to cater to your prince’s whims? If I only had such a short time to achieve my goals,” Edelgard said, “I would do everything in my power to achieve them while I still could. I wouldn’t waste a single day.”

“If you rushed yourself like that, you’d get sloppy,” Mercedes teased her, a faint flicker of her smile returning. “Isn’t it better to leave a good job unfinished than to finish a bad one?”

“What if you can’t trust anybody to finish the good job you did for you when you’re gone?” she retorted defensively.

“Then that sounds like a problem with your friends.”

“I mean—If you have a vision, something you want to see in the world, you should strive to bring as much of it to fruition as possible and not unduly burden the next generation with carrying out your life’s work…”

Mercedes laughed at her. “And what do you want to see in the world?”

Edelgard let her fingertips slip into Mercedes’ soft, freshly-combed mane. “A world where _this_ doesn’t have to happen to people like—like you.”

Mercedes took her hand and gently lifted it away. “That’s sweet of you, Edelgard, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. Besides, with Dimitri at my side, I can live as long as I want. And,” she added, her spirits lifted, “if I feel I haven’t lived long enough, I could just haunt you and the rest of my friends after I die.”

Her good mood was infectious, like a yawn; Edelgard found herself stifling a small smile. She often felt so alone in this world with its colder and more reserved Byleth, but she _did_ have friends to dull the pain. “Would you be a fearsome ghost,” she asked, “or a friendly one?”

Mercedes’ little grin widened as she pulled away her blood-dotted handkerchief. “Yes,” she answered. “Don’t you worry about me, Edelgard. I’ll be at the top of my game at Gronder Field. I might even show off a few tricks from my days at the Royal Academy of Sorcery…” She coughed, took a few wheezing breaths, and cleared her throat. “Excuse me.”

“You’re bleeding; I can’t _help_ but worry,” Edelgard replied. “You’re going to be under my command at Gronder Field; if you’re unfit…”

“You talk like it’s a real battle, Edelgard.” Mercedes laughed. “That’s why you and Ingrid are so fun to talk to. You’re so _serious.”_

“Battles are serious matters,” Edelgard said. “And I’m serious about this one. If you aren’t well enough to fight, don’t push yourself.”

“Yes, Mother,” Mercedes teased her, resting her head on her shoulder. “But tell me, really, what’s so important to you that you’d spend every day of your life working toward it?”

Edelgard sighed and idly ran her fingers through her freshly-combed hair. “It might sound silly or strange to you, but… as for right now, I just want to go home.”

“But you don’t know the way?”

She shook her head.

“Well, Enbarr is just southwest of here; if you take the road past Gronder Field and follow it through Varley and Hresvelg territory you’ll—”

“I was being metaphorical,” Edelgard interjected, flustered and rosy-cheeked, embarrassed by Mercedes’ teasing. “But… thank you, Mercie.” She'd always had a knack for easing her loneliness—like one of her lost older sisters.

Once she’d left Mercedes’ room to return to hers, though, her good mood slowly dissipated as Mercedes’ words rang in her ears. The thought occurred to her that Mercedes had closer ties to Those Who Slither in the Dark than even Lysithea had—not merely a prototype, as Lysithea had been. It was not a duo between Dimitri and Dedue in this world, as it had been between Edelgard and Hubert, but a _trio._ Whatever their plots and aims were, she was in the thick of it.

How much did Mercedes know, though, and did she play any role beyond that of Dimitri’s caretaker?

* * *

Another half-day’s march from the Great Bridge of Myrddin brought the students to the end of their pilgrimage, and on the morning after, with the sun hanging just high enough in the sky to color the sky pale periwinkle and the clouds cottony white, at last, Gronder Field—not a map, but the hallowed battleground itself at full scale—lay before the Blue Lions.

This would be far, far grander than the mock battle the academy had held at the start of the year. Each house had a complement of a score of soldiers behind them to swell their ranks—mages, archers, cavaliers, and pegasus riders—to be commanded as the students and their professors saw fit. This was a test of everything—of strength, of skill, of endurance, of leadership. This was the proving grounds for student and teacher alike.

Dimitri looked up from his perch atop his wyvern at the cliff overlooking Gronder Field, upon which stood Archbishop Rhea, her elite knights and attendants, and nobles from all across Fódlan—many students’ parents and families—as they watched and waited for the battle to begin. Edelgard looked up at the audience and wondered if Arundel and Burkhart were there… and any of her other siblings.

“Look at Archbishop Rhea up there,” Dimitri commented, his tone of voice completely neutral and tightly managed. “We must look like ants to her. Everyone, show off the results of your dedicated training—and show her just how powerful we ants are.”

“Were you up all night workshopping that one, Your Highness?” Sylvain asked.

“As we planned,” Byleth said, focusing more on the task at hand, “we’ll split up and take on both classes simultaneously. Sylvain, Dedue, Glenn, Ashe, take your forces and follow me south to seize the hill and engage with the Black Eagles’ forces. Dimitri, Ingrid, don’t take flight until we’ve taken control of that ballista. Felix, Annette, Mercedes, Edelgard, take your forces across the eastern bridge to attack the Golden Deer.”

Dimitri frowned, but relented. He’d had some disagreements with Byleth about this over the past few days. His wyvern, mirroring his personality in a way that was almost cute, fidgeted and let out an irritated snort. The several pegasi standing behind him and Ingrid pawed at the ground with their hooves, awaiting their riders’ orders. “If you think keeping us in reserve will lead us to victory, Professor,” he said with a sigh, “then I and my men shall remain behind for now.”

Edelgard scanned the eastern side of Gronder Field, studying the foreboding woods beckoning and the scattered clusters of autumn-colored trees dotting the grassy field, and nodded. One hand grasped the reins of her horse; the other tightened around the haft of her axe. “I have a few good theories on where the Deer will be positioned. I’m guessing there are a few of them in that copse closest to the river—at least one archer. Lorenz is probably among them. Let’s make an example of him, shall we?”

Mercedes, seated confidently atop a dappled gray mare, nodded. “We’ll give him the fright of his life!”

A flag rose beside Archbishop Rhea, fluttering in the wind. A trumpet fanfare rang out across the vast field. The battle had begun.

Dimitri brandished his lance. “Lions, forward! For honor!”

Byleth drew the Sword of the Creator, letting its bony steel glow with the light of a blazing fire. “Stay focused.”

The carefully-managed positions of the three houses immediately began to shift as Edelgard and her half of the class set out for the eastern bridge and Sylvain’s half of the class set out for the hill. Edelgard saw a flash of violet hair flutter atop the wooden ballista platform built into the hill’s gentle slope. Bernadetta had already seized the hill—but hopefully Dedue would scare her away.

“Damn. You were right about that girl being fast, Edelgard,” Felix said.

“Of course I was,” Edelgard said, turning her focus away from the hill and toward her own mission. She led her faction of the Blue Lions’ forces onward. “After we win this battle, we should recruit her.”

“Oh, dear. But haven’t the Black Eagles lost enough students already?” Mercedes asked.

As Edelgard’s strike force moved in, a cavalier clad in gleaming violet armor, his horse dressed to match, burst from the nearby thicket—but not to engage her team. Rather, he zeroed in on the hill. _“A stronghold for me to seize?”_ Lorenz Hellmann Gloucester called out. A trio of mounted soldiers dutifully followed him. _“Splendid!”_

Edelgard sighed. She honestly should have expected this. She couldn’t be blamed for forgetting some of the details, though, could she? Her version of this mock battle had been six years ago! “Change of plans. Mercedes, in front with me; move to intercept. Annette, Felix, follow behind.” The small complement of soldiers accompanying them split accordingly; Edelgard and Mercedes took three cavaliers forward, and Felix and Annette took three swordsmen and two archers.

A mire of luminous black sludge spread across the ground in front of Lorenz, stymieing his steed’s legs and slowing him and his men down just enough for Edelgard and Mercedes to flank them. Edelgard struck one of the soldiers with her axe, knocking him off his horse and into the mire, and pulled up in front of Lorenz. Lance in hand, he parried Edelgard’s next strike—and rather than being panicked or worried, he seemed particularly delighted.

“It is an honor to cross blades with you, Lady Edelgard!” he exclaimed, a grin on his thin, angular face as the head of Edelgard’s axe hooked around the haft of his lance. “Know that whoever wins here, there will be no hard feelings between House Gloucester and the Empire!”

“Thank you,” Edelgard said, and with a savage, Crest-aided wrench of her arm, she tugged Lorenz’s lance toward her, leaving him wide open. Her next strike unhorsed him.

Lorenz hit the ground, rolled to his feet, and flung out his hand, conjuring a burst of fire that narrowly grazed Edelgard’s ear as her horse traced a widening arc around him. An arrow hit her in the shoulder, its tip finding its mark in the gap between her breastplate and shoulder armor; she gritted her teeth against the sharp jolt of pain and ripped the arrow free of her flesh. She switched her axe to her other hand, relieving her right arm of its burden.

A vermilion blur, Leonie Pinelli rode to Lorenz’s rescue, another arrow already nocked to her bow and ready to fire. _“Lorenz, you ass!”_ she cried out. Mercedes chased after her, hurling a globe of roiling black and violet miasma at her; Leonie’s horse leaped out of the way as it crashed against the ground, mud and clumps of grass spattering its dressing and armor, and switched targets. Edelgard rode to intercept her, and as the enemy’s shot jailed just barely over Mercedes’ head, she drove her axe into her side. Leonie was nearly thrown off her horse, clinging to its stirrups as it continued onward and dragged her along for a few seconds before losing her grip and falling to the ground in a heap.

Felix put a saber to Lorenz’s throat before he could run or recover his lance, keeping him in place as Edelgard rode her horse in a slow trot in front of him. 

“I’ll accept your surrender now, Lorenz, if you’ll offer it,” she said as Mercedes came up to her and tended to the wound in her shoulder with a haze of healing magic. “I’d hate for you to die on this battlefield.”

“Uh, what?” one of her soldiers asked.

“What are you talking about, Your Highness?” another asked.

As her adrenaline rush faded, she realized that she might have been taking this battle a bit too seriously.

Lorenz grinned. “I admire how seriously you are taking this battle, Lady Edelgard. Send my regards to Ferdinand von Aegir.” He clapped his hands. “My soldiers, collect Miss Pinelli and bring her to the medical tent! And I,” he added, rising unsteadily to his feet and plucking some grass and dirt from his violet hair, “shall take my leave; you have bested me.”

Edelgard nodded, watching him intensely as he walked away, his head held high with pride even in defeat, and kept a tight grip on her reins as the cacophony of battle rang out from all directions. She realized, glancing down at how white her knuckles were, that she was expecting him to spring some kind of trap—but it never came. No one was fighting to the death here.

“I think we might have drawn first blood!” Mercedes said. “Isn’t that exciting?”

An arrow zipped through a gap in the thicket, its aim straight and true. _“Mercie, look out!”_ Annette cried out, grabbing her and wrenching her off her horse—but the arrow still found its mark, slipping through Mercedes’ robes and sticking up out of her chest.

Edelgard whirled around, summoned a fireball in retaliation, and lobbed it at the thicket, setting the trees alight; a pair of archers fled the fire on foot, smoke trailing behind them. “After them,” she ordered her soldiers, who dutifully pursued.

“Mercie,” Annette gasped, eyes wide as she grasped the arrow’s shaft, “are you… all… right?” She pulled the arrow away and found its steel head broken.

“Oh, I took some extra precautions,” Mercedes assured her, patting her on the hand, “and put on some extra light armor under my robes. No need to be concerned!”

 _“Light_ armor?” Felix questioned, looking at the arrowhead. Edelgard shared his sentiments. What light armor could do _that?_

“You need to tell us when you do that,” she said, realizing she’d been holding her breath and letting out a relieved sigh.

“Everyone worries enough about you as it is,” he grumbled.

Another arrow, a heavy bolt from the ballista atop the hill, flew through the air with a deep and sonorous whoosh; Edelgard craned her neck to spy its trajectory and saw it whipping through the air and dashing itself on the rocky cliff face beneath Rhea and her attendants.

“A shot across her nose; that’s the signal,” Edelgard said, spying a flash of silver hair on the hill. “We’ve taken the ballista!”

On cue, two pairs of wings rose into the air—one pair leathery and rust-brown, the other feathered and cloud-white. Dimitri and Ingrid had entered the fray, their complement of soldiers joined them, and the Blue Lions was ready to make its play for control of the skies.

Another wyvern soared across the battlefield to intercept them. Though it moved too quickly for Edelgard to make out any details, it was approaching from the Black Eagles’ side, so Petra must have been riding it.

“Never thought I’d see a boar fly,” Felix scoffed, shaking his head, but Edelgard could hear a light little twinge in his voice that hinted he was impressed—and relieved. Dimitri had struggled quite a bit with flight training; for the past week Byleth had been working with the class to devise two sets of plans, one for if Dimitri was ready to take his mount into battle, and one if he wasn’t. All that training had paid off, though, and the White Lion of Fhirdiad had taken to the air.

As the sun lazily arced past its zenith, the fighting intensified both on land and in the air, and Edelgard’s team pressed south and clashed against the main body of the Golden Deer’s forces. The ringing of swords and spears echoed through the wooded glade; arrows zipped through the air.

“Spread out and move forward,” Edelgard commanded, ushering her soldiers onward. “Don’t let them get close to the hill!” She rode forward, axe bared, and charged into the fray.

Another bolt from the ballista shot across the field, felling Petra’s wyvern and sending her back down to earth.

“Doesn’t the academy think it might be a little… dangerous to have a siege weapon out here?” Annette asked, watching the wyvern plummet from the sky. “That thing could kill someone!”

Felix knocked one of the Golden Deer class’ soldiers off his horse and concussed him with the flat of his blade. “This thing could kill someone, too,” he said.

“I wonder how many students die in these battles every year,” Mercedes said, the quite pleasant tone of her soft, breathy voice contrasting sharply with the jagged spikes of black miasma that burst out of the ground and hobbled horses on her command. “Surely there’s more than one, on average.”

“Try to keep it at zero this year,” Edelgard said, reminding her as much as herself that this was a mock battle, not a real war—and yes, her blood was pumping and her pulse was pounding; yes, her veins were on fire; yes, her every sense was attuned to survival; but _it wasn’t a real war._ She had to remember to pull her punches now that her training regimen had brought her comfortably close to the proficiency she expected from her body. At the last moment, she remembered to turn her axe around so that the blunt end, not the sharp edge, cracked against a cavalier’s chin with enough force to throw him off his horse.

She was shaken by her sudden lapse. _This wasn’t a war,_ she had to remind herself. This was school. This was fun. She needed to have _fun._

A blast of cold air buffeted her; her horse’s legs skittered and splayed as the grass and dried leaves crinkling under its hooves froze into a solid, slick sheet of ice. She had the presence of mind, at least, to hurriedly dismount as her steed fell and avoid getting her leg trapped under its flank; she hit the ice, skidded, and dug her axe into the ground to anchor herself.

 _“I’m sorry,”_ Marianne von Edmund half-whispered from behind a pair of trees, her voice just loud enough to reach Edelgard’s ears. A glistening magic sigil, ice-white, had traced itself in the air in front of her.

Poor, sweet Marianne. A girl too kind for war and bloodshed, too browbeaten by her life and circumstances to believe her life had any value. The close bonds she had formed with the Black Eagles Strike Force in Edelgard’s world had saved her life in more ways than one. Edelgard wondered, would she be able to overcome that pain in this world, too?

Edelgard flung a tongue of flame into the trees and let it ignite the dried leaves still clinging to the canopy, driving Marianne away before she could cast another spell. With the flames crackling and smoke pouring into the air, she turned her focus back on the main body of the Deer’s forces, only to find herself thrown to the ground by something very strong, very heavy, and very pink.

Hilda loomed over her, hefting a double-headed battleaxe over her armored shoulder. “No one sets Marianne on fire except me,” she said, seeming almost _serious._

 _“Edelgard,”_ Mercedes called out, heading into the forest, _“shall we leave you to deal with your ex by yourself? I’ll deal with Marianne!”_

Hilda’s cheeks turned as pink as her hair. “What the—Hey, I don’t—”

Edelgard picked herself up and threw herself at her. _“Out of my way, Hilda!”_

“What’s _wrong_ with you?” Hilda asked as the two of them traded blows. She was surprisingly agile considering the thick, strong armor plating she was wearing, which she’d apparently gotten someone to paint bright pink.

“It’s nothing personal. I’m here to win, not chat with old friends.”

“Well, you don’t have to be a _jerk_ about it!”

Edelgard felt her bones rattle from parrying Hilda’s next strike. It was some sort of miracle of nature that someone this lazy could be this strong through, apparently, nothing but sheer natural talent.

A gust of wind hit Hilda in the chest, knocking her back and leaving a dent in her armor. “I got this, Edelgard!” Annette chirped, readying another spell. “Break their front lines!”

Edelgard pressed forward. Ahead was Raphael Kirsten, one of the tallest, widest, and thickest students in the academy. He, like Dedue, was as immovable as the punching bags in the training hall, except that he could punch back. Flanking him was a short young man with long, swept-back burgundy hair—Arcturus von Ordelia, one of Lysithea’s older brothers—wielding a sword with a blade as jagged as a lightning bolt and the Golden Deer’s professor Manuela Casagranda. 

Both were unknown quantities—Arcturus was a replacement for Lysithea, apparently possessing some magical talent, but his strengths and weaknesses were a cipher; Manuela hadn’t participated in the mock battle in Edelgard’s world due to the lingering effects of a nasty wound from Jeritza, so her presence here wasn’t one Edelgard had been able to fully prepare for. At least she knew Manuela well enough to know how she fought, though.

Felix was the first to reach Manuela, nimbly dodging one of her white magic spells and striking at her with his saber. “Out of my way!” Professor Manuela shouted at him, the blade of her sword grinding against Felix’s. “I’ve got a crusty old geezer to beat up!”

Edelgard couldn’t help but feel a little happy that in this world, Manuela and Hanneman had this battle to enact their little rivalry. Perhaps she could help with that.

A jagged fork of lightning split the air, leaping from Arcturus’ sword and nearly striking Edelgard. The sharp, metallic stench of the burnt air left in its wake stung her nose. Raphael’s steel gauntlet grazed her forehead, but thankfully, her small stature made her a rather difficult target for the hulking giant. Around them, their soldiers were locked in combat, their numbers slowly dwindling as they traced a dance of mutual destruction.

It was almost comical, Edelgard had to admit, spending five years of her life fighting on battlefields like this one and seeing the fallen lay dead where they had been felled—and then coming here and seeing the “dead” get up and walk away with no hard feelings between each other. If she hadn’t been busy trying to keep Raphael from clobbering her, she might have laughed.

Raphael’s fist collided with Edelgard’s forearm and she felt her bones snap like twigs. “No hard feelings, right, Princess Edelgard?” he asked, cheerful as ever, his smile as bright as sunshine, as Edelgard pulled back with jaw set and teeth gritted against the searing, throbbing pain. “Don’t worry, once I clean your clock, Professor Manuela will fix you right up! Right, Professor?”

“In a minute,” Manuela grunted as she tried to strike Felix down.

“If you stand in my way,” Edelgard snarled, taking up her axe in her free hand as Annette cast a healing spell on her and knitted her bones back together, “I will cut you down until you have no blood left to bleed!”

Raphael looked a little concerned. “Uh… It’s great that you’re so enthusiastic, Your Highness?”

“Raphael, you dunce,” Arcturus spat, hurling a bolt of lighting at Felix, “stop complimenting the enemy!”

“But she’s doing such a good job!”

“Come on! The more time we waste with the Blue Lions’ B-team, the less time we’ll have to fight the Black Eagles!”

 _“B-team?”_ Edelgard parroted, insulted. She dodged the next crackling blast of blue-white lightning by a hair. Arcturus von Ordelia, it seemed, had a particular axe to grind against the Black Eagles—not surprising, if the Empire had still wronged his house in this world’s past—but he was most definitely _not_ Lysithea; his magic paled in comparison to hers.

“If you’re so eager to fight someone from the Empire,” Edelgard shouted at him as he and Manuela wore down Felix’s defenses, “I’m right here!”

His attention diverted, lightning crackled around his blade as it clashed with her axe. He was certainly enthusiastic about having an opportunity to hurt her, so while she wasn’t much for banter or taunting, she figured she could indulge him as she weaved between his blade and Raphael’s fists. He was older than Lysithea, but he wasn’t stronger. Or smarter.

“That’s right,” Edelgard taunted him. “You’re not just fighting someone from the Empire, you’re fighting a Hresvelg!”

And as he drew back his sword to strike her down, she leaped out of the way and let Raphael’s fist turn his nose into an overripe strawberry. He dropped like a stone.

Edelgard hoped she wouldn’t have to tell Lysithea that her older brother was a bit of an idiot.

“Flank them to the east!” she ordered her soldiers and classmates. “Push them into the Black Eagles’ forces!” Her remaining forces took position, forming a spearhead against the Golden Deer’s ranks, and pressed them westward, nearer to the sound of combat.

An arrow zipped low across the ground, burying itself in Felix’s calf and bursting free out the other side. He stumbled, falling to his knee and leaving himself open for Manuela to strike him down; Annette came to his aid, knocking the professor off her feet with a razor-sharp gust of wind.

Edelgard traced the arrow’s trajectory to the smoldering woods, where Ignatz Victor had taken up sniping position, his pale green hair standing out against the red and yellow autumnal tapestry of the forest floor. She could see him aiming his next arrow at her and tossed her axe aside, then grabbed Raphael by the arm as he threw another punch at her—turning his considerable weight and momentum against him and throwing him to the ground. The arrow that had been meant for her buried itself in his ample bicep instead.

 _“Oh, Goddess, I’m so sorry, Raphael!”_ Ignatz wailed, hastily picking up his bow and hurrying to a new sniping position as Edelgard flung a fireball into the trees to smoke him out.

Raphael picked himself up and pulled the arrow out of his arm. “It’s alright, Ignatz, I’m okay! Hey, Your Highness, how’d you pull that off? You’re so small!”

“Come at me like that again and I’ll show you,” Edelgard replied. He came at her again and she showed him. He hit the trunk of a tree with enough force to splinter it.

“Are you alright?” she asked Felix as Annette tended to his wounded leg and carefully removed the arrow from it, staunching the flow of blood with some bandages before preparing a healing spell.

She gingerly rubbed her arm, feeling a deep and throbbing ache where the bones had broken and been knitted together. Wounds like that weren’t so easy to heal completely in the field, as many students here had probably learned the hard way. Even with powerful healing magic, mended bones and deep wounds could still take time and care to fully heal; just as her arm would still be weak and sore for days, Felix would probably have a limp for just as long even after he was patched up.

“I’ll be fine,” Felix said. “Let’s keep pushing.”

They kept pushing. The remainder of the Golden Deer’s forces—Manuela, Hilda, and a few of the remaining soldiers—retreated west and found themselves soon grinding against the Black Eagles, who were more than happy to pick them off.

Professor Hanneman clapped the soot from his hands. “Ah, Professor Manuela,” he said, drawing a saber from his side as he sat astride his horse. “Prepare to die, you slovenly sow!”

“Eat shit and fall off your horse,” Manuela retorted as she parried his blow, “you bloviating old windbag!” 

“I’ve received a letter from the ocean—Seems they have run out of bottom feeders!”

“I’ve received a letter from the jerk store—Seems they've run out of _you!”_

“And why should they care? _You_ are their best-selling item!”

Their swords clashed in a flurry of parries and ripostes. “You fight like a dairy farmer!” Manuela shouted.

“How appropriate— _you_ fight like a cow!” Hanneman retorted. “What’s this? I think I see a day-old sandwich lying at your feet!”

“Look behind you! A rare Crest!”

He looked over his shoulder, catching sight of Dimitri’s wyvern swooping down to pluck Linhardt off the ground, and with a blast of fire Manuela felled his horse. He hit the ground, mud splattering his tweed coat, his monocle flying off his face. She struck his arm with her sword as he lay in the mud next to his horse.

“Don’t break a hip, old man,” she said.

He looked up from his undignified repose, catching sight of Edelgard. “Ah, Lady Edelgard! How are the Blue Lions treating you?” he asked, wheezing.

“Fine,” Edelgard said, flinging a fireball at Hilda and forcing her to retreat. “How are the Black Eagles? Do they miss me?”

“I would say so. I hear you’ve become quite the star pupil! Will I be seeing you at my next Sunday seminar?”

“You really do talk a lot for a corpse, Hanneman,” Manuela said as her blade met Caspar’s axe. She couldn’t hold back against his onslaught and was quickly felled, mud splattering her white cloak as she lay not too far from where her rival had fallen.

“Alright, who’s next?” Caspar crowed, setting his sights on Edelgard. “Hi, Princess! Is it okay that Ferdinand gave me permission to beat you up?”

“You’re welcome to try,” Edelgard said, and as he charged at her Felix darted in, striking him in the back with a pair of daggers and sending him to the ground.

Hilda struck back with a vengeance, her axe’s sharp blade finding purchase in Edelgard’s forearm; Edelgard reeled backward, blood soaking her sleeve.

“Oops! Too hard?” The pink-haired girl cocked her head. “Sorry, sometime I forget that this is a mock battle!”

“I find myself wishing our breakup had been less amicable,” Edelgard said as she nursed her wounded arm.

“Yeah, well, maybe you shouldn’t have just stopped talking to me out of nowhere?”

“It’s not my fault I had amnesia,” Edelgard retorted. “I completely forgot we were friends!”

“That’s the dumbest excuse I’ve ever heard!”

“I know.”

 _“Edie!”_ Dorothea was next to take a shot at her, a sword in one hand and a globe of flickering orange flames in the other. _“Think fast!”_

Edelgard thought fast, and the fireball meant for her hit Hilda square in the chest. She hurriedly removed her smoldering armor and beat a hasty retreat to the forest.

“Permission to go after her, Edelgard?” Annette spoke up. “The battle isn’t over until we’ve routed the enemy!”

“No,” Edelgard said. “If we follow Marianne, Hilda, and Ignatz into the woods with our numbers, they’ll be able to spring a trap on us. Stay with me for now.”

“Look at you, Edie—really playing the part of the general here!” Dorothea said, a hard gleam in her emerald eyes. “I didn’t think you’d make it this far.”

“I’m full of surprises, Dorothea,” Edelgard retorted, parrying Dorothea’s next strike. She’d never imagined her fighting so zealously against her.

“I can see that. Maybe you _are_ just better than us commoners.”

Edelgard had the feeling something her other self had once said was being thrown back at her. No wonder Dorothea hated her. “I think you’ve changed my mind about that. You really are something else, Dorothea.”

“Flattery won’t get you anywhere, Edie.” Dorothea’s next strike cut into the side of her hand, forcibly disarming her. “I’m sure it isn’t quite your palatial bed, but try to enjoy your nap in the dirt.”

A shadow passed over her and Ingrid swooped down, her pegasus’ feathery wings glittering in the afternoon sunlight, and drove the blunt end of her lance into Dorothea’s stomach, knocking her to the ground.

“You alright, Edelgard?” Ingrid asked.

“I’ll be fine; thank you for your assistance.”

“No problem.” With a flurry of feathers, Ingrid took to the skies again, narrowly avoiding a volley of arrows from Bernadetta in the southwestern stronghold, currently held by Ferdinand and Hubert and besieged by Sylvain, Glenn, and Dedue.

Edelgard ducked for cover behind Hanneman’s felled horse and addressed the wound on her hand. Dorothea’s blade had cut into the meat of her palm, all but making it impossible to wield a weapon; her other arm was a bloody mess with a stinging gash splitting muscle and sinew. As a fighter, she was in no shape to continue—but she was still alive and capable as a leader. Where would her team go from here?

Annette found her and healed the new wounds. She wasn’t looking too good herself; there were fresh bruises on her cheek and a trickle of blood running down her brow. “You alright, Edelgard? What do we do next?

“Head for the hill and regroup with Professor Byleth, then devise a plan to root out the Golden Deer survivors from the woods. We’re close now, but we can’t get complacent.”

“Tell me about it! If they stay in there,” Annette said, tending to Edelgard’s arm, “they could stay hidden for a long time. I once read about one of the Battles of the Eagle and Lion where a few of the students hid so well that the battle went on for three days!”

“That,” Edelgard said, “sounds like something Claude would do. Maybe that’s why we’ve still seen neither hide nor hair of him. Where’s Mercedes?”

“Still in the woods,” she said, biting her lip. “I hope she’s okay. What if she has another episode while she’s all alone?”

“I knew I should’ve sent you with her.” Edelgard shook her head. “I can’t believe she ran off like that.”

“But at least she’s got that armor on under her robes, huh?”

The trees rustled and a great beast rose from the forest with long, slow flaps of his leathery wings. There was a vibrant dash of yellow riding atop it—Claude von Riegan, bow drawn in his hands. On his winged mount, Claude soared into the center of the battlefield, narrowly avoiding a beam of black and violet light that ripped through the air, nocking and aiming an arrow in mid-flight as he expertly controlled the wyvern’s path toward his foes.

Edelgard was shocked. She had only idly suggested that Claude might use his older self’s tactics—she’d been sure he’d be using the same strategy his younger self had used in her world during this same battle, and those hadn’t involved a wyvern. Could it be that he had sent the note— _that he, too, was a fellow time traveler,_ using his knowledge of the future for his own ends? 

“This is bad,” Annette said, watching Claude’s wyvern’s path over the field with a terror-stricken face, mouth agape. “Dimitri can’t hope to beat Claude at his own game! Hang in there, Dimitri!” she called out.

An arrow zipped through the air and Ingrid plummeted from the sky, barely managing to control her steed’s descent into a gentle arc before meeting the ground. Within a second, Claude already had another arrow drawn, and no matter how maneuverable Dimitri was, he would have no hope of challenging him in his own territory.

Edelgard saw a bolt from the ballista narrowly miss Claude’s wyvern and the Sword of the Creator lance out, its blade fully extended and arcing across the sky, and just as narrowly graze its wing. Another volley of arrows flew and Dimitri’s wyvern reeled back and spiraled to the ground, throwing off its rider into the open air.

And then, with the blazing blade still tracing a long arc into the air, the world turned to stone. Dimitri’s body hung motionless, suspended in the air with his lance falling from his grasp and hovering just above him, just as motionless. Byleth stood on the hill, tiny and indistinct, and next to her, there was another even tinier shape hovering just above the ground—just as there had been at the Brionnac Plateau a few weeks ago.

And then, the familiar burning, and the familiar flash of searing light, and when it receded Edelgard found herself in the Imperial Palace at Enbarr, standing in the middle of the garden’s expansive greenhouse.

Lush and verdant greenery, despite the cold autumn air outside, filled the glass-paneled chamber; the air was pleasantly warm and humid; vibrant splashes of colorful flowers dotted the greenery. Adding a bit more color to the room, Hanneman, Linhardt, Annette, and Lysithea were clustered in a tight semicircle around her and watched her as intently as an eagle watched its prey.

Her hands were balled into fists; she was shaking. _“Will you please,”_ the other Edelgard said, _“stop_ following _me for just—”_

Edelgard struggled to take control of her body. It was easier this time, but she couldn’t know how long she could remain here before she was dragged back to the other world. She felt dizzy—so disoriented she could fall to the ground. Just a few seconds ago, she’d been on a battlefield, her heart had been throbbing, her pulse had been pounding… and now she was here, in a body that was by comparison completely at peace.

She looked at her dogged attendants and let herself relax, her hands unfurling and lying limp at her sides. “Hello, Hanneman, Linhardt, Annette… Lysithea.”

Her gaze lingered on Lysithea. She was on her feet again, no longer confined to a wheelchair, though a pair of wooden crutches had to keep her steady and upright. Her cheeks were pink, too, bright pink, and her colorful roots had grown out even longer from her scalp. Beneath the long tresses of snow-white hair was a solid one or two inches of beautiful reddish-violet, the color of fine red wine, just like her older brother. The color had even started returning to her eyebrows.

It hurt so much to see her, but it was an odd, _good_ hurt. The same good hurt she’d felt back when she’d been reunited with Byleth after her five-year absence.

 _“Lysithea!”_ she cried out, her heart leaping, and with reckless abandon she embraced her younger counterpart. She buried her fingertips in her hair, tracing with almost reverent awe where red and white met. “Your hair… Oh, Lysithea…”

Lysithea figured out what had happened immediately and returned her embrace. “It’s good to see you again, El.”

“It’s _you,_ then, Your Majesty?” Hanneman inquired, his brow furrowing over his monocle.

“Yes,” Edelgard said, still hugging Lysithea tightly. She realized that she didn’t want to let go. “Yes, it’s me. For how long, though, I cannot say. Perhaps only a few minutes.”

“Fascinating,” Linhardt said. “You’ll have to tell us everything you can while you’re here.” He already had a notebook and a pencil in his hands. “Start with how you returned here. What are the circumstances? Is there some sort of consistent triggering event? What does it feel like? Does it feel like it has anything to do with your Crest?”

“Have you four been watching me all day waiting for this to happen?” Edelgard asked.

Hanneman, Lysithea, and Annette suddenly looked very sheepish and all of them looked away, muttering “no, no, of course not,” and “why would you think we’d do that?” and “we have lives, you know” and other such things.

“Yes,” Linhardt said, “we have been. For the past three weeks, in fact.”

“Well,” Annette said, “we’ve been watching in shifts.”

Edelgard smiled. “I do hope so.” She set her hand on Annette’s shoulder. Having seen her younger self just mere minutes ago, she had a new appreciation for how much that cheerful, hardworking young girl had matured. She no longer had such a babyish face, especially now that it was framed with longer, gently curled locks of carrot-red hair, but some things hadn’t changed—all that warmth and cheer was still there. “I have so much to tell you all…”

“Well, let’s get to it,” Linhardt said, already scribbling furiously.

Hanneman was producing medical equipment from his coat. He was still the same old Hanneman, even if his handlebar mustache was a tad scruffier, his monocle traded out for a pair of glasses—when had _that_ happened?—and his hair now more silver than gray. “Your Majesty, would you consent to a blood sample?”

“I—” Edelgard’s eyes fell to a streak running through Annette’s hair. Amid the fiery orange, a vein of silver. She took the offending lock between her forefinger and thumb, fear seizing her heart.

“Edelgard, what’s wrong?” Annette asked, ignorance written all over her round face.

 _“Who did this to you?”_ she hissed.

“What?”

 _“This!”_ Edelgard tugged gently on the lock of silver hair. She noticed more streaks, silver and gray and white mingled with the brilliant red, her heart falling further with every one she spied. “Y-Your hair—I know Hubert has been fighting his war against—Did they… Were you…”

Annette’s eyes widened and mouth gaped as she slowly realized what Edelgard was talking about. “Oh! Oh, no, it’s fine, Edelgard!” she said, gently prizing Edelgard’s fingers out of her hair. “It’s just a little gray hair! It’s from stress. And… I get it from my father. Dominics go gray early. Uh… _very_ early.”

Edelgard clasped her hand, as though embarrassed of its behavior (and thus her own), and sighed with relief. “Oh… I’m so sorry, Annette—I just worried…”

“Well, of course you worried, El,” Lysithea said. “You’ve been cut off from us for so long… You should see the gray streaks in Hubert’s hair,” she added with a coy smile. “Ferdinand’s lucky he gets his hair from his mother; otherwise I think he’d be bald by now.”

“Those poor men,” Edelgard said. She hugged Lysithea again, pressing the young woman to her chest like a prized stuffed animal. She hadn’t fully realized how much she’d missed her until she could put her arms around her again. “Oh, Lysithea, I’ve missed you so, so much…”

“Me too. Is it… true that I don’t exist in the other world?” Lysithea asked.

“I don’t know if you don’t exist,” Edelgard told her, continuing to stroke Lysithea’s hair, “but you haven’t enrolled in the Officer’s Academy. Your older brother, though…”

“M-My older brother?”

“Arcturus von Ordelia.”

Lysithea was silent for a while, and then she curled up in Edelgard’s embrace, burying her head in her shoulder. She trembled a bit and let out a muffled little sniffle.

“He strikes me as… overly excitable,” Edelgard said, gently rubbing her back. Her words caught in her throat. She knew exactly how Lysithea felt—the pain, guilt, wistfulness, all those complex and contradictory feelings tugging and pulling every which way on her heart. “Although I haven’t gotten to know him very well. I’m sorry; I wish you could see him.”

Linhardt cleared his throat. “Excuse me, we don’t have much time, right? Edelgard, do you know what happens when you take back control of your body? Where the, er, _other_ Edelgard goes?”

Edelgard shook her head. “When these episodes happen, I return to find that I’ve passed out for the duration, so it’s unlikely that she returns to her own body. She’s probably still in this world, just locked out of controlling this body.”

Linhardt scribbled some notes. “Incredible. I wonder what’s causing it,” he mumbled.

“The first time I felt my consciousness return to this world,” she added, “I didn’t have control over this body. I just had to watch whatever the other Edelgard said or did.”

“That must have been horrible,” Lysithea said.

“It wasn’t so bad. At least I could see some of you again. Is Byleth here?”

“I’m afraid there’s been a minor rebellion in former Fraldarius territory; she’s gone off to quell it,” Hanneman said.

Edelgard’s heart fell. They kept missing each other. “Tell her I send her my love.”

“Of course.” Annette wrapped her arms around both her and Lysithea. “It’s so good to see you again, Edelgard!”

“I have a few questions about this other world, too,” Linhardt said. “The other Edelgard told us that her world’s Prince Dimitri had white hair. I surmise that he took your place for those Crest experiments, then? Does he have the Crest of Flames?”

“I’d like not to talk about Crests for a while,” Edelgard said, “but yes. I’m investigating him right now.”

“I would love to know what you’ve uncovered, Your Majesty,” Hanneman said. “That reminds me: Linhardt and I are theorizing that you’ve become trapped in an ‘alternate time-line.’ Picture our world as a single line drawn on a page, and the other world as a line parallel to it. Each line is a separate ‘time-line.’ But there are so many similarities to our two world’s histories that I believe the two lines must have intersected at some point, or split apart some time in our collective pasts—like tributaries springing from the same river. Now, I know that parallel lines do not by definition intersect on a flat plane, on a non-euclidean surface—”

“I have a slightly different theory about time,” Linhardt interjected. “Imagine four balls on the edge of a cliff—”

“—Whatever happened to Prince Dimitri may actually be the point of divergence for these two time-lines. Hubert has uncovered some information suggesting that the split, and perhaps these ‘distortions’ that cause our time-lines to intersect may have been artificially engineered—”

A sharp, fishhook-like pain seized Edelgard in her stomach. She set Lysithea aside and held up her hand. “Hanneman, that’s enough for now. You and Linhardt write up your reports and leave them in my study for me to find next time.”

“It’s happening already?” Lysithea gasped, grabbing both of her hands tightly. “You’re _already_ going back?” she asked, crestfallen.

“I’m afraid—” She winced and gasped as the pain struck her again. The other world was trying to claim her. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

Linhardt kept taking notes. “Incredible. What does it feel like, Edelgard?”

“Like a fish on a hook.”

“I wish we could keep in touch,” Annette said. “Don’t miss us too much, though, Edelgard; we’re still here for you and we won’t stop working until we’ve found a way to bring you back, I swear!”

Inspiration struck Edelgard. There _was_ a way she could keep in touch. “Linhardt, can I borrow your notebook and pencil?”

Linhardt reluctantly handed them to her; she turned to a fresh page, ripped it from the binding, and wrote on it a message to her other self.

 _My dearest Byleth. I have missed you and still do miss you so dearly. Sometimes I must strain to remember the touch of your hand so I can fall asleep free of nightmares, and to think of you consigned to sleep alone when we have fought so hard to be together fills me with guilt. Seeing your younger self reminds me so much of what I have become separated from—the you_ _who has grown so much in the past six years, the you who slowly learned, just as I had, to be more than a vessel, to be truly human. She reminds me so much of your hard-earned smile, your warmth—but she is not you, and she could never replace you. And my heart aches all the more to be so close and yet so far away. I long for you—your eyes, your lips, your hair, your everything; the beat of your heart in your chest, which I treasure more than gold, most of all. Please take good care of yourself, my love, so that I may see you when I return. Yours forever, your Edelgard._

Her handwriting was shaky and rushed, each tug of the fishhook in her body, soul, and mind forcing a tremor into her hand. All but panting for breath, she finished the note, folded it, and pressed it into Annette’s hands. “Give this to Byleth when she returns,” she gasped, and she let the notebook and pencil fall to the ground just as the world exploded and was consumed once again in blinding white light.

She woke up back in Gronder Field, the trampled grass tickling her ears as she lay on the ground, the autumn air crisp and cool against her skin in sharp contrast to the comfortable humidity of the palace’s greenhouse. The sun, now descending from its zenith, beat down on her, and a familiar silhouette loomed over her.

“Ah, you’re awake!” Mercedes said, resting a hand on her cheek.

Edelgard felt healing magic ripple through her body, deadening the aching vestiges of her wounds. She blinked against the harsh sunlight bleeding around the edges of Mercedes’ silhouette. “How… Where am I…?”

“You passed out just before Claude’s wyvern took off,” Annette said. “Oh, yeah, that’s right! Claude had a wyvern the whole time and was hiding it until now!”

“Before…” Edelgard sat up and rubbed her head. But she’d seen that; she’d _remembered_ that. How could she have passed out before it had happened? “And… And then what?”

“It was quite intense, but Byleth and Ashe managed to take him down,” Mercedes said. “Ignatz and Marianne came out with Hilda and surrendered after that, so that does it for the Golden Deer.”

“Sylvain’s team is finishing off Hubert right now,” Annette added. “He just won’t quit… he’s clinging to that stronghold like a barnacle.”

Edelgard was barely listening, still reeling from the sudden end to her brief sojourn. She tried to stand up, but her knees were still a little weak and the world swirled sickeningly around her. Mercedes propped her up. “Let’s get you to the medical tent, Edelgard. We’ve only one enemy left… the rest of the Blue Lions can handle this.”

“Don’t you underestimate Hubert von Vestra,” Edelgard mumbled as she staggered off the field with Mercedes’ and Annette’s arms around her. “He’s my retainer… he’s tough.”

She found most of the Black Eagles and Golden Deer, along with quite a few of the Blue Lions, milling around the medical tent, and as she took her place on one of the cots in the tent and let one of Manuela’s infirmary assistants tend to her remaining aches and pains, she heard the faint sound of a trumpet fanfare reverberating across the hill and field and woods. That was it. The last of the Black Eagles had been defeated, and the remaining Blue Lions stood alone on the battlefield.

“I’ll be damned,” Manuela said, pressing a damp cloth to her brow as she sat on one of her own cots. “She actually took us down. Again.”

“She truly is a force to be reckoned with, that Byleth,” Hanneman agreed, lying on a cot across the room from her. “Perhaps next year we should set aside our differences and fight her together.”

“And turn on each other as soon as we’ve taken her down, you nearsighted old fossil?”

“Of course, you hideous, lecherous souse.”

Once she was feeling well enough to walk unaided, Edelgard left the tent and found all three houses gathered together, and Dimitri and Byleth, both worn and covered head to toe with mud and grime and sticky dried blood, flanking a very disheveled and quite grumpy looking Hubert who stood between them as their last prisoner of “war.”

Alois stood among the students. _“This is the end of this year’s Battle of the Eagle and Lion!”_ he called out over the conversing students, his voice booming across Gronder Field. _“And the winners are…”_

Edelgard found herself holding her breath. Annette was buzzing with anticipation; she seemed just about ready to explode. Every other student seemed antsy. Only Mercedes, and of course Byleth, were calm and placid.

An eternity seemed to pass by.

_“The Blue Lions!”_

Cheers erupted from the Faerghus students. Edelgard would have exhaled with relief and joy, but Annette hugged her so tightly that it squeezed every last morsel of air from her lungs.

 _“We won!”_ she squealed. “Thank you so much, Edelgard! I _knew_ we could do it with you on our side!”

“With how much we prepared and how hard we all trained,” Edelgard said, pulling herself away from her, “our victory was assured.”

“Well done, Your Princeliness,” Claude told Dimitri, flashing a roguish grin even in defeat. “I’m certainly not on a hurry to get on your bad side.”

“I assumed you would attack us head-on,” Ferdinand added. “I clearly must rethink my opinion of you. Well done, Dimitri!”

Dimitri shook his head, wearing a humble smile. “Claude, Ferdinand, you both deserve equal praise for a battle well fought. All three of our houses did extremely well. Wouldn’t you agree, Professor?”

Byleth nodded. “The Golden Deer house was very strong.”

“It’s an honor to hear that from a fighter such as yourself,” Claude said, offering her a polite and only slightly mocking bow. “But there’s no getting around it—the Blue Lions were better prepared. It’s almost like you knew exactly how we were going to react to your strategies. In any case, as fun as this has been, I hope we never have to put this experience to use.”

“I would not mind,” Ferdinand said. “I would welcome a challenge from either of you any time. If we were to hold a rematch, I am certain my house would triumph.” He laughed.

“That is nothing to joke about. The true Battle of the Eagle and Lion is best left in the past,” Dimitri said. “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually change the name of this mock battle. Right, Professor?”

Byleth nodded. “I suggest the Battle of the Eagle, the Deer, and the Lion. That’s more inclusive.”

“Right, and there’s nothing more ethical than a war where every side is equally represented,” Claude said, grinning. “On that note, I have a proposition for all of you. When we get back to Garreg Mach, let’s have a grand feast to bring down the walls between our respective houses! And by a ‘grand’ feast, I mean a regular feast in the dining hall. But we’ll push our tables together so we can all eat as equals—no winners, no losers, just friends.”

“You and your feasts, Claude,” Ferdinand said, shaking his head. “I am amazed you can keep such a trim figure, given that you seem to celebrate victories and defeats alike with them. But I suppose food does soothe the pain of loss—the Black Eagles, then, shall join you in the dining hall!”

“I am sure my class will have no objections, either,” Dimitri said. “What about you, Professor?”

Byleth crossed her arms. “We’ll celebrate our victory.”

“Oh, um… I’m not, er, sure that was the point. Or—” He and Edelgard both noticed the smile on Byleth’s face. A smile grew on his face in kind. “Professor, was that a joke? You look so… happy. I love seeing you like this…”

Edelgard felt herself smile as well, but it was a smile that hid the pang of loneliness in her heart. To see such a smile on Byleth’s face was a rare gift indeed. There was no more beautiful sight in the world. It had always been the kind of smile that had made her feel relaxed, at peace—as though even someone like her deserved to be happy.

She turned away, though. This, she had to remind herself, was not _her_ Byleth. _Her_ Byleth was all the way across Fódlan, surely pining for Edelgard as much as Edelgard was pining for her.

“Great work, class,” Claude addressed his fellow Golden Deer. “We might not have won, but we gave everyone else a hell of a fight!”

“Except for Lorenz. What were you thinking, surrendering to the Empire so readily? Don’t you have a shred of Leicester pride?” Arcturus fumed.

“A true noble knows when he is bested, Arcturus,” Lorenz retorted. “To know one’s limits is an essential skill for the nobility… and to have cordial relations with one’s neighbors.”

“And Hilda,” Arcturus grumbled. “What’s this I hear about you napping in a bush?”

“Hey, I participated!” Hilda exclaimed defensively. “And I wasn’t _napping,_ I was _passed out!_ You’ll vouch for me, right, Marianne? Ignatz?”

Ignatz stared at the ground, entranced. “I swear I saw him,” he mumbled, shaking his head. “I swear I saw the Death Knight in those woods…”

Marianne stared at the ground with him, kneading her pale hands worryingly. “Hilda, should we die before we wake tonight, I beg of you, please take good care of Dorte for me.”

Mercedes giggled. “I played a devilish little trick on them,” she told Edelgard coyly. “Illusion magic is a wonderful thing.”

“Shame you couldn’t have taught us any of that,” Sylvain sighed.

“Well, one must learn to crawl before one can run,” she said to him. “But I would be happy to continue your training, Sylvain! If you could magically disguise yourself, surely you’d have more luck with women!”

Edelgard tried not to laugh at Sylvain’s visible discomfort, his cheeks almost as red as his hair.

“Edelgard!” Ferdinand strolled in and rested his hands on her shoulders. “It’s a shame I did not meet you on the battlefield,” he said. “But I suppose hearsay will have to do, and I am impressed by what I have heard others say. You have certainly transformed yourself!”

“She _has,_ ” Annette said to him. “Between her and Professor Byleth, we almost have _two_ teachers sometimes!”

“So I have heard. I do not suppose you are reconsidering your departure from the Black Eagles?”

Before Edelgard could respond, Ingrid grabbed her arm. “We’re not letting her go back. She’s too powerful.”

“Thank you, Ingrid,” Edelgard replied. “I do miss you, Ferdinand, but perhaps I can arrange a demonstration of my newfound skills with you in the training hall tomorrow if you’re eager to taste defeat again so soon.”

“I am _glad_ we did not meet on the battlefield,” Hubert said to her, shooting a playful glare at Ferdinand. “I would not dare to raise a hand against you in battle, Lady Edelgard. If _you_ had charged our stronghold, I would have had no choice but to surrender and leave our house leader to fend for himself.”

“I see,” Dimitri said. “Then our positions should have been reversed, Edelgard.”

Edelgard shook her head. “I don’t think I could stomach facing my own classmates. Meeting Caspar and Dorothea was hard enough. Regardless, surely you could set such things aside for the sake of a simple mock battle,” she told Hubert, trying not to think about how many times she’d come close to killing someone out of habit. “It’s merely a particularly violent game of pretend.”

“I was never so good at that game, Lady Edelgard,” he said.

“As I recall,” Ferdinand said to him, “you were excellent at it until one of Edelgard’s older sisters made a fuss about how boys couldn’t be pegasus knights.”

Edelgard had never seen Hubert’s cheeks turn such a vibrant shade of pink. “I still cannot see why boys cannot _pretend,_ at least,” he muttered, flustered.

Dorothea crossed her arms. “I guess you can be anything you set your mind to, huh, Edie?” she said with a scowl before turning her back on her.

“Dorothea, wait.” Edelgard broke away from her friends and hurried after her, weaving through the massed students. “I’m—sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” Dorothea asked, scoffing derisively. “Sorry for your inherent superiority? So, did you _really_ change, or were you just pretending to be a useless little brat all along?”

Seeing Dorothea glare at her made Edelgard’s heart sink into her stomach like a lump of lead. It was so… _wrong._ She and Dorothea were _supposed_ to be friends. “I _did_ change,” she said. “I realized that it wasn’t fair that I had everything handed to me without any effort while you had to struggle for every scrap you had. I was… ashamed, I realized. Ashamed that so many nobles like myself can coast through life while commoners like you scrape and claw for sustenance on the back alleys of Enbarr and survive only by the whims of luck. Ashamed of how thoughtless and ignorant I had been in my behavior toward you. You are strong, Dorothea, and beautiful, and fierce, and you have succeeded at everything you have set your mind to… and I have been an idiot.”

She offered Dorothea her hand. Dorothea squinted suspiciously at it. “May we let bygones be bygones? Would you accept my apology for how I have treated you? Can we perhaps… be friends?”

Dorothea pushed her hand aside. “How do you know what I had to suffer through? I suppose you’ve heard all the rumors they spread about me?” she snapped. “And if I _wasn’t_ strong and beautiful and fierce, and I _didn’t_ succeed at everything I set my mind to, what would you think of me then? Would you still _want_ to let bygones be bygones?”

“Apparently, I was friends with Hilda before I forgot,” Edelgard replied, still finding it odd to be on the receiving end of Dorothea’s ire against the noble class. She’d always been too much of an atypical noble for her to treat her like a typical one. “So, yes, if you were lazy and stupid, I would still want to be your friend.”

Dorothea looked away and let out a disarmed laugh. “Well, I, um—Petra, how’s your wyvern? Is she going to be okay?” she called out, hurrying away from Edelgard.

Although her Dorothea had been quite kind to the other Edelgard, Edelgard supposed shouldn’t have expected patching things up with _this_ Dorothea to be quite so easy. Once more, she had to remind herself how much less mature these distorted reflections were than the people she knew.

But at least she _knew_ them.

Once the sun had started to set and the clusters of students had begun to break apart and head to their tents to prepare for the next morning’s march back to Garreg Mach, the noble families who had been spectating the battle with Archbishop Rhea came down to visit their children. Ingrid’s father and older siblings, for example, and Caspar’s father and elder brother; Lord Rodrigue Fraldarius and Margrave Gautier; Count Gloucester and Count Ordelia, the latter of whom had three children with him (one of whom must have been Lysithea, though Edelgard could barely recognize her amid her siblings); Margrave Edmund, Baron Dominic—and, of course, Lord Volkhard von Arundel and a veritable army of young men and women and children who, Edelgard assumed with an icy chill of dread dripping down her spine, were her siblings.

“El!” Burkhart cheered, wrapping his arms around her. “Good to see you safe and sound. I’m glad, I must admit, that your professor had you out there with the Leicester kids—I don’t know how I would’ve felt about you cutting down your countrymen!”

“As usual, Professor Byleth thinks of everything,” Edelgard said, gently and gingerly extricating herself from his grip. “How… are you doing?” It was hard to force the words out. It felt like talking to a ghost.

She caught sight of two children among Arundel’s retinue—one a boy about fifteen years old, the other a girl around twelve or thirteen. The boy was a bit short for his age, a bit round around the middle, with an earnest smile stretching from ear to ear and glossy, thick curls of aquamarine hair falling over his brow; the girl was thin, gangling, with long chestnut hair the same shade as Edelgard’s—she must have inherited it from her father, too—held out of her face in an ornately braided updo, round glasses perched atop her nose, and a nervous demeanor.

All Edelgard could do was stare at these oddly-familiar children and wonder who they were—although she didn’t have long to do that before the girl tackled her and nearly knocked her down to the ground.

 _“El!”_ the little girl squealed, clinging to her tightly, her weight forcing Edelgard to stagger and stumble. _“Y-You have to t-tell me everything—I-I c-couldn’t see anything up there!”_ she stammered excitedly, her words tripping eagerly over their own feet.

“Hedy, get off her!” the boy cried out, panicked, as he rushed after her. “El’s all worn out and bruised; you’ll hurt her!”

Burkhart pulled the girl off of Edelgard with ease and set her down. “Easy, Hedy. El didn’t survive Gronder Field for _you_ to do her in.”

Edelgard felt her heart break in two. _Hedy._ Her only little sister Hedwig—the one who had been the last to die in those horrible dungeons, babbling words beyond meaning in a feverish fugue. And that meant the boy at her side was Pasc, sweet Pascal, her only younger brother, who had always been too kind.

And she hadn’t recognized them. Pascal had been nine when he had died; Hedwig had nearly been seven. Now they were both starting to grow up. She’d never imagined that Pasc would fill out like that or that Hedy would be such a beanpole (and she had plenty of years left to get even taller).

The littlest boy and the littlest girl, who should have lived by all rights instead of her, were standing before her—not so little anymore.

“You really were pulling your weight out there, weren’t you?” the young woman standing next to Burkhart said. She could have been his twin—the same nose, the same eyes, the same wavy, wheat-gold hair shining in the sunlight, the same confident posture. In fact, she was. This was Gerlinde, Edelgard’s eldest sister. There was a wry smile on her face. “When Burk told me our little Lazygard had put her nose to the grindstone, I couldn’t believe it,” she added, reaching out and vigorously tousling Edelgard’s hair. “So, what have they been teaching you that’s so engaging?”

Edelgard recoiled. Gerlinde’s lovely, long fingers—she’d always been so good with the piano, Edelgard suddenly recalled—felt like acid pouring over her scalp. “I—I’ve gotten good with an axe, sword, and lance,” she choked, forcing her words past the lump in her throat, “a-and reason, too…”

Pascal grabbed Gerlinde by the arm. “She doesn’t like it when you do that, Lindy!” he protested.

Edelgard tried to take a deep breath to calm herself. Burkhart, Gerlinde, Pascal, Hedwig… nearly half of her siblings were all right here, and they were all bickering and teasing each other like a big, happy family.

 _Her_ big, happy family.

“El, wh-what’s wr-rong?” Hedwig asked her. “D-Did I really h-hurt you?”

“No, I’m fine,” Edelgard said, which was what she always said when she wasn’t anywhere near fine. “It’s just… I’ve gone so long without seeing any of you, I… I missed you.”

“I’d hoped to invite Immanuel, Justine, Dagmar, Joachim, and Heidemarie,” Arundel spoke up, “but unfortunately, they’re a little tied up at the moment. I hope this is a good enough victory gift for my little El.”

“And what would you have done if the Black Eagles or Golden Deer had won, Uncle Volky?” Gerlinde teased him. “Would we have been her consolation prize?”

“I did not allow myself to think of that possibility, darling; I would never bet against a Hresvelg, let alone my own niece,” Arundel said with a wry little smile, and Edelgard wondered if he’d still sided with Prime Minister Ludwig during the (apparently peacefully-resolved) Insurrection of the Seven. _“Anselm!”_ he called out, turning and cupping his hand around his mouth. _“Come here and say hello to your little sister, for the Goddess’ sake!”_

Edelgard turned to follow the direction of his shout and saw a young man, solidly built, about her age with a mop of tousled, shoulder-length jet-black hair standing between Dimitri, Dedue, and Rodrigue, conversing animatedly with the two of them in hushed tones too low to hear. But when Arundel’s voice reached his ears, he turned around and headed across the grounds, weaving through the crowd back to his family.

“Talking with the White Lion, eh, Ansy?” Burkhart said, his arms crossed and an amused smile on his face as the other young man drew nearer. “What’s he got to say? All good things about El, I hope!”

“Yes,” Anselm said, his voice deep and smooth—good heavens, Edelgard had never imagined any of her siblings growing old enough to have a deep voice! “All good things. Apparently, you’re the best student in the Blue Lions, El?”

“Well—I try,” Edelgard said, trying not to remember that the last memory she had of Anselm was of him screaming that he hated her before a gaggle of hooded mages had dragged him off and killed him with their damned blood experiments.

Anselm hugged her. “If you’re going to be a traitor, you might as well be the best, right?” he replied with a wry, teasing smile crossing his face as he pulled back. “And are those northern yokels treating you well?”

“Those ‘northern yokels’ are my classmates, Anselm,” Edelgard said, taken aback—how was she supposed to speak to her elder (albeit by a scant eight months) brother when she’d spent half her life only knowing him as a corpse, only remembering all her regrets and all the things she’d never been able to say to him? “And a few of them,” she added, “are even my friends.”

“Of course they’re treating her well,” Burkhart said. “Did you hear that she and Prince Dimitri are step-siblings?”

Anselm smiled and nodded. “Oh, yes, he was just telling me. Uncle Volkhard, you never told us Aunt Anselma was so… ambitious.”

“That means Prince Dimitri’s a part of our family, too, right?” Pascal asked.

“Well, yes,” Gerlinde said, shrugging, “but also no. It’s more like how we all still call Uncle Volkhard our uncle, even though he’s only El’s uncle by blood…”

“Don’t make things so complicated, Lindy,” Burkhart chided her. “Just say he’s our step-cousin and leave it at that.”

Edelgard retreated from the conversation, keeping her arms pinned over her chest as though to keep her heart from leaping out. The voices of her long-lost, long-dead siblings stung her ears. Mercedes was wrong—ghosts were not just stories. Here in this world, this time-line, a world she didn’t belong in, ghosts were real and solid and very much alive.

“Um… El?” Hedwig asked, tugging on her sleeve. “El, a-are you… ok-kay?”

“I’m fine,” she croaked, taking a hasty step back. This place, these people, were like poison to her. Acid eating through metal. Living, breathing, talking, laughing reminders of the injustice of her existence. Her breath felt short, as though she were lying in a sealed coffin and had started to run out of air—or as though she’d been put back into that horrible dungeon where she belonged—

“I’m f-fine,” she repeated, frailer, weaker. She shook her head. “Just… tired. So tired…”

“It’s been a long day,” Arundel said, taking her by the arm. “Now, Count Bergliez has kindly offered us his castle to stay the night in—would you care to join us?”

_He took her by the arm._

_Thales,_ every part of Edelgard’s brain screamed at once, and she wrenched her arm free of his grasp. “No!” she cried out. “I… I’ll go myself,” she added, conscious of half a dozen concerned, bemused stares boring into her. “I just need to take a walk and clear my head first.”

She fled from her family, their happy, idle chatter and laughter still ringing in her ears as the sun inched toward the horizon. She wandered aimlessly, the abandoned battlefield that would from now on lay fallow edging into the periphery of her vision. None of it registered to her, not even the cruel dramatic irony that she alone knew that today had marked the last Battle of the Eagle and Lion. What cruel wrinkle in time, she asked herself, had forced her to take another Edelgard’s place and see the smiling faces of the people who by all rights should have lived instead of her?

 _“El!”_ an unfamiliar voice called out to her. She turned around to find her brother Anselm approaching her. “What’s wrong?” he asked as he closed in on her.

“Nothing,” Edelgard said. “I’m just a little tired.”

“Who’s bullying you?”

“Excuse me?”

Anselm laid a hand on her shoulder. She couldn’t stop herself from reflexively recoiling.

“Who,” he asked, his voice growing lower, sharper, more urgent, “is bullying you, El?”

“No one,” she said. “I’m not—”

“Is it someone from the Blue Lions? Do they not accept you? Or is it someone from the Black Eagles?” Anselm’s grip on her shoulder tightened; his eyes narrowed and his brow furrowed angrily. “Is that why you transferred houses? Was someone _abusing_ you? I hear there’s a commoner in the Eagles this year; is it _them?”_

“No,” Edelgard stated, pushing herself away from him. She couldn’t look at his face. The Anselm she had known had stopped loving her many years ago, had wasted the last of his breaths telling her he hated her—it was too much that he would be here in front of her, older and stronger and braver, and that he would _care_ about her. “I can’t explain,” she said, “but no one is bullying or abusing me or—”

“Is it someone in the church? Or one of the knights? Is it Ferdinand? Is he mistreating you? Why are you so afraid of being touched?”

“Enough!” she snapped, slapping away his hand. “I am not being bullied, or tormented, or abused, or any such thing by anyone or anything except for my own thoughts!”

Her words, sharp and stern, hung in the air. Anselm, taken aback, only stared dumbly at her.

“I,” she said, and then her voice gave out. Her chest rose and fell, her heart rattled in its cage like an unruly songbird, her pulse throbbed. Her mouth hung open, her tongue and throat moved, but no sound came out, not even a whimper.

Undaunted, Anselm reached out and set his hand upon her cheek. “What happened to you, El?” he asked, his voice tempered with worry and concern.

She took his hand. Soft, manicured, unblemished, unscarred. She took his hand, fell into his waiting arms, and sobbed into his chest.

At this age in her world, Edelgard had thought she had long since lost the ability to shed so much as a single tear. From the day she had arrived at Garreg Mach—from long before then, in fact—to the end of the war, she had never cried once. And she would insist that she had not cried when Dimitri’s headless corpse had fallen at her feet, that it had only been the rain falling on her face. She had shed tears for her siblings, and from then on she had never cried, not even for herself, up until until the moment she had cradled Byleth’s lifeless body and felt desperately for a pulse and those long-maintained floodgates had faltered and burst open.

At this age in this world, though, she cried. She sank into her brother’s waiting embrace and cried.

“Anselm,” she said to him, her voice hoarse and weak and muffled, “what I am about to tell you may sound… strange. But… you would believe me, right?”

“Of course, El. You can tell me anything.”

“I’ve been having these… dreams, lately. The same dream, night after night, and so vivid that I don’t fully realize it when I wake up. In my dreams, I see a future where you, Burkhart, Hedy, Pascal… all of you die. Tortured before my eyes, crying out in vain for salvation as our father stands by, helpless to do anything but watch. The dreams end the same way… I am alone.”

“It’s okay, El,” he said to her. “They’re just dreams.” She felt his hand brush the hair away from her brow and his lips gently press against her forehead. “We’ll always be here for you. Come to Castle Bergliez and spend the night with us; you won’t have any nightmares. I’ll keep you safe.”

Edelgard nestled in his chest and held him closer. The tighter she clung to him, the more it hurt; the more it hurt, the tighter she clung. But it was an odd, _good_ hurt, and so she held him closer.

* * *

It was another two days’ march from Gronder Field through Myrddin back to Garreg Mach Monastery, where Claude made good on his promise of a grand feast. The Knights of Seiros were there as well to join in on the celebration, further crowding the dining hall, and among those knights was Professor Byleth’s father, Captain Jeralt Eisner.

As Edelgard expected, Byleth loaded her plate with as much food as a normal person could eat in one day and a little bit more, and Edelgard knew that she would be going back for seconds, and possibly thirds, and if she was truly daring, fourths. It was always astonishing to behold the sheer volume of food Byleth could inhale in the name of celebration without getting sick or sluggish. The only time Edelgard had seen Byleth suffer any ill effects from overeating had been the night of their wedding.

“Kid!” Jeralt cheered, giving Byleth a hearty, firm slap on the shoulder as she dug into her food. A normal person might have been thrown to the floor by the force of such a gesture, but Byleth was not a normal person in any respect. “Sorry I missed the battle; I tried to get back as fast as I could, but… Anyway, however you did, I’m proud as hell of you.”

Byleth set down her fork and swallowed the mound of mashed potatoes she’d just shoved into her mouth, her throat bobbing. A small smile crossed her face, and then it widened, and her lips parted to show a crescent sliver of parsley-flecked teeth. “We won,” she announced.

Jeralt’s kind, paternal smile widened just a little bit to match the one on his daughter’s face. Neither of them showed much emotion; their inexpressive faces ran in the family, it seemed. “I knew you’d kick ass. So,” he said, looking over the Blue Lions clustered around her at the table, “who was the star of the show here? Prince Dimitri?”

Dimitri gave him a bashful shake of his head. “No, no. All my strength would have been for naught,” he said, hooking his arm around Edelgard’s and pulling her close, “if it hadn’t been for our professor—and Princess Edelgard’s leadership on the eastern front.”

“It was a team effort,” both Edelgard and Byleth answered at once, their words tripping over each other.

“None of us alone could have won,” Edelgard added, “without all of us.”

“Princess Edelgard, eh?” Jeralt offered her his hand across the table. “A pleasure to meet you.”

Edelgard took his thick, meaty, calloused hand and gave it a firm shake. It was so different than Byleth’s hand, but its warmth was the same.

Warmth. Jeralt was a _warm_ man, hard and stony but radiating a familiar and welcome heat just like his daughter. While he wouldn’t get any fatherhood accolades for raising Byleth in his line of work from the tender age of ten years old, he was perhaps as good a father as a consummate mercenary could possibly be, in much the same way that Dimitri was as good a cook as a man with no sense of taste could possibly be.

He was, more or less, a good man, and he loved Byleth, and Byleth loved him in return just as much.

And in two months, he’d be a dead, good man, and Byleth would be crying for the first time in her life, and it would all be Edelgard’s fault. She would watch her teacher’s strong, stoic face crumple like used tissues, crack like a beautiful vase thrown to the floor; she would hear her teacher bawl like a child; she would stand there, useless, every trite and hollow phrase of consolation and condolence dying on her tongue before it could crawl from her mouth, finally deciding on some disgustingly stoic, arm’s-length appeal to her inner strength because what else _could_ she say when she had all but driven the knife into his back herself?

“A pleasure,” she said, swallowing a lump in her throat, “to meet you, Captain Jeralt.”

“So,” Jeralt said to Byleth, “you’ve got a Faerghus prince and an Adrestian princess in your class, huh? Who’s next? Gonna poach someone from Leicester next and round out the set?”

There was a bit of a pinkish tinge to Byleth’s cheeks. She turned her head and looked away sheepishly. “Dad…”

“Keep making connections like this and you’ll be set for life.” Jeralt chuckled. “I’m sure after your victory, kids from the other houses will be lining up to be one of the Blue Lions. You’ll have to beat ‘em off with a stick!”

“I don’t think I could beat off that many students,” Byleth admitted.

Ingrid drove her elbow into Sylvain’s side to stop him from snickering.

 _“Do you_ ever _listen to yourself speak?”_ a little girl’s voice, faint and nearly indistinct against the bustle of the reveling students, chided Byleth in an exasperated, put-upon tone.

Byleth cleaned her plate and stood up to have her second full-course dinner of the night, but Dimitri stopped him. “Um, Professor, if I may… Can you meet me outside the dormitories? And you as well, Edelgard. I will not keep you away from your meals long, I promise.”

Byleth nodded, and she and Edelgard followed Dimitri out of the dining hall and across the lawn to the dormitories. Dimitri marched up the steps. “Wait here, please,” he said, ascending the staircase. Byleth and Edelgard waited there.

“Thank you so much, Professor,” Edelgard said to Byleth as the two of them stood in the cold, brisk night air. With the Battle of the Eagle and Lion behind them, autumn was on its way out; it wouldn’t be long, if Edelgard remembered correctly, until the first snowfall of the year. “Thank you for everything. I hope I haven’t been too, um… egotistical, as of late?”

Byleth smiled and patted her on the shoulder. “You’ve been fine.”

“Thank you,” Edelgard said, feeling her cheeks burn against the cold air. “I’m… This might sound like a strange thing for me, a princess, to say, but… I’ve never been happier taking orders from someone as I am taking orders from you. There is… something about you that makes pleasing you the most important thing in the world to me.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“No, it’s… a strange sort of charisma you possess.” Edelgard wrung her hands nervously, embarrassed to be speaking like this to a woman who wasn’t even _her_ Byleth, no matter how similarly they looked and acted. On this night in her past, she’d told Byleth the same thing, and perhaps because she’d been the crown princess, it hadn’t sounded so awkward.

And her thoughts turned to the letter she had written for her wife, her own Byleth, and the urge to speak those sentiments to this one, as wrong as it would be, felt overwhelming.

And why not? She was _Byleth._

“What I mean is,” Edelgard said, tripping a bit over her words, “that someone such as you, Byleth, should bend your knee to no one.”

“So… you think I should rule the world?” Byleth asked her, cupping her hand thoughtfully around her chin.

“I cannot think of many other people who are qualified.”

Dimitri bounded back down the staircase, carrying a bundle of furs in his arms. Both looked to have once belonged to great dire wolves—one of them a silvery-gray pelt speckled with black and trimmed with white, the other a foxlike auburn bordering on scarlet. There was a nervous smile on his face.

“I, um… asked Rodrigue to send these to me a few weeks ago,” he said, handing the gray pelt to Byleth and the red pelt to Edelgard. “I thought, since it is getting colder, and we may be making more trips to the northern parts of Faerghus, that you two—especially you, Edelgard—might, um… might need help keeping warm. And there is nothing that keeps one warm better than the fur of Faerghus dire wolves.”

Edelgard ran her hand through the auburn pelt. It had been fashioned into a long, loose, cloaklike mantle. The undercoat was dense, soft, and downy; the guard hairs were long, coarse, and bristly. She tossed it over her shoulders and clasped it over her collar, and suddenly, the only parts of her body that were still cold were her face and hands. Byleth donned her mantle as well. It engulfed her jacket, the speckled silvery fur blending almost completely with the gray fabric in the dark.

“Do you… like them?” Dimitri asked. “I… I confess that I am not much for gift-giving, and I do not have many fond memories of gift-receiving, so… Do you like them?”

“It’s nice,” Byleth said. “I like it.”

Edelgard nodded. “It’s very thoughtful of you, Dimitri. Thank you.”

“I think I look a bit like that, um… Hurricane King person,” Byleth added. “That was what he called himself, right? That guy with the wolf pelt and the creepy helmet?”

“I—I was not thinking about that,” Dimitri said, taken aback. “Furs are… rather common winter wear in Faerghus, especially Fhirdiad, so I did not quite make the connection. Does that upset you, Professor?”

“No, it’s nice,” Byleth replied. “Thank you, Dimitri. It’s very sweet of you.”

“Sweet. Um…” Dimitri stared down at his boots. “I have had a wonderful time in your class, Professor. I cannot restate that enough. Nor can I thank you enough for our victory in the Battle of the Eagle and Lion, as well as everything else.”

“We all did our part.”

“Yes, that is true—but it was your instruction that allowed us to reach our full potential. Isn’t that right, Edelgard? I can think of no better example of Byleth Eisner’s prodigious pedagogy than you.”

“You flatter me, Dimitri,” said Edelgard, “but yes, Professor—I, too, cannot thank you enough for being a part of my life.” Her heart burned in her chest. There was so much more she wanted to say, but couldn’t, because those words were meant for someone who looked and acted like the woman standing before her but wasn’t her. “I—” Her mouth was dry. “I cannot thank you enough.”

Edelgard heard the faint sound of that mysterious little girl’s voice drift across the air again. _“Byleth,”_ it said, _“don’t you have a…”_

For a second, if she squinted, she could swear she saw a flash of green and gold near Byleth’s head. What was this? Visual and auditory hallucinations? Was she going mad?

“Oh, that reminds me,” Byleth said. “I, um, have gifts for you two, too. Hold on a bit,” she said, and she hurried across the dormitories to her quarters, vanishing into the night and leaving Edelgard and Dimitri alone together.

“So,” Dimitri said, “you really like it?”

Edelgard wrapped the fur mantle tighter around her shoulders and hid her hands in it. “I do. It’s… I’ve always been quite sensitive to the cold, and it’s only gotten worse as I grow older. In a few weeks from now, I think I’ll have trouble taking it off,” she said, a little laugh escaping her lips as she let the fur’s warmth envelop her.

Dimitri smiled, his icy blue eyes warm. “Be careful. In Faerghus, there are folktales regarding those who take to wearing the pelts of beasts and forget to take them off. Eventually, they become beasts themselves. Werewolves, they are called. And the Red Wolf Moon is upon us,” he said, “so… take care you do not become a red wolf yourself.” He reached out and buried his hand up to his wrist in Edelgard’s mantle.

“What about the Hurricane King, then?”

His smile faded and he withdrew his hand. “What about him?”

“When we saw him, he wore a wolf’s pelt and his helmet was shaped like a wolf’s head. Do you think _he_ might be a werewolf?”

He blinked, then brushed his snowy hair from his brow. “…Perhaps he is. Or perhaps we have both heard too many of Mercedes’ scary stories.” He shook his head. “By the way, Edelgard… I have been thinking about what you said to me a month or so ago. About hopes and dreams, and being a sword that grasps its own hilt. You spoke so strongly about it, so I wonder… What are your hopes, then? Because you sound quite motivated in general, but I cannot figure out for the life of me _what_ you want to do with your life.”

Edelgard wasn’t quite sure how to answer honestly without giving too much away or possibly alienating him. On top of that, if her answer didn’t match up with something Dedue might have gleaned from his research into this world’s Edelgard before the time-lines had intersected, then he might be even more suspicious that she was a changeling sent by Rhea to spy on him, just as Glenn had been sent by Those Who Slither in the Dark.

“Um… actually,” she said, stalling, “I just think…”

Byleth returned at exactly the right moment, slipping silently out of the darkness like an assassin who had lay in wait just long enough to strike at her target. “Hi. I’m back,” she said, “and I have your gifts.” She handed a little bundle of parchment paper bound with twine to Dimitri, and another to Edelgard.

Dimitri opened his package first, letting the paper and twine fall to his feet as he removed the pair of black leather gloves inside. “Professor… Where did you get these? I have been looking all over for these!”

“I found the pair you lost a few weeks ago,” Byleth said, “but they were worn out and almost falling apart. So I decided to take them to a tanner and get them repaired and reinforced. I hope you like them.”

He slipped them on over his bare hands, hiding the pale, scarred skin. His smile returned. “They fit like… well. This is wonderful, Professor. I do not know what to say. Except, of course, ‘thank you.’ Thank you, Professor. Again.”

Edelgard opened her package and found waiting for her inside a silver hair clip with three long black eagle feathers flowing out of it. “I figured out you were homesick,” Byleth said. “So… the black eagle feathers. That’s an Adrestian thing, right? Anyway, it’s a hair clip. It goes in your hair, I think. I’ve never worn one.”

“Professor…” Edelgard whispered, taking the hair clip (which did, in fact, go in her hair) and slotting it into place above her ear. She _was_ homesick, more than Byleth could possibly imagine. She found herself fighting back tears. “That is so kind of you. Thank you so much.”

Dimitri cleared his throat. “I, um… I feel silly admitting this now, Professor, but when you first came to lead our class… you unnerved me. You never smiled, and you never showed anger either. And yet you didn’t appear to be suppressing your emotions. You just… didn’t seem to have them at all. At first I thought perhaps you just didn’t care for us, but I was wrong. In the half-year we’ve spent together, I’ve seen the glow of humanity in your eyes and in your actions countless times. And I… When I’m with you,” he said, clearing his throat again, “and you as well, Edelgard, I—I am not so sure how to explain it, but… I feel this—light. Something… inside… that feels like…”

He shook his head. “I—I suppose I should retire to bed; these past five days have been exhausting and I am clearly not thinking straight. Please, feel free to return to the feast. As for me, I think I’ve had enough. Thank you, both of you, for the wonderful evening.” He rushed the words out as quickly as possible and hurried back up the staircase.

“No problem,” Byleth called out after him.

* * *

Edelgard and Byleth returned to the feast and the revelry, which had proceeded apace without them, ran longer and longer into the night. Some people started dancing. Some people, particularly Manuela, started dancing on the tables (some people, particularly Manuela, had gone quite out of control without Seteth’s dour insistence on rule-abiding and good-example-setting to rein them in).

Eventually, Edelgard found herself sitting at another table next to Jeralt via some whim of the human whirlwind that swirled through the monastery’s dining hall with reckless abandon. He was drinking a quart of mead like water, with several empty tankards clustered around him. Hanneman was pulling a nearly-passed-out Manuela, whom Jeralt had apparently drank well under the table as a means of stopping her from dancing on it, away; she halfheartedly swatted at her bitter rival with a limp arm, which was about all she could manage. Amazingly, Jeralt didn’t seem the slightest bit drunk for all he’d imbibed.

“Your Highness,” he said to her with a curt nod, as politely as one could with the lip of a tankard pressed to their mouth. “I’d ask if you wanted a drink, but ale’s a bit of a commoner’s beverage, isn’t it? I’m sure the rest of you nobles and royals have plenty of good wine here.”

“I’ve never had much of a taste for wine, actually,” Edelgard said.

Jeralt furrowed his brow, but only for a moment. “Huh? Oh, right—they start you kids on wine pretty early in Adrestia, don’t they?”

“I confess I’ve never been one for alcohol of _any_ sort, actually,” she admitted. “I prefer to keep my wits sharp. But… I’ll try some ale, I suppose. Byl—Professor Byleth has been having me try a lot of things.”

Before she knew it, there was a pint of ale staring her in the face, a foamy cream-colored head hiding a deep amber pool. It had a bitter, yet fruity and tart taste—blackberry or black currant, perhaps? Either way, she found she liked it. She was sure that in her own world and her own body, with its more sensitive palate, she would hate it, but here—it was quite good.

“I am surprised,” she said, “that there is this much alcohol in the monastery.” Of course, in her time and her world, the Black Eagles Strike Force had depended on the monastery’s ample supply of beer and wine to keep morale up, but she was still taken aback that here and now, in the monastery’s heyday, the monks produced so much so quickly.

“Kid—uh, Princess—there’s _one_ thing you’ve got to know about the world. Monks. Nuns. They love beer. They love wine. And you know what they love more than drinking beer and wine?”

“The Goddess, I suppose.”

 _“Selling_ beer and wine. Every monastery in Fódlan makes its money, fills its coffers, and supports its monks and nuns’ habits—heh, heh, _habits—_ through ale, lager, shiraz, and zinfandel, and Garreg Mach is no different. You think _taxes_ are enough for all _this?”_

“I’d always thought so.”

“Well, the taxes fund the knights. But the rest is all booze, Princess. And supplying it keeps the people on the Church’s side. Keep your people drunk, and they’ll love you forever.”

“Ah. I’d thought it was the extrajudicial execution of heretics that kept people on the Church’s side.”

“Well, the killings help. But the rest is—”

“—All booze, yes. I get it.” Edelgard kept drinking, and the more she drank, the better it tasted. She was starting to see the truth to Jeralt’s words. Perhaps alcohol—beer, wine, spirits—was an important facet of society she had neglected due to her own personal distaste for such things. Perhaps she could bring this knowledge back to her world and unify Fódlan through a network of distilleries, breweries, and wineries stretching across her newly-engorged empire. The next time the time-lines crossed, she would have to write another note about it.

Before she knew it, there were several empty pints before her, and Jeralt’s choices of conversation topics had started getting _weird._ “You know, Princess… all these years,” he said, “and I’ve never aged a day, I swear. Showing little Byleth the same face since the day she was born; not a wrinkle gained or lost.”

“It’s good that you still feel young at heart,” Edelgard replied.

Jeralt laughed. “Nah, I feel _old_ at heart. Young everywhere else. Ask Alois, he’ll vouch for me. Thirty years he’s known me. Ask him how many new gray hairs I’ve gotten in all that time.”

“I suppose not many?”

“Guess how old I am.”

Edelgard pondered the question. “Unless you were my age or younger when you had Byleth, you must be in your forties, at least,” she said. “But… Alois met you thirty years ago, didn’t he? So you must be in your fifties…”

“Way off.” Jeralt took another long draught from his newest tankard. “To be honest, I don’t know myself. I stopped counting after one hundred. Why bother, right?”

Edelgard coughed and gagged on a mouthful of ale. “O-One _hundred?”_ Was this a joke?

“Yeah. Got a blood transfusion way back, back when I first met… well, she didn’t call herself Rhea back then.”

“Archbishop Rhea?”

“That’s what she calls herself now. Back then… Who was the archbishop back then? Never mind. It was still her. Point is, I saved her life, she gave me some blood, and ever since, well… between you and me, I think I’m immortal.” Jeralt lifted his head and glanced across the sea of revelers, and Edelgard followed his gaze until she found Byleth standing amid the ebb and flow of students and faculty, speaking with Alois and Catherine. “Crazy story, huh? If anyone else told it, I bet Rhea would have them executed. If anyone believed it.” He laughed.

“I’ve got a crazy story, too,” Edelgard said, her brain humming pleasantly in her head as she took another swig. “I am a time traveler from the future, you see—well, my mind, not my body. I seem to be… possessing my younger body. But I digress. In the future, I’m the Emperor of all of Fódlan—the three countries have been unified, you see—and—” She found herself laughing. _Giggling,_ even, like a little girl. “Well, er, Captain Jeralt, forgive my impertinence, but… I, in the future, may have—I married your daughter!”

Jeralt looked at her. The smile on his face had frozen into something more resembling a grimace and the mirth has faded just a little from his eyes. Edelgard felt her blood run cold and the solid anchor of sobriety pull her back down from the heady heights of being utterly soused. What had she just said? What had she _done?_

While Edelgard desperately thought of what she could say to salvage this, Jeralt threw his head back and laughed. He pounded his fist on the table. A few tears leaked down his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. “So she’s… what, in the future? Queen? Emperor-Consort?”

Edelgard mustered a nervous laugh and nodded. Was he humoring her, or did he actually believe her?

“I don’t make an ass of myself at the wedding, did I?”

“No, um…” She sighed. “You…” She paused, took another swig to give herself some time to think, and swished it around in her mouth a bit to give herself even more time to think. No matter how much time she gave herself, she couldn’t seem to think very much. “You don’t make it. I mean, you can’t make it. Away on business. To Almyra.”

“Damn. Well, at least business is good.”

“You… _believe_ me?” she asked, incredulous.

“Kid, I’m immortal. I’ve seen some shit.” Jeralt patted her on the shoulder in a way that might have been patronizing, but Edelgard was honestly too soused to tell. “Time travel. Wow. So, what’s the future like, _Emperor_ Edelgard?”

Edelgard didn’t answer. Her brain was starting to work again. Sticky, beer-soaked gears and cogs were turning freely. She couldn’t change his fate in her world, but here…

She grabbed him by the arm and leaned in. _“Jeralt,”_ she whispered, _“stay very, very far away from Glenn Fraldarius.”_

Jeralt looked at her again. He studied her for a while. Edelgard felt unduly warm, and not just from the heavy fur draped over her shoulders.

“Okay, Time Emperor,” he said. “I’m sure you know what you’re talking about.” He went back to drinking.

After Edelgard had had enough—which was a decision that, much to her embarrassment, Ferdinand and Hubert ended up making for her—she returned to her quarters, more than ready (albeit more resigned than willing) to fall into a deathlike slumber and await the killer hangover that would surely await her in the morning. But once she had stumbled into her room, she found a little folded slip of white paper on the floor—no doubt slipped under her door and unfolded it to find a message scrawled in the same disguised handwriting as the first note that troubled her for the past month.

I KNOW WHERE YOU CAME FROM

16 GARLAND MOON 1186

Edelgard no longer felt drunk. A chill ran up her spine, forcing her to shiver in spite of the warm mantle still draped over her shoulders.

Whoever had left this note—and the first note—knew the date of her wedding.


	10. Gazing at Sirius

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Blue Lions gain a few new students and Edelgard enjoys a relaxing weekend fishing trip with her classmates and her future father-in-law.

Captain Jeralt stared down intently at the unfolded slips of paper Edelgard had set out on his desk, a grim and serious look settling on his face as he scratched at the scruffy beard lining his jawline. “And you’re sure these aren’t just from some disgruntled student? Like… what’s-his-face, the weird kid… Hubert?”

“It’s from someone who knows what I am,” Edelgard insisted, pointing to the second and most recent note. “Look at this date. Sixteenth of the Garland Moon, 1186.”

“That’s just shy of six years in the future,” Jeralt noted. “Anything important happen on that date?”

“My wedding.”

His face softened. “…My kid’s gonna be a Garland Bride?” he muttered almost wistfully.

The Garland Moon was considered a traditional time for marriage; deep down, it was said, every woman longed to be wed under that auspicious moon with a garland of white roses woven into her hair. Edelgard didn’t care one way or another about such a tradition, and she hadn’t thought Byleth had cared either and had just assumed that one of her friends had suggested the date to her. But right now, seeing that look on Jeralt’s face—a soft twinge at the corner of his hard, chapped lips—Edelgard understood why.

“I’m sure the writer knew that,” she said to him. “This letter had to come from someone who knows what that date means to me—someone from the future. But the wedding wasn’t public, and I only invited close friends, so only they know the exact date; the legal records of our union were backdated two weeks prior for security purposes.”

“And if one of your friends is a time traveler like you, they wouldn’t be leaving such a cryptic message.” He nodded. “I get it. That just makes it weirder. Is anything else important about this date?”

She shook her head. “I’m sure the date is important to someone else for some reason or another. But not to me.”

“Hmm.” Jeralt stroked his beard. “Well, I’m stumped. Maybe you should let Professor Hanneman in on your secret; he’s a smart guy. Or Shamir. She’s a tracker—could probably pick up a lot of clues from just looking at this paper. Sorry, my head’s not built for mysteries.”

“Even if you can’t help, at least I have someone to talk to,” Edelgard said, folding up the slips of paper and stowing them away as she made her way to the door of Jeralt’s office. At the very least, it felt good to have a proper co-conspirator at last, even if it was someone she had never expected. She was still shocked that Jeralt actually believed her; she thought he’d been humoring her during the victory feast. “For even just that alone, I’m thankful, Captain.”

“No problem, Your Highness. Oh—What’s she like in the future?”

“Hmm?” Her hand hovered over the doorknob.

“Byleth.”

“She hasn’t aged a day.” Edelgard swallowed a lump in her throat. “Neither have you.”

“Exactly the same?”

“Not exactly. She smiles more. Laughs occasionally. Sounds like… bells. Bright bells.” She wondered if she should tell him that Byleth had a heartbeat.

“That’s nice. I’ve always worried about how stoic she is.”

Edelgard’s hand stayed just a fraction of an inch away from the doorknob, her thoughts turning to the sight that was burned into her mind—the sight of Byleth weeping over her father’s corpse, weeping for the next month as her students tried their best to console her.

“She’s gotten much less stoic,” she said, trying to keep herself composed, “since your…”

“Since my what?” Jeralt asked.

“Since you’re so supportive of her,” Edelgard lied, “after she announces her engagement. Your happiness brought a whole new world to her.” She set her hand on the doorknob and turned it, but as soon as the door opened, she found herself nearly knocked off her feet as Professor Manuela charged into the room.

“Jeralt,” Manuela announced, “I need a drink.”

“Saint fucking Cichol, it’s not even two in the afternoon yet,” Jeralt said to her. “Besides, you look like you’ve been drinking enough already.”

He was right. Manuela looked haggard, Edelgard noticed: pale, ashen, with deep gray crescents hanging under bloodshot eyes. Typically, this was a look reserved for the morning after a catastrophically bad date, but as far as Edelgard knew, she hadn’t been seeing anyone else. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew what I just saw. Break out the good stuff. Oh, hi, Princess Edelgard. Congrats on distinguishing yourself in battle.”

“Thank you, Professor; take care,” Edelgard said, weaving around her and making a hasty exit. A leaden lump had formed in her gut. It had been around this time of year in her world when Solon’s experiments had begun to bear fruit and a mysterious illness had swept through the village of Remire—was that where Manuela had come from?

She exited into the hallway and let the door swing shut behind her, then crouched down to the floor and pressed her ear to the door, straining to hear what Manuela might say in between swigs of booze.

 _“So what’s this all about?”_ Jeralt asked Manuela. _“You’re not usually a day drinker. Did you get dumped again?”_

_“I wish. It’s about work.”_

_“Hmm. You and Shamir just got back from Remire, right?”_

There was a long pause, presumably while Manuela wet her whistle. Edelgard recalled the strange sight of the half-entombed men at Zanado. _Remire,_ one had whispered with his last breath. She had wondered what horrible deeds were being wrought there in this world so different from her own—and now it seemed she would find out.

 _“I did,”_ Manuela answered, unusually laconic.

_“I heard rumors people have been getting sick there. Had your work cut out for you, huh?”_

_“You don’t know the half of it.”_ Another pause, another swig. _“First patient I looked at, healthy guy, big, strapping young lad—all his teeth were falling out. He—He didn’t have a_ jawbone _anymore. It was… just pliable flesh. Another girl, a little girl—she had a goiter on her neck, swollen to half the size of her head. And a man… an old man… had burns all over his arms and chest, red and black, like he’d been roasted over a spit! I went to put a poultice on the burns and dress them and… his skin_ _just_ sloughed _right off, like…”_ She retched. _“Like meat off the… Meat off the b—I think I’m gonna be sick—”_

Edelgard heard the clatter of hasty commotion followed by the sound of vomit splattering against the bottom of an empty pail.

 _“Take it easy,”_ Jeralt said once Manuela had stopped vomiting. _“Need some water?”_

Another pause, another glug, this time of something that wasn’t intoxicating.

 _“Thanks,”_ Manuela croaked. _“I did what I could, but… concoctions and white magic could only do so much—the ones who were sick were… I_ swear _they were rotting from the inside out. It’s times like this I wish the Church allowed autopsies.”_

 _“Sounds like the_ last _thing you’d want to do is cut one of those corpses open.”_

_“Not me, personally, no. But someone else might have less of a—a gag reflex…”_

Another scramble for a pail, or perhaps a chamberpot, and another round of vomiting.

_“So… what do you think it was? A plague? Poison? Dark magic?”_

_“If it_ is _dark magic, it’s the darkest I’ve ever seen.”_

Edelgard felt her blood run cold, flickering snatches of memory—fever, knives, open wounds, weeping sores, gangrene, bloody vomit—running through her head against the vivid images of deformity and decay conjured by Manuela’s words. What perverse experiments were Those Who Slither in the Dark conducting in Remire? Could they be doing something _worse_ than what they’d done to her?

_“Is there anything I can do? My child and I owe the people of Remire. If something’s happening there, we’ve got to help them.”_

_“Thanks for the offer, but I don’t know what you could do to help. I still have a lot more studying to do. If it’s a plague, it could be worse than the one that struck Faerghus. I have to see if it’s infectious.”_

_“You’re going_ back _there?”_

 _“Dammit, Jeralt, I’m a_ physician, _not a…”_

She heard footsteps coming from down the hall and hastily pulled away from the door.

“Edelgard?” Byleth asked, coming to a stop and looming over her. “You okay?”

“Ah, Professor—I just had to adjust one of my bootstraps,” Edelgard said, picking herself up. “If you mean to speak with your father, I believe he’s talking to Professor Manuela right now.”

Byleth nodded. “Oh. Thank you.”

“It’s not… urgent, I hope?”

“No, it’s not urgent.” She shook her head. “I was just going to talk to him about that fishing trip I promised the class. There’s a mountain stream just a little to the east, only a short hike from here, and it’s perfect. I want him to come.”

“Sounds great.” Edelgard realized she was holding herself stiffly around Byleth. There really wasn’t so much as a single hair’s difference between her and her wife. An exact copy, a perfect replica in face and voice, and a little voice in the back of Edelgard’s mind was screaming at her to reach out to her, to caress her, to feel, to touch…

She and Byleth headed down the hallway and downstairs together. She kept her hands pinned to her sides.

“So you like fishing,” Byleth said as the two of them went outside. Hoarfrost crunched under their boots; a glittering, silvery glaze had descended over the monastery, coating the grass and frosting the roofs and the hedges and rosebushes.

“Yes? Is that… odd?”

“I didn’t think so when you told me, but I guess… it’s not a usual hobby for a princess.”

Edelgard heard the faint, ghostly girl’s voice again. _“This one truly is nearly as odd as_ you,” it said. She stuck a finger in her ear and tried to clean it out. Why was she constantly hearing these things that weren’t there? Was she going mad?

“Are you okay?” Byleth asked her.

“No, I just, um… I’ve had this incessant ringing in my ear and it’s quite vexing. Anyway, I’ve done a fair bit of fishing myself in the river that runs through Enbarr to the sea. I… A while back, I had a friend who was a mercenary, not unlike you,” she lied, “and she taught me how to fish.”

“That’s interesting,” Byleth said flatly, but Edelgard knew she meant it earnestly. “I wish Flayn hadn’t left. She’d like to go on this fishing trip.”

“She would. Perhaps when the Hurricane King has been found and detained, it will be safe for her to return here.”

“I hope so. That reminds me—he and that Death Knight were spotted in town last night, so be careful.”

“What were they doing?”

“They were going after, um…” Byleth put a finger to her chin and thought. “A church official. I think his name’s Aelfric.”

“Do you know why?”

She shrugged. “Ask his parents.”

“No, I mean why he was attacked.” Edelgard recalled something Hubert had said to her. “They say the Death Knight targets people with great faith in the Goddess, doesn’t he?”

“That’s what Alois told me,” Byleth said, patting her on the back, “so you with your whole revelation thing… You should be extra careful. Don’t go out alone at night.”

“I won’t, Professor,” Edelgard said. And then, before she could stop herself, she added, “Would you care to accompany me, then?”

She stood in place, frozen, mortified by her own audacity and horrified by her sudden loss of self-control.

“Sorry, I can’t,” Byleth said. “Excuse me, I just remembered I’m having lunch with Dedue and Ashe at two. I’ll have to get goi—”

Her eyes rolled up into the back of her head, showing all whites and just a sliver of blue, and she crumpled to the ground. Edelgard sprang forward to catch her. _“Byleth!”_ she cried out, forgetting for a moment her impropriety.

And then her head exploded.

It was a ringing, throbbing, pulsing, pounding, splitting pain, like an axe hewing through a thick tree trunk to make firewood, and she herself lost her balance and fell. She felt herself burn again, the world around her flickering. For a moment, she saw the monastery grounds vanish and the tall, vaulted great hall of the Imperial Palace engulf her; for a moment, she felt the familiar weight of a crown atop her head and a cape draped over her shoulders; in a moment, it was all gone and she was back in the monastery.

And there was a little girl standing—no, _hovering—_ over Byleth’s crumpled body, a girl no older than twelve by the looks of it, draped in splendid regalia and wearing an ornate tiara; a waterfall of forest-green hair cascaded down her back. Her skin and clothes and hair and everything about her were translucent; Edelgard could see the rosebushes through them. Her eyes were squeezed shut, her mouth agape and jaw slack as her unconscious body went through the same motions as Byleth’s and fell, not to the ground but about a foot above it. The sight of her—the same specter she’d seen when the world had frozen—filled Edelgard’s mind with fear, as though water so cold it burned was pouring into the fissure in her skull.

Edelgard passed out. Her last thought, focusing on the vision—the hallucination, it _had_ to be a hallucination—of the phantasm haunting her wife:

_What in the Goddess’ name is happening to me?_

* * *

Edelgard and Byleth’s odd simultaneous fainting spells ended up being counted as nothing more than a simple case of vertigo, but for the next few days, Edelgard pondered with growing unease what could have caused that splitting headache—and why she had seen and heard that strange apparition. As Hanneman had said, the episodes she had that sent her momentarily back to her own world seemed to be caused by some force or process that was causing the two time-lines to press closer to each other. Those fainting spells could have been another symptom of that mysterious force or process—but why was Byleth affected just as she was? She couldn’t be the other time traveler—surely _she_ would have told Edelgard if she was!

And that specter—Edelgard didn’t believe in ghosts, but perhaps it was not a ghost at all but rather some _entity_ connected to the flow of time, some sort of time-child…

She was jolted out of her musings by the sound of a pile of books hitting the floor; every head in the classroom turned in the direction of the sound and caught sight of Annette crouched down amid a pile of textbooks while Mercedes looked worryingly on.

“I told you, Annie,” Mercedes scolded her, “you’d hurt yourself if you tried to carry my books for me.”

“No, no, I’ve got it,” Annette insisted, scooping up the books into her arms in an awkward, precarious bundle. “It’s no problem! I’ve got it.”

Edelgard was about to hurry to her side and help her, but Ashe, who was closer, beat her to it, and the three students all settled into their desks and waited with the rest of the Blue Lions for their teacher to arrive.

On some mornings, Byleth showed up for her lectures early; for the most part, though, she showed up exactly on time. This morning, she was not running early. Her students, though, knowing that she preferred to start her class as soon as she arrived and not when the monastery’s bells rang in the hour, always arrived early, just in case.

When Byleth was punctual, the Blue Lions classroom was always a little rowdy in the few minutes between when the students arrived and she arrived. Students would chat and squabble with each other, squeeze in a few fleeting final minutes of shut-eye, sit back and put their feet up on their desks—all sorts of behavior typical of restless adolescents but quite unbecoming of nobility and officers. These past few days since the students had returned from Gronder Field, the classroom was even more restless now that their strenuous month of restless secret training for the big battle was over and done.

Edelgard didn’t care much anymore whether someone’s behavior was unbecoming of nobility, since the trappings of nobility were nothing but artificial pomp designed to make people think they were inherently superior to commoners. In fact, as long as they had a good head on their shoulders, she had come to relish the company of nobles who refused to put on airs.

But Sylvain caught her eye this morning, now that her mind was no longer elsewhere and elsewhen, _not_ because he was being particularly lackadaisical or offensive, but because of the book he held open in his hand while lounging back in his seat with his boots resting on the surface of his desk. He was skimming it with a faint smile on his face, his eyes roving back and forth across the page, his lips occasionally parting ever so gently as they mouthed the occasional word.

Sylvain caught her eye, or rather his entertaining diversion did, because the book in his hand was not the kind of romance or adventure novella one could buy in the local bookstore. Rather, it was a plain and fairly simple notebook, a little old and a little shabby, its pages bound within a leather cover with string.

Edelgard knew exactly who that notebook belonged to—and it did _not_ belong to Sylvain. She stood up straight, marched over to him, and stared icily down at him, her hands on her hips. “Sylvain,” she said, “what are you doing with Bernadetta von Varley’s journal?”

He looked up at her with wide, innocent eyes, momentarily dumbstruck, mouth agape. The book clamped shut around his thumb. “Uh… Is it? I didn’t know,” he finally managed to say.

Having overheard Edelgard, Ingrid was on him in an instant. _“What?_ Sylvain, what the hell are you doing with a girl’s diary?” She snatched the book out of his hand.

“Wait, wait, wait, no—” Sylvain stammered, pawing at the book. “I—I’ll give it back! It’s all just a big misunderstanding; I—”

“Do you have an _ounce_ of shame? Of all the lows you could stoop to, I never thought you’d go _this_ low.”

Sylvain snatched the book back and held it close, almost protectively, to his chest. “I’ll give it back to her, okay? It’s not like it’s got anything _intimate_ inside it, anyway.”

Edelgard set her hand on Ingrid’s shoulder. “Ingrid, go back to your desk. I’ll deal with this. Bernie and I are friends. Sylvain, get up. We’re giving it back to her right now.”

Ingrid let out a frustrated sigh. Beneath her golden hair, her face was livid. “Thanks, Edelgard,” she said. “I’ll let Professor Byleth know where you two are if you aren’t back in time. Don’t let him off easy.”

“I won’t.” Edelgard grabbed Sylvain by the arm and wrenched him out of his seat. “Come on. You and I are going to have a talk.”

She strode out of the classroom and onto the lawn with Sylvain trailing unwillingly behind her.

“Why are you like this?” she asked him.

“What?” he replied, taken aback.

“You’re smart, strong, and perceptive. You’re talented; you pick up new skills easily. I’ve seen that quite clearly during our training.”

Sylvain’s face was as red as his hair. “A—Are you—Your Highness, I wouldn’t mess with a woman who’s already engaged—”

“That isn’t what I meant. Someone as intelligent as you should know better than to act like such a louse. Unless you think you can get away with it thanks to your noble standing?”

He was silent for a moment. “You’re right,” he finally said, after a pensive pause. “Someone as intelligent as me _should_ know better. And I _do_ know better. I _know_ I’m making an ass of myself. That’s the whole point.”

“You’re making yourself look like a scumbag on _purpose?”_

“Why wouldn’t I? It doesn’t matter either way. I can act like as much of a scoundrel as I want, break as many girls’ hearts as I want, be rude and obnoxious and unpleasant, or even go a month without brushing my teeth or bathing, and everyone will still love Sylvain of House Gautier, bearer of the Crest of Gautier and wielder of the Lance of Ruin.” There was a hard look in his amber eyes and a bitter set to his jaw.

“That’s incredibly presumptuous of you.”

A mirthless laugh escaped Sylvain’s lips. “Yeah, you’re right. The truth is, everyone loves me, and nobody does. It’s not _me_ they love, it’s my bloodline.”

“Your Crest.”

“See, you get it! That’s what I like about you, Edelgard. My parents always gave me everything I wanted. They doted on me and treated me like I was the center of the universe while my big brother got nothing. Were they rewarding me for my behavior or my accomplishments? No, they were rewarding me for the accident of my birth. How I acted didn’t even factor into it. And those girls who throw themselves at me—you think they care if I’m handsome or chivalrous? No, all that matters to them is that slim chance to marry into nobility. Because of my Crest.”

“So you’d like to see how low you’d have to go to make them stop,” Edelgard said. “I see. I think that’s a fool’s errand, Sylvain—you’re better off quitting while you’re ahead. You could be a slovenly rapist with chronic halitosis and a face like a gargoyle and people would still fawn over you because you, the future Margrave Gautier, bear the Crest of Gautier.”

“You’d know all about that, huh?”

Edelgard shook her head. “Adrestia doesn’t put as much stock in Crests as Faerghus does. My status as ninth princess consigned me to the life of an idle noble, not my status as one who bears a Crest. But all across Fódlan, the aristocrats get away with shocking and appalling behavior and never face their reckonings, all because their power and status makes them untouchable. I’ve heard and seen things from them that would curdle even your blood. It would be a shame if you threw away all of your redeeming qualities just because you wanted to lash out at this unfair social order; there are more productive things you could be doing. But I digress—why did you steal Bernadetta’s notebook?”

“I didn’t steal it,” Sylvain said, vehemently shaking his head. He still clung to the book as though he were protecting it. “I found it in the library.”

Edelgard crossed her arms. “And?”

“And I was going to give it back right away, but it opened by itself. It opened by itself, I swear. And it… well, it wasn’t a diary or lecture notes or anything like that, it was a _story._ I read the first page and…” He sheepishly scuffed the grass with the toe of his boot, suddenly rendered bashful by his confession. “I couldn’t help myself. It was just so _good._ Before I knew it, I’d read a chapter, and then the whole thing, and then I’d started rereading the parts I really liked…”

“Bernie is a very private girl,” Edelgard told him. “If she finds out you looked in her notebook without her permission, she’ll panic.” She took the book from him. “I’m going to hand this back to her. You’re going to apologize. And you won’t even _hint_ that you’ve read a single page.”

Sylvain laughed, and this one didn’t sound quite so mirthless. “No wonder you and Ingrid are besties.”

Edelgard marched him up to Bernadetta’s room, which stood on the first floor of the dormitories with its door exposed to the open air unlike the hallway on the second floor. She knocked softly on the door. She’d checked up on Bernie a few times since she’d arrived in this world, kept Ferdinand off her back, offered her a sympathetic ear once or twice… and hopefully, that meant the poor girl wouldn’t freak out _too_ much.

No one answered the door.

“Well, we tried,” Sylvain said. “How about we leave the book on the stoop and head back to class?”

Edelgard made him wait a little longer, but the church bells tolled eight o’clock and class was now in session, so she dragged him back to class with Bernadetta’s notebook hidden safely in her bag. She’d have to give the notebook back the next time she saw her, and worry about coaxing an apology out of Sylvain later.

She and Sylvain hurried back to the classroom to find Byleth waiting for them—along with a few new, but not unfamiliar faces.

“Hi, Edelgard. Ingrid told me why you and Sylvain were late,” Byleth said. She gestured to the new students standing in the middle of the room. “As I was just saying to the rest of the class, we’ve got some new recruits. Let’s welcome them to the Blue Lions.”

Bernadetta von Varley stood in the center of the classroom, which explained why Edelgard hadn’t found her in her room. She kneaded her hands together in that same fretful way she always did, her tired gray eyes nervously scanning the room from behind a curtain of messy violet bangs. Next to her, looming over her like a giant, his girth filling the room, stood Raphael Kirsten, who was—as always—beaming, a broad smile crossing his broad, bricklike face. Raphael was an exaggeration of a man; everything about him was extreme, from the muscles threatening to pop every button on his shirt with every slightest movement to his heavy brow and a cleft in his chin so deep that food could get trapped in it. And next to _him_ stood Ignatz Victor, tiny by comparison (though not as tiny as Bernie), wiry and bespectacled, with hair like a head of cabbage and multicolored remnants of paint stains clinging stubbornly to his fingertips.

Edelgard waved to Bernadetta. “Hi, Bernie.” Bernadetta smiled—more of a grimace, really, a fear-smile like that of a cornered animal—and timidly waved back.

“So, Raphael, why don’t you introduce yourself first?” Byleth asked.

“Sure, Professor!” Raphael said, thumping his massive fist against his massive chest. “Name’s Raphael! I tussled with some of you back at Gronder Field last week! Anyway, I’m from Leicester. Nothing special about my heritage; my folks were merchants back when they were still alive. I love strength training, and food, and bulking up, and meat! And my best pal, Ignatz!” He clapped Ignatz on the shoulder, who nearly fell over from the force of the blow. “Anyway, I’m here to become a knight!”

Felix rolled his eyes. “Oh, great,” he muttered, his arms folded tightly across his chest, “another one.”

“Thanks, Raphael,” Byleth said. “We’re happy to have you. Ignatz?”

Ignatz bowed and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Uh, hi, I’m Ignatz Victor. I’m from Leicester, too, of course, and my parents were merchants, too. I fought some of you at Gronder Field, and—I’m sorry about your leg, by the way, uh… Felix?”

“It’s fine,” Felix said.

“Anyway, I want to be a knight… I guess,” he added, lying very unconvincingly. Edelgard knew him well enough from her own world to know that all he _really_ wanted to be was a painter, if the stains on his fingers didn’t make that obvious. She wouldn’t have trusted anybody else to paint her and Byleth’s portraits on the night of their wedding. “I’m looking forward to being a part of the Blue Lions.”

“Looks like you’ve got a few new friends, Ingrid,” Glenn said, teasing his unwilling fiancee.

“We’re looking forward to having you, too, Ignatz,” Byleth said. “And here’s Bernadetta. Bernadetta, would you like to introduce yourself?”

Bernadetta shook her head. “N-No, that’s fine,” she said. “I mean, if I don’t have to?”

“Professor, if I may do the honors?” Edelgard took a step forward. “Bernadetta is an old classmate of mine. She’s the daughter of Count Varley. She’s shy around people and a gentle soul, and as we’ve seen at Gronder Field, she’s tenacious and quite a good shot. I hope she finds a welcome home among us Lions.”

“Well said, Edelgard,” Dimitri said, rising from his seat. “Bernadetta, Raphael, Ignatz, all three of you distinguished yourself at Gronder Field last week. As head of this house, I must extend to you all a warm welcome to the Blue Lions.”

“Y-You ‘must?’” Bernadetta stammered. “You mean, you wouldn’t if you had a choice?”

“No problem, Your Highness!” Raphael said. “Feels great to be here already. You’ve gotta share your strength training routine with me!”

“Take a seat anywhere you like,” Byleth told the new recruits, and Raphael found a desk to wedge himself into near Dedue, Ignatz seated himself near Ingrid, and Bernadetta stood in the center of the classroom. Edelgard took a seat near the back of the classroom and beckoned for her to follow.

Bernadetta took the hint and slipped gingerly into the empty seat beside Edelgard’s. “Th-Thank you, Lady Edelgard,” she whispered.

“No problem,” Edelgard said. “I think you’ll do well here, Bernadetta; the students here are quite a kind bunch once you’ve gotten to know them. Just to let you know, though, Dedue likes to invite new recruits to lunch so he can get to know them better. He cooks delicious food, but it’s very spicy and his first batch might be a bit more than you can handle.”

“Okay.”

“And Mercedes likes to tell ghost stories to new recruits.”

“O-Okay.”

“Also, Sylvain found this in the library a few days ago,” she said, taking out the notebook and laying it in front of Bernadetta, “and hadn’t gotten a chance to return it to you yet. He’s sorry it took too long.”

“O—” Bernadetta let out a shocked gasp and hastily shoved the notebook into her bag. Her face had turned beet-red. “He—He didn’t—”

“Not a word,” Edelgard told her. “He swore he didn’t read a word of it.”

She let out a relieved sigh.

“So now that we’re all here,” Byleth addressed the rest of the class, “I have an announcement before we begin our lecture on…” She addressed her cue card. “Archery formations. This Sunday, we’re all going on a fishing trip with my dad to celebrate our victory. If you’ve never gone fishing before, I think you’ll like it. If you have gone fishing before and you didn’t like it, I think I can change your mind. And now, let’s look at the sharpshooting tactics of…”

While Byleth launched into a lecture that was as riveting as always, Edelgard felt her attention drawn again and again toward Bernadetta.

If _Bernie_ was the other time traveler, she would tell her, wouldn’t she?

Who else could it be? Ignatz? No, surely _he_ would have told her if he was. He and Bernie were both smart enough that they’d probably have noticed that Edelgard was displaced in time. And surely both of them would be acting more like their future selves—Bernadetta less skittish and hysterical, Ignatz a more confident and self-assured—if they were both from the future, like she was.

She hadn’t noticed _anyone_ in this world who’d been acting oddly more mature than they had when she’d originally been enrolled here. Was it possible the time traveler could be intentionally trying to blend in and act like their past self?

Was it possible they had sinister intentions in this world?

* * *

Edelgard tried to set all of that out of her mind, however briefly, for the weekend’s fishing trip. As Byleth had said, the stream she had picked out was just a few hour’s hike through the mountains. The class left the monastery late Saturday afternoon once everybody had finished with their week’s assigned group tasks, using the last of the daylight to make it to the stream and set up camp. Although trekking up a mountain was not many people’s idea of a relaxing diversion, compared to the training gauntlet that had spanned the month before Gronder Field, it was as relaxing and soothing as a hot bath.

That Saturday night, Ashe and Dedue fed the class with a flavorful lentil soup cooked over the campfire. With a warm bowl clasped in Edelgard’s hands and steam from the freshly-ladled soup caressing her face, and the thick fur cloak draped over her shoulders, she could barely feel the bitter chill of the cold night air, and the soup’s rich and spicy aroma cleared her mind as well as it cleared her sinuses.

“Have you ever noticed,” Dimitri asked no one in particular, sitting near the fire and running his hand idly through the coarse grass beneath him, “that sometimes you find edible plants among weeds?”

“Please do not eat the weeds, Your Highness,” Dedue said to him, handing him a bowl. “Here. Have this soup.”

“I was just saying…” he muttered sheepishly.

“Hey, this is great!” Raphael exclaimed, digging into his soup with gusto. “Ashe, Dedue, you guys are the best cooks I’ve ever met!” He’d taken quite a liking to Dedue’s recipes—so Edelgard had heard, Dedue’s interrogation of him had lasted the better part of an afternoon because he’d kept asking for extra helpings. “All it’s missing is the meat!”

“Actually, it’s not _missing_ the meat,” Ashe explained. “It’s a lentil soup.”

Raphael furrowed his massive brow.

“Beans and lentils have protein in them, just like meat.”

“Oh! So, Dedue, your people can get big and strong like you, even when you’re just eating stuff like this?”

 _“Could,”_ Dedue corrected, his face as stony as usual. “Professor, would you like it hotter? I have a bottle of crushed peppers.”

Byleth nodded and held her bowl out. “Yes, please. Thank you, Dedue.”

Dedue took a small glass bottle from his bag, uncapped it, tipped it on its side, and shook a few flakes of dried, crushed peppers into her soup. “Tell me when to stop,” he said. Byleth didn’t tell him to stop for a very long time.

“That’s my girl!” Jeralt crowed, tousling her hair as she slurped soup that was more pepper now than lentil with only a few beads of sweat popping up on her reddening brow. “Your mom would be proud of you, kid.”

“Did she enjoy food like this, too, Captain?” Annette asked.

“No, she had a weak constitution,” he said to her. “But she loved to try new things, and she loved to live vicariously through me and my cast iron stomach.” He gave his belly a loving pat.

“You know, Almyran dishes are getting really popular in Leicester, especially in Derdriu,” Ignatz spoke up. “Dedue, are there any places in Faerghus where Duscur food has really caught on?”

An awkward silence fell across the campsite. Ignatz’s face, similarly, fell.

Dedue shook his head. “No,” he said. “Duscur food is not even popular in Duscur anymore.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry.”

“It is in the past,” Dedue assured him, but Edelgard knew the pained, shamed look on Ignatz’s face well. Guilt came to him frequently and easily, and he always wore it very plainly on his face. He would probably spend the next few weeks pointedly avoiding Dedue as a form of penance. “At least it is popular here,” Dedue added. “I cannot ask for more than that.”

Raphael nudged Ingrid, who was not eating anything, in the side. “Psst. Hey, Ingrid. Why aren’t you eating? Aren’t you hungry?” When she just looked away without saying anything, he added, “Oh, I get it. You’re worried there won’t be enough to go around if you have any. Well, have the rest of mine, then! I gotta save room for fish tomorrow, anyway.” He forced his bowl into her hands. “C’mon, eat! Like Ashe said, those lentils will help you bulk up!”

Ingrid gingerly, warily, cautiously brought a spoonful of soup to her mouth and ate it. Perhaps it was only the way the firelight flickered on her face, but her mouth curled just slightly upward and lips puckered as though she was trying to hide the fact that she enjoyed it.

Edelgard noticed, though, that by the end of the night, the bowl Raphael had passed to her was empty.

“Dedue, I have a proposition for you,” Ashe said as he ladled the last dregs of leftover soup from the pot into a bowl for Bernadetta. “One day, when I’m retired from being a knight and you’re done being His Highness’ retainer, I want us to open a restaurant together. We’ll _make_ Duscur food popular in Duscur again. And everywhere else, too! The people of Faerghus need to see that your culture created beautiful things.”

“That is kind of you. I will consider your offer,” Dedue said. “But that will be many years from now.”

“It’ll never catch on,” Glenn said, eerily cheery.

“You’re fooling yourself,” Felix said to Ashe. “He isn’t going to leave the boar’s side until the day he dies.”

“Not if I die first,” Dimitri said.

“Speaking of dying,” Mercedes said, fiendishly rubbing her hands with a ghoulish grin on her face, “aren’t our three new recruits still due for their initiation? I have a few new scary stories to tell in the dark…”

Bernadetta sat up straight and froze, looking for all the world like a frightened deer ready to bolt into the woods. Edelgard inched closer to her to steady her.

“Scary stories, eh?” Jeralt laughed. “I’ve got a few of my own. Back in the Blade Breakers, we would tell each other the grimmest, goriest stories we knew every Saturday night to toughen each other up.” He gave Byleth a pat on the shoulder. “And this kid’s heard every single one of ‘em. I bet she’s impossible to scare!”

Edelgard suddenly found that she understood a lot more about her wife.

Mercedes smiled devilishly. “And how _much_ do you bet, Captain?”

Jeralt reached into his pack and set a jingling burlap bag—stuffed with gold coins, no doubt—on the ground in front of him with stern and unshakable determination. There was a serious look on his face now—the face of a gambling man. “This much.”

“Have you two heard of Harold the scarecrow?” Mercedes asked him.

“Yup.”

“The noblewoman’s blemish?”

“Of course.”

“The dead man’s hand.”

 _“Love_ the dead man’s hand.”

“The hook!”

“The hook! Everybody knows the hook.”

“Aaron Kelly’s bones!”

“A classic.”

 _“I_ haven’t heard any of these stories,” Dimitri said. “Perhaps you two could take turns telling them to us?”

“Why don’t we make a game out of it?” Sylvain suggested. “Whoever’s story scares the most of us wins the bet.”

With that, the game began. The scarecrow that came to life and slaughtered its tormentors, the vain noblewoman whose facial blemish ruptured and let loose a horde of spiders, the woman terrorized by the skeleton of her late husband, the bloody hook hanging on the carriage’s door and so on, and so on… It was agreed that while Jeralt had by far the goriest and most lurid tales in his library, Mercedes was a much more skilled performer and storyteller and could more easily get her audience to jump and shriek on cue. Still, the competition lasted well into the night, the fire burning down to embers, with no clear winner in sight.

Before a winner could be announced (Byleth and Dedue, being seemingly unflappable, were the judges), Bernadetta timidly raised her hand. “I—I have a scary story,” she stammered.

Everyone’s head turned toward her.

“I mean I—I don’t have to t-tell it _now,_ do I?” she said, biting her lip and kneading her hands. “I just—I just said I _had_ one, not that—I mean, surely none of you want to hear it—Oh, way to go, Bernie, now you look like an _idiot_ in front of everyone; why can’t you just keep your mouth shut?”

Edelgard very, very gently laid her hand on top of hers and gave her an encouraging nod.

“Is it one we might know?” Mercedes asked her. “If it’s an old classic, _I_ could tell it for you. Just give me the title.”

“No, um…” Bernadetta shook her head. “No, I, uh… I made it up. S-So I’m probably the only one who’ll find it s-scary, anyway… Just forget I brought it up!” she squealed, burying herself in her coat and drawing her hood up over her head.

“Aw, c’mon, you can share it with us!” Annette encouraged her.

“No, I—You’re all just going to embarrass me, aren’t you?”

“I wanna hear Bernie’s story,” Sylvain spoke up. “We _all_ wanna hear Bernie’s story, right?” He elbowed Felix in the side, then jabbed him a few more times for good measure.

“Yes,” Felix agreed with a resigned sigh, “we all want to hear Bernie’s story.”

“Up and at ‘em, Bernadetta,” Ingrid encouraged her. “You’ve got this.”

“Yeah, go for it, Bernie!” Raphael cheered.

“O-O-Okay,” Bernadetta stammered after a bit more cajoling. “Here goes nothing.” She took a deep breath. Edelgard took off her fur cloak and draped it over her shoulders so that she’d feel warmer and more secure—a trick she’d found out a few years ago to help her with her anxiety.

Emboldened, Bernadetta began to tell a ghost story.

By the end of the night, Ashe was hiding behind Dedue, Raphael was trying (and failing) to hide behind Ignatz, Ingrid was biting her nails ragged, Sylvain was utterly enraptured and completely terrified, and Dimitri looked ill.

“D-Did you like it?” Bernadetta asked. “Oh, no… You all hated it, didn’t you? I’m so sorry… j-just forget about it!”

Jeralt stood up, took his sack of gold coins, and dropped it at her feet.

“That was amazing!” Sylvain exclaimed. “Do you write stories for fun or something, Bernie?” he asked, earning a sour glare from both Ingrid and Edelgard.

Edelgard shivered, struggling to chase Bernadetta’s lurid description of the rats in the haunted castle’s walls from her mind. “Bernie,” she whispered, trying to keep herself from stammering or her teeth from chattering, “may I have my cloak back now?”

“Huh? Oh! S-Sorry, Your Highness!” Bernadetta stammered, shrugging off the cloak and handing it back to her.

That night, everyone tried to sleep as best they could, though a few nightmares here and there were unavoidable given how long the scary story competition had lasted. Not to Edelgard’s surprise, her old nightmares had returned to haunt her—and not just her.

She woke up in the earliest hour in the morning when the horizon was only just starting to turn violet and decided, as the phantom sensation of rats nibbling on her toes lingered, that she wouldn’t even try to get back to sleep. Instead, she slipped out of her bedroll and left her tent, basking in the vast field of unobstructed starlight that shone down on the campsite and the tiny crescent sliver of the moon sinking closer to the lightening horizon. The stream near the campsite—the stream the class would be fishing in tomorrow—babbled quietly to itself, and the wind blew through the trees and swayed through the alpine branches with ghostly whispers trailing in its wake. It was all too easy to see ghosts here, slithering in the dark—out of the corner of her eye, Edelgard kept spying the faint, fuzzy impressions of ghostly faces watching her. It wasn’t too irrational, though, to think that Those Who Slither could be watching her here.

She heard a low, quiet moan and crept toward the source of the sound, one hand tightly grasping the handle of the knife she’d brought with her to clean whatever fish she caught just in case whoever—or whatever—was making that noise was hostile. Deep down, though, that low, almost animalistic sound called to mind the moans and groans of her dying brothers. She could hear those sounds coming from Burkhart as he struggled to breathe, or Anselm as the bruises and broken bones the dungeon guards had inflicted on him throbbed and ached…

When she spotted the silhouette at the bank of the stream, it was on all fours like an animal, and Edelgard almost took it for a wolf or a mountain lion before it lifted its head out of the running water and she saw a flash of silver.

 _“Glenn,”_ it choked out in a human tongue, strained and pained, _“Yuri… Emile… Mercie, I’m so… Father, I’m sorry…”_ It plunged its head back into the water and ripped it back out. _“Father, Mother, please… please… Ma…”_

Edelgard conjured a tongue of flame in her free hand and watched the firelight dance off glistening, soaked pale skin and silver hair. _“Dimitri?”_

Dimitri looked up at her, but didn’t seem to see her. His ice-blue eyes were wide and blank, unfocused, blind. _“Ma…”_

She crouched beside him and gently pulled him back from the water’s edge by the scruff of his neck. “You’ll catch pneumonia if you do that,” she said to him.

He blinked a few times, and then, suddenly, he saw her. “Ah! Edelgard, I… I’m sorry; I had lost myself a little. You couldn’t sleep, either?”

“No,” she said, helping him dry his hair on her cloak. “A… familiar nightmare of mine. Bernie’s story must have brought it to the forefront of my mind.”

“That girl has quite an imagination.”

“Yes, she has quite the intimate understanding of fear. Which part of the story did you think it was? The part with the rats?”

Dimitri blanched and nodded. “Do not go around saying this to anybody, but… I find I am deathly terrified of rats.”

“So am I,” Edelgard confessed. “I had a terrible experience with them in a confined place once.”

“So did I. It was while I was imprisoned after the Tragedy of Duscur. The rats fed on us when we were too weak to fight back… I still have some scars on my toes. I just cannot look at them the same way again. The rats, not my toes.” He let out a self-effacing little laugh. “The White Lion of Fhirdiad, terrified of rats. And you, a Black Eagle. A proud cat and a bird of prey, frightened of the things they’re meant to feed on.”

“Funny, that,” Edelgard agreed. She felt almost envious that he spoke of his trauma so casually, revealed those secrets so readily (though not the secrets _beneath_ those secrets), while she’d had to keep everything hidden behind a mask of quiet determination. It was something so different between them, despite their identical circumstances. There was an earnestness there that, perhaps, she herself lacked.

“You’re like her, you know,” he said to her.

“Who?”

“Mother. _Your_ mother, my… step-mother. She was kind, but… distant. I can remember her sometimes, sewing by the window with a lonely look in her eyes. She was unreachable when she was in her moods. And like that, you suddenly became… kind, but cold. Like her.”

Edelgard took his hand. It was freezing.

“I wish I remembered her better,” she said.

“So do I,” he said. “I only have fragments. Bits and pieces here and there… faint… vague… but I remember her love. I’m glad that it connects us both.”

They sat together for a while on the bank of the stream, looking up at the stars as the dawn light on the horizon grew stronger and forced them to fade away. Edelgard watched the path traced by the Blue Sea Star, the brightest star in the sky.

“The Blue Sea Star,” she said. “That’s where the Goddess dwells?”

“Where she came from, they say,” Dimitri answered. “Sometimes I wonder… but it’s wrong of me.”

“You wonder what?”

“Nothing.”

“You can tell me.”

“I…” His voice cracked. “I wonder if she ever really left.”

“I understand,” Edelgard said. “Everything you suffered through, all those years of torment… all those prayers that must have gone unanswered.”

“No,” Dimitri said, shaking his head. “No, my… My prayers were answered. I was saved. But the others… the other children who were tortured and killed… Mother… _our_ mother… she didn’t come for them. I… I thought the Goddess was supposed to be fair back then.” He let out an evasive laugh. “But look at me. Speaking to a girl who had a revelation to the Goddess, who saw her face and heard her voice! I hope you’ll… forgive me for my horrible atheism.”

“It’s fine,” Edelgard said. “I didn’t have much faith in the Goddess myself, for the longest time. I even thought she… she _hated_ me.”

“Until she spoke to you.”

“Even then, there are things I’m not so sure about.”

“I thought Rhea could give you all the answers.”

Edelgard chuckled. “Rhea… Her tea parties, as you can probably imagine, aren’t the most fun thing in the world.”

“They aren’t?”

“They aren’t. She’s… I feel like a part of her just wants to _consume_ me. To _engulf_ me. To swallow me whole, envelop me, and keep me with her… forever.” The sight of Byleth with lustrous, luminous hair the color of fresh mint leaves and Rhea’s emerald eyes set in her face struck her like a hammer to her chest. “To make me… to make Byle—our professor… happy and obedient vessels for her will, like her favorite knights. Pets. Dolls for her to dote on and dress as she pleases, servants to her will. And… Dimitri, may I confess something to you?”

“I have no right to absolve you, but… I’d be happy to hear your confession.”

“The church can’t be any further from the Goddess,” Edelgard said. “The Goddess is supposed to love all of her children. But the Church harms people in so many ways… hoarding money, keeping the poor destitute, keeping the uneducated ignorant, making sure the fat and wealthy can become fatter and wealthier still, closing people’s minds to outsiders. I think that if the Goddess could see what Rhea and past archbishops have done in her name, stretching back even to the days of Saint Seiros… I think she herself would turn against them.”

Dimitri’s silver brows furrowed. There was an odd, uneasy smile on his face. “You… You think _that_ of the Church, Edelgard?”

“I do.”

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Yes.”

“You mustn’t tell Rhea.”

“I won’t.”

“The Tragedy of Duscur… was caused by the Church. The Knights of Seiros turned on my family, slaughtered my father and his knights, and brought Glenn, Mother, and me to a dungeon. There we languished for years with other children. Mother was useless to them, but us… they conducted horrible experiments on the rest of us. They tortured us. They poured poison into our veins. And all this… with the Crest of Seiros embroidered on their robes, etched onto their armor.” Dimitri took a deep, long, shuddering breath, wracked with the pain of his memories. Edelgard set her hand on his back to steady him. “The church is evil down to its core.” His voice cracked and broke. His eyes squeezed shut and tears rolled down his cheeks. “They killed our mother, Edelgard. They made me watch.”

Edelgard tore her gaze from the stars. No wonder Dimitri didn’t consider Those Who Slither a threat. They’d played a devilish trick on him to ensure his loyalty. She was amazed that they hadn’t done the same thing to her in her world—if they had done that to her, twisted her world so utterly, Fódlan would have become a nightmarish realm of darkness… and she would have eagerly created that world for them.

She put her arm around his shoulders and draped her cloak over the both of them as he held back his sobs.

“You’ve heard… that the Professor bears the Crest of Flames, haven’t you?” he asked, choking back the lump in his throat. “It’s the reason why she can wield Nemesis’ legendary blade.” He held out his hand, palm upward, and Edelgard knew exactly what he was going to do next. The intricate emblem of the Crest of Flames appeared in the air over his hand, traced in fiery lines the same icy blue as his eyes. The cold light of the apparition clashed against the warm light of the flickering flame in Edelgard’s hand like waves lapping at a shoreline. “I have it, too. It was burned into me. Into _us._ For their evil ends…”

The sight of that baleful Crest froze the air in Edelgard’s lungs.

“When I reveal this truth,” Dimitri said, strength anew flooding into his voice, “the anger and hatred my people hold for Dedue… for the people of Duscur… it will all be turned on the Church. The people of Faerghus will be united in their loathing… and just as the fires of their hatred burned Duscur to the ground, so too will they destroy Rhea and her wicked designs. I will crush them, rip them, tear them… When the time for that comes, Edelgard, will you stand with me? Against the church? Against Rhea’s lies? For Professor Byleth? For Dedue? For… our mother’s sake?”

Edelgard looked into his eyes, blue lit by blue fire. Wide, hurt, earnest eyes; eyes begging her for help; eyes so cold, yet so warm. Had she ever given Byleth such a look? She must have.

What could she say to him besides _yes?_ If she didn’t agree to an alliance with him, she would become a threat—she knew too much; she would have to be killed. If Dedue didn’t get rid of her, then Glenn or one of the other agents of Thales would do the deed. In fact, she thought, recalling Dimitri’s behavior as the Hurricane King, he might kill her himself.

But as long as he believed that the so-called Men in Black were his friends, allies, _saviors—_ then he was a danger to all of Fódlan. Men like him, good and kind men who didn’t stand for anything, were uniquely dangerous—because they could _fall_ for anything.

She had to say _yes._

And before the Hurricane King declared his war against the Church of Seiros—only a few months from now, assuming Dimitri’s plans were operating on the same timeline as hers had—she had to make sure he saw the truth about Those Who Slither in the Dark. With any luck, whatever horrors awaited at Remire would be enough.

She closed her hand around his, shattering the image of the Crest of Flames into a flurry of blue sparks that faded into the night. “Yes, Dimitri,” she said. “I will stand with you. For Byleth. For our mother.”

Dimitri smiled. “I’d hoped for so long that I could trust you. Thank you, Edelgard. Thank you so much.”

The sun crept over the horizon, spilling amber light across the mountain; the rest of the class emerged from their tents, and the fishing trip began in earnest. Edelgard knew her way around a fishing pole, thanks entirely to all the time she’d spent with Byleth in her world, but most of the other students were, to pardon the expression, completely at sea and were desperately in need of guidance from Byleth and Jeralt. Dedue and Ashe seemed at home, though, wading in the shallowest part of the stream and scooping up crayfish.

Edelgard spent most of her time that morning and afternoon making sure Dimitri didn’t make bloody messes out of his fingertips, though she ended up puncturing her fingertips quite a few times herself. Every once in a while, she found herself gazing at Byleth as she helped Mercedes or Ignatz or one of the other students hook their bait or reel in a catch. Seeing Byleth help people—seeing the attention she gave everyone, how seriously she took her responsibilities to the people in her care, how intuitively well she seemed to know everyone—reminded Edelgard why she loved that woman so much. And with her there, and Jeralt, the Blue Lions suddenly felt somewhat like a family to Edelgard—somewhat, just a little bit, like the family she had made from the Black Eagles Strike Force.

In the late afternoon, the class cleaned and cooked their fish, pan-frying them, roasting them, boiling them; with full bellies and only a few lingering wounds, the class marched back to Garreg Mach with the setting sun to their backs. Edelgard didn’t think she’d had so much fun since her wedding.

* * *

The next day, Edelgard took Jeralt’s advice and went to Shamir Nevrand, one of the Knights of Seiros stationed at Garreg Mach as an instructor, for help regarding whoever was sending her the cryptic missives that had been weighing so heavily on her mind. Edelgard only showed her the first one she’d received, though—she had no intention of explaining (or suspiciously _refusing_ to explain) the date on the second note.

Though Shamir was a Knight of Seiros, and before that she had fought against the Adrestian Empire in the Brigid-Dagda War, Edelgard bore her no ill will. She was a refreshingly cool and blunt woman, straightforward and fairly honest, and quite unlike her fellow knights in that she held no belief in the Goddess or in any of the Church of Seiros’ tenets.

“Hmm…” Shamir eyed the slip of paper Edelgard had handed her suspiciously, her brow furrowing over dark violet eyes. “Ink’s good quality. Paper, too. A noble wrote this.”

That narrowed it down, but not by much. There were more children of noble birth in this school than there were commoners, and Edelgard had already eliminated all of the commoner students she knew of. Dorothea _certainly_ wasn’t a time traveler.

“They wrote the letter with their left hand in block letters to disguise themselves,” she continued. “I can tell from how the ink smudged. So they’re right-handed. And the way the letters are curved makes me suspect a girl wrote this.” She lifted the paper to her nose and sniffed it. “Faint perfume, too. Floral.”

Edelgard’s mind raced. “Floral perfume, you say…?” She was thinking—Could it be? Could the time traveler be…

“Whoever’s leaving these notes is a noble girl who’s left-handed and wears perfume,” Shamir pronounced. “Unless they put that perfume on the paper just to throw you off their trail. Anyway, if that’s the only sample you have,” she added, handing the slip back to Edelgard, “I think that’s all I can do.”

“Thank you, Shamir.” Edelgard took the paper back and slipped it into her bag, then offered Shamir a courteous bow. “You’ve been very helpful. I think I know who wrote this now.”

“No problem. Stay safe.”

Edelgard headed back to the dormitories, marched up the stairs, and stopped just short of her room. She knocked on the door in front of her, rapping her knuckles against the wood hard enough to make them sting. The sound reverberated down the hallway. Her heart pounded in her chest.

 _“Ugh,”_ Hilda’s voice bled through the door, muffled. _“Arcturus, if you’re gonna drag me out here again, let me remind you that what I do with my free time is_ none—”

She opened the door. Her face was unmade (and, peeking over her shoulder, Edelgard could see that her bed and desk and also floor, somehow, were _also_ unmade), her eyes bleary, her hair only half-done up in her signature twin tails—pink locks flowed untamed down her right shoulder. A faint, but unmistakable smell of floral perfume still clung to her.

Her eyes narrowed, her pink brows knitting together. “Edelgard,” she said coldly.

“Hilda,” Edelgard replied, “can I speak to you?”

Hilda put her hands on her hips. “It’s gonna take a big apology to make me forgive you for forgetting we were friends for two months.”

“Well then, a big apology is what you shall have. I really _did_ have horrible amnesia; I even forgot that I was engaged to Ferdinand. I didn’t mean you any harm, but it’s entirely my fault that I never thought to ask anyone about the friends I’d had before my accident. I’m sorry I abandoned you, and I’m sorry it took me this long to say it.” Edelgard held out her hand. “I hope we can… regain what we have lost?” she said, letting her lips tug her mouth upward in a hopeful smile.

Hilda looked down at her hand, crossing her arms. “Hmm… Really, Edelgard, I kinda think I’m _over_ you now.”

“I know,” Edelgard said to her, “that you have every reason to hate me, but…” Hilda was seconds away from slamming the door in her face; she had to think of something to stay her hand for a moment more. “Hilda, I love you,” she blurted out.

There was a look of utter confusion on Hilda’s face. “Huh?”

“I’ve been so stupid,” Edelgard said. “All the signs were right there; it was so foolish of me not to see them in myself… in _you…_ in _us._ You’ve been my best friend, Hilda, but I know now that we’ve both wanted so much _more_ than that. Can you take me back? Can you accept me, despite all my flaws? Can you ever love me again as I love you?”

Hilda stood in front of her, mouth agape, utterly and completely flabbergasted from Edelgard’s confession. Edelgard took that chance to barge in past her and slam the door shut behind her.

“What the—Hey! Hey, you can’t just barge in here like that!”

“Sixteenth of the Garland Moon, 1186,” Edelgard said. “How do you know what that date means?”

“Huh?”

Edelgard produced the slip of paper from her bag. “Enough charades. I know what you are. You’ve been sending these letters.”

_“Huh?”_

“Sixteenth of the Garland Moon—How do you know that date, Hilda? _How do you know the date of my wedding?”_

_“Huh?!”_

Seeing the utter bemusement on Hilda’s face, her wide eyes, her slack jaw, Edelgard began to wonder if she’d just made a terrible mistake.


	11. The No-Eyed People

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which questions are answered in ways that raise further questions.

Edelgard had never before seen Hilda’s brow so furrowed. Was she truly ignorant? Or was she playing dumb? She’d never known Hilda well in her own world, but her reputation as someone who was far slier and more guileful than she let on preceded her. She could feign ignorance or helplessness or anything else quite convincingly, as long as it got her out of having to put effort into something. But was she faking it here? Or had Edelgard just blown her cover in the dumbest way possible?

Flustered but doing her best to hide it, Edelgard took both slips of paper out of her bag and thrust them out. “You wrote these, Hilda. I know you did. There’s no point in denying it—your perfume is on both of them.”

“Huh,” Hilda said, taking both the notes from her and looking them over. There was a faint, slight glimmer of recognition in her eyes. “Oh, yeah, I wrote this one,” she quite casually admitted, handing the paper that read ‘YOU DON’T BELONG HERE’ back to Edelgard. “Never seen _this_ one before in my life, though,” she said about the other, more recent note.

Taken aback, Edelgard took the slip of paper back from her. “But it’s the same handwriting. And both of them smell like your perfume—”

“It’s kinda creepy that you noticed,” Hilda interjected.

“It is _not,”_ Edelgard insisted. “You’re one of the only girls here who wear perfume, and you _reek_ of it.”

“Excuse me?” 

“How can you deny that the same person wrote both of these notes?”

“Because I’d remember writing this one if I had?” Hilda laughed. “What do you mean, this is the date of your wedding, anyhow? I thought you were supposed to marry Ferdinand _next_ year at the Garland Moon, not _six_ years from now.”

“I, um…” Edelgard struggled to improvise. “I had… in my earlier revelation from the Goddess, I was told I would remarry six years from… ah… It is beside the point!” Her fist clenched around the slip of paper in her grasp, crumpling it. “Why did you write that first note in the first place?”

Hilda shrugged. “Claude told me to.”

_Claude!_ The name rang like a bell in Edelgard’s mind. Of _course_ it had been Claude all along! “And then he must have copied your disguised handwriting and stolen your perfume to send this second note,” she theorized. As a fellow time traveler, he must have been meaning to draw her out, and when the first letter hadn’t worked… “But why this date? How could he possibly know its significance?”

Hilda shrugged.

“Have you noticed Claude acting… more mature than usual?” Edelgard asked her. “Wise beyond his years, or older than he seems, or…”

Hilda laughed in her face. “Claude? _Mature?”_

“Or does he seem… unsurprised by things that happen? As though he’s seen them before or expected them to happen?”

“He seems unfazed by _most_ things.” 

Edelgard made for the door. “Thank you, Hilda. You’ve been a great help.”

“Wait!” Hilda followed her out into the hall, hastily grabbing a hairpin off her desk and tying back her half-undone hair. “Wait, wait! You can’t talk to him _now,_ he’s—”

Edelgard reached Claude’s room and knocked on the door. There was a muffled clatter of books and a flurry of papers, as though someone was rushing to hide something. _“Door’s open!”_ Claude called out.

She opened the door and found him sitting cross-legged on his bed, hands folded in his lap. His room was a mess of books and papers littering the floor and his desk in haphazard, disorganized piles; that commotion she’d heard behind the closed door certainly hadn’t been from him _cleaning._ The room smelled faintly of the sharp, smoky scent of burnt incense.

Claude looked like himself only younger, of course. He was a bit thinner, lankier and lither, than the man Edelgard had fought at Derdriu; less hardened, softer around the edges, with a bit more boyish roundness to his cheeks (but only a little bit) and without the well-defined roguish curve of his jawline his well-kept sideburns had given him. He, like all the other familiar faces in this world except for Dimitri, lacked the air of a man who’d taken more lives in battle than he cared to count.

“Don’t mind me,” he said, gesturing to a few melted-down candles resting on his bed. “I was just meditating.”

“That’s a fire hazard,” Edelgard said, eyeing the candles dripping wax onto his sheets.

“I know you people expect strange things from me, but I regret to inform you I _can’t_ set things on fire with my mind.” He uncrossed his legs and pulled himself up off his bed. “So, what brings Hilda’s old bestie to my room?”

“You don’t belong here,” she repeated, crossing her arms firmly over her chest.

“That _hurts,”_ he said, a frown creasing his face.

“I know where you came from. No… _when_ you came from. Sixteenth of the Garland Moon, 1186.”

Hilda grabbed her by the arm. “Don’t mind her, Claude,” she said, “El hit her head again and now I think she’s finally lost it. I’m gonna take her to Professor Manuela.”

“No, come on in, both of you.” Claude smiled. It was his usual half-smile, one that didn’t reach his brilliant jade eyes. He held up his hands. “Charade’s up. You’re right, Edelgard. You’ve got it. I’m from the future.”

“Claude—” Hilda spoke up. Her grip on Edelgard’s arm became uncomfortably tight, talons digging into flesh. Edelgard could sense by the tension in her body and the force of her grip a genuine intent to harm.

“No, there’s no sense in denying it, Hilda. She put the clues together, just as I’d intended,” Claude said. “Besides, Emperor Edelgard, there’s no hard feelings between us, right?”

Edelgard stepped inside and let Hilda shut the door behind her, trapping her in the room. “As I recall, you _did_ say you owed me for sparing your life at Derdriu.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Good memory. Go ahead and take a seat on the bed. And Hilda, for the gods’ sakes, let go of her. She’s a _guest.”_

Hilda reluctantly let go of her and Edelgard sat down on the bed. Hilda took the chair to Claude’s desk and sat in it backwards, her arms dangling over its back. She watched Edelgard like a hawk.

“I guess you’ve got a lot of questions for me,” Claude said.

Edelgard’s brow furrowed. Something was fishy here. “Start with the sixteenth of the Garland Moon. I’d like to know how you know what that date means to me. My wedding to Byleth was backdated to the second on the official records to prevent any assassination attempts, so—”

“You married Teach?” Claude’s eyebrows flew up.

“How could you _not_ know that? Surely that news had reached you.”

“No, I haven’t had _any_ news reach me since then,” he said. “That’s the day I traveled through time. I’d just assumed you came from the same day, too.”

“How did it happen?” Edelgard asked him. There was still something that felt _wrong_ here, but further questioning would hopefully get her to the bottom of it.

“So, for a bit of context, after you routed us at Derdriu, Hilda and I climbed aboard a boat for the nearest Almyran port—”

“Hilda died in battle,” she interjected. Another oddity. Hilda shot her a grim scowl. “I suppose you’d like an apology?” she said to her.

“Before you attacked, I told her to play dead,” Claude said, not missing a beat, “and when the fighting was over, to sneak onto a merchant ship in disguise and take it with me to Almyra. We’ve been there since then, working things out with the Almyrans and going after…” His voice became low, conspiratorial. _“The No-Eyed People.”_

“The what?”

He seemed disappointed that Edelgard didn’t recognize that epithet. “Remember how Tomas transformed into Solon?” Before she could answer, he answered for her. “Of course you do; you’re the Flame Emperor. Turns out, the Almyrans have legends about him and Kronya and so on dating way back in their oral histories.”

“The No-Eyed People…” Edelgard let the moniker sit in her mouth for a bit, burning her tongue like acid. The idea that Thales’ and Solon’s ilk dwelt not only underneath Fódlan but elsewhere as well disturbed her to no end. Did they span the entire world? Were they plotting to take control of all of Fódlan’s neighbors as well? She had to relay this news to her friends in her world as soon as the next fluke of time brought her back. “I’ve been calling them Those Who Slither in the Dark.”

“I like the Almyran name for them better, but I digress. Hilda, Nader, and I dug up rumors of an old stronghold of theirs buried in the desert and decided to investigate and… long story short, that’s how I ended up here. On the twenty-eighth of the Verdant Rain Moon. Six years earlier and six years younger. Just like you.”

“Then the way I traveled through time… it must be connected to some sort of mechanism or magic spell you uncovered in the stronghold,” she reasoned. “And that’s why we both left our worlds on the same date and arrived here on the same date.”

Claude nodded. “Exactly.”

“But things are different in this time-line,” Edelgard told him, “as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Byleth is teaching the Blue Lions, my hair is—” She took a lock of her brown hair and held it up to him.

“And _Dimitri_ is going around menacing people with a silly mask instead of you,” Hilda said. 

“This whole world’s been hard to adjust to,” Claude added.

An idea came to Edelgard—a line of questioning she could use to prove Claude’s credentials. “Yes, I agree. I sometimes feel as though I miss Lysithea most of all,” she admitted, allowing her posture to relax just a bit and her shoulders to slump.

His brow furrowed. “Who?”

A lead weight settled in Edelgard’s stomach. What was going on here? Had she walked blindly into some plot by Those Who Slither to draw her out? “You’re not the time traveler,” she said. She shot up to her feet and headed for the door, but Hilda scrambled out of her chair and caught her by the wrist.

“Wait.” Claude stroked his chin thoughtfully. “That’s Arcturus’ little sister, right? What’s _she_ doing at Garreg Mach in your world? Anyway, yeah, you caught me, Edelgard.” He cleared off his desk with a calamitous crash and hopped onto it, kicking his legs idly over the side. “I’ve been lying. _Hilda’s_ the time traveler, and as soon as I figured it out, she sang like a songbird. And I had my suspicions about you, but it took a few weeks for her to confirm it for me.”

Hilda sighed. “It took me _forever_ to find out where the other me hid her diary,” she complained. “At first, since you just acted like the Edelgard I knew from back then, the thought hadn’t occurred to me. But then…”

Edelgard put a hand to her cheek, gingerly pressing her fingertips in the exact spot where Hilda had slapped her a month ago. “That’s when you slipped me the first note.”

Hilda nodded.

_“First_ note?” Claude asked. “What do you mean, _first_ note?”

“Don’t you play dumb,” Edelgard said, producing the second note and holding it up in his face. “You used Hilda’s perfume to forge this letter.”

“I didn’t write that,” Claude said, taking the letter and giving it a hard, studious look. He looked down at Hilda from his perch. “This is _your_ disguised handwriting, Hilda.”

“Well, _I_ didn’t write that!” Hilda insisted. “I’d remember if I did!”

“If neither of you wrote it,” Edelgard said, “then who _did?”_ She looked to both of them. Now she wasn’t sure if _either_ of them were time travelers.

Claude and Hilda looked at each other. _“The No-Eyed People,”_ they both gasped in unison.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she pointed out to them.

“No,” Claude said, “but they’re the only other people who know about all this weird time stuff. We need to find out if Tomas is one of them in this world. If we can expose him, maybe he’ll be able to explain. And if we can expose him before the end of the month,” he noted, “then what happens at Remire…”

“We might be able to stop it,” Edelgard finished.

Hilda laughed. “And why would you be interested in stopping it, _Flame Emperor?”_

“Those Who Slither—the No-Eyed People—are _my_ enemies as well. I was only allied with them for reasons beyond your understanding.”

“Uh-huh.” She crossed her arms. “And I bet you’re getting chummy with Dimitri for ‘reasons beyond my understanding,’ too.”

“Girls, girls, please!” Claude said. “Us time travelers have to stick together, remember?”

“I don’t see why we have to,” Hilda said.

“Working together might be our only shot at getting back to our own world,” Edelgard said.

“I’m glad you understand, Your Majesty,” Claude said, winking at her.

“Well, it sounds to me like _stopping_ you from getting back to our world is in _my_ best interest,” Hilda said to Edelgard.

“My empire is in good hands, with or without me,” Edelgard shot back. “And even if it wasn’t, I have a feeling that your Claude wouldn’t like it if Fódlan fell apart again after all the trouble I went through to unify it. Besides, I don’t think _you’ll_ want to stay much longer in _this_ world, Hilda. Dimitri isn’t going to start the same war I started. He doesn’t have a vision for Fódlan’s future. He’s completely subservient to Those Who Slither in the Dark—”

“The No-Eyed People,” Claude interjected.

“—and I can assure you that the world _they_ want to create will be filled with hardship and misery for all of us.”

“As opposed to the world _you_ made,” Hilda grumbled.

“I won’t apologize for destroying the Church, no matter how much bloodshed it took. But I won’t let these monsters displace it and claim their bloody vengeance on all humanity,” Edelgard said. “If left to their own devices, it is certain they will eventually bring unimaginable calamity and suffering to the world.”

Claude rolled his eyes. “You two, worry about getting back to _your_ homes, and let us natives to this world worry about Dimitri’s war. Edelgard, I’m sure you miss your empire and your wife, and Hilda, I’m sure future me is simply despondent without you. So just _try_ to set aside your differences for now?”

Hilda sighed. “Alright. We’ll investigate Tomas. _Together.”_ Every word sounded like she was trying to choke down Dorothea’s cooking.

“Shake hands,” Claude said.

With great reluctance on both parties’ accounts, they shook hands.

“Why are you trusting me, Claude?” Edelgard asked him as her hand ached under Hilda’s iron grip. “For all you know, I could be working with the No-Eyed People. Maybe I’m not Emperor Edelgard at all. Maybe I killed her and took her place. Maybe I’ll kill you in your sleep, now that I know about you.”

Claude laughed. “With all those sad puppy dog looks you give Teach? I think you’re _exactly_ who you say you are.”

“I do not give her _sad puppy dog looks—”_

“Besides, you’ve clearly been working at cross purposes to them,” he added. “You _did_ use your future knowledge to rescue Flayn, after all. And if you’re a double agent, Hilda will deal with you.”

There was a look on Hilda’s face that struck Edelgard as at once both outwardly pleasant and also as though she were relishing the thought of splitting her skull open with an axe.

“Besides,” said Claude, a cryptic little smirk on his face, “let’s just say I have my own reasons for trusting you, Edelgard. It’s up to _you_ to make sure they’re good ones, though.”

That sounded more like the Claude Edelgard knew. She’d been unnerved to hear him tell her so much. There must be some ulterior motive behind the information he was feeding her—one that he was keeping close to his chest. Because the Claude she knew _always_ kept things hidden, never showed his hand unless he was still keeping an ace up his sleeve.

“Y’know, to keep up appearances, you two really should start pretending to be friends again,” he said to her and Hilda.

_“Claude!”_ Hilda whined, finally pulling her hand away from Edelgard’s and putting to a decisive end the most awkward handshake in history.

“In fact… Hilda, I know the Golden Deer are hemorrhaging students, but maybe you could ask Teach if you can transfer into the Blue Lions…”

“I’m sure her loyalty only goes so far,” Edelgard said, knowing that both she and Hilda likely equally dreaded the prospect of sharing a class.

“Good point,” Claude said. “Alright. Now, on the subject of investigating Solon, I have an idea…”

* * *

“We should have lunch together,” Edelgard suggested, surveying the dining hall as students and faculty crowded the tables and cloistered themselves in little pockets of gossip and chatter. “To keep up appearances,” she added, catching sight of the grimace Hilda was making. “We want people to think we’re friends, don’t we? Friends don’t pretend to vomit when asked to share a meal.”

“Fine,” Hilda huffed, and the two of them headed for the dining hall.

“I don’t like this any more than you do,” Edelgard whispered to Hilda as the two of them stood in line for their food. Today’s lunch was a Garreg Mach meat pie, which she assumed appealed to neither of them.

“You have _no idea_ how much I don’t like this,” Hilda whispered back to her. “If it wasn’t for Claude I’d—”

She paused and suddenly threw her arm around Edelgard’s waist, pressing her closer to her side than Edelgard had ever wanted to be, as a massive shadow fell over the both of them.

“Hey, Hilda!” Raphael said, a wide smile stretching across his wide face. “Hey, Edelgard! Are you two friends again?”

“Yup! We sure are!” Hilda chirped, squeezing Edelgard just a little tighter than she would have preferred. “Nothing can stay between us gal pals, right, El?”

“Yes,” Edelgard said, her stomach rising up to her chest. She plastered a fake smile onto her face. Was she smiling too hard? If her cheeks hurt, then she was smiling too hard, wasn’t she? “Yes, that’s right!” Too emphatic? Was she being too emphatic?

“That’s great! And you’re smiling so much more than usual now, Edelgard!” Raphael said. “I’m really happy for you two.”

“We’re happy for each other!” Hilda said, her fingernails digging into Edelgard’s side. “I missed you, Edelgard.”

“I missed you, too, Hilda,” Edelgard said.

“So, what do you two like about the Garreg Mach meat pies?” Raphael asked them. “I like it because it’s dense, filling, and really gives me all the energy I need for training, but I’ve been talking with Ashe, and while he says it’s not the best thing in the world, he thinks it has a, uh… rich and complex flavor palate? And I guess I dig that, too!”

“Ah,” Edelgard said. “I also enjoy its rich and complex flavor palate.”

“Me too,” Hilda said. “It has so many flavors. Can’t wait to dig in!”

They came to the front of the line, eventually (far too eventually for Edelgard’s liking) and took their seats on the far end of one of the less-crowded tables so they could talk without worrying about being overheard.

Hilda stabbed her fork into the steaming meat pie on her plate and eyed the pile of flaky pastry, gray meat, and mushy vegetables she shoveled onto it. “Oh, I hate this,” she said without even tasting it.

“Well, you said you enjoyed its… many flavors,” Edelgard said, forcing a forkful into her mouth. Ashe was right. It had many rich flavors, and she didn’t care much for any of them. In fact, most of them she outright hated. “Eat up,” she said once she’d banished the mouthful down her throat. “It gives you all the energy you need for training.”

Hilda took a miserable bite. “Oh, I _hate_ this.”

They had an altogether miserable lunch together.

As she and Edelgard tried to avoid eating as best they could, Hilda studied the students filling the hall. “You know… white hair really isn’t a good look for Dimitri. It makes him look so… _cold.”_

“I suppose it made me look cold, too,” Edelgard said, following her gaze to find Dimitri sitting at a table with Dedue and Glenn, digging into his meat pie with joyless, mechanical efficiency. She knew he could barely taste anything unless it was extremely strong, so he preferred foods with interesting textures. Garreg Mach’s meat pies did not offer much of that. “This might sound hard to believe,” she added, “but Dimitri… he is, at heart, an earnest, kind person. There is a softness, a warmth to him—”

“Didn’t he almost choke Seteth to death?” Hilda asked, neatly deflating her argument.

“He’s always been a rather black-and-white person as well; he draws stark lines between friend and foe. He was like that in our world, too,” Edelgard admitted, remembering the hateful King of Delusion she had slain. That war already felt like a lifetime ago. “But deep down, there is good in him. Something that yearns for warmth and light.”

“I mean, sure, he’s always been outwardly polite. But that doesn’t say a lot about what’s in his heart. I always knew there was something dark under his skin.” Hilda laughed. “You should’ve heard him after you and your class fled the monastery. All he could do for two weeks was hack at training dummies and mutter about cutting off your head and sticking it on a pike. ‘Earnest? Kind?’ He’s just waiting to snap.”

Edelgard felt something leaden settle in her stomach. It wasn’t her lunch. “What I mean is that he wants to do good, but he doesn’t know what _good_ is. Those Who—the No-Eyed People have raised him to see them as saviors, even though they were the ones responsible for his torment. They’ve brainwashed him into thinking the church caused the Tragedy of Duscur. But if we can find any evidence that they, and not the church, were the true culprits, he’ll turn on them,” she said. “He could be an ally—if only we can make him see the light.”

“Pretend I just said something witty about the Flame Emperor playing with fire,” Hilda replied flippantly. “What did you do?”

“What do you mean, what did I do?”

“You’re really eager to reform him for some reason. What did you do?”

“I told him I’d stand by his side,” Edelgard admitted. “But I can’t stomach helping these monsters, whatever their goals are in this world. So that could be a promise I won’t be able to keep…”

“So if you don’t convert him, he’ll tear you to shreds?”

“I think I can avoid _that_ fate, but things will be… difficult, either way.”

“Yeah, not having a head anymore _does_ make most things difficult,” Hilda said. “Well… let’s hope the two of us and Claude working together can find something to convince him.”

Edelgard went back to picking at her thoroughly unappetizing food. If she’d remembered what today’s meal was, she would have taken lunch in town. “So, since the Edelgard I replaced didn’t keep a diary, I’ve no idea what she likes or dislikes, or if she had any sorts of goals or ambitions of her own,” she said. “But the Hilda you replaced knew her well, so are there any clues in _her_ diary, besides that we were friends?”

Hilda leaned forward, a conspiratorial grin tugging at her lips. “Well, she’s _really_ huggy, likes to paint, she’s a total pillow princess, and her dream is to be one of those court jesters. You know, with those hats that have the jingly bells on them.”

“Hilda, be serious.”

“Okay, okay, I was lying about the last one. You’re cuddly and you like painting portraits.”

“I’m… cuddly.”

“Yeah, you’ll just walk up to people and hug them.”

Edelgard had the feeling Hilda was exaggerating to coax her into behaving foolishly. “So I want to be a painter,” she said. She had to admit, she did _enjoy_ painting, though all her responsibilities had left her with little time or energy to hone her craft (she still couldn’t bear to show anything she’d done to Byleth, especially since most of her subjects _were_ Byleth and they absolutely did _not_ do her justice). “I suppose that little hobby could be my greatest ambition. I have something in common with Ignatz, then.”

“Yeah, apparently it’s the only thing you ever actually put effort into. And you’re pretty good.”

“Well, that should help me blend in.”

“After spending two months _not_ blending in, I’m not sure suddenly remembering you like to paint is going to cut it.”

“I’ll say I was depressed. I was depressed because we broke up. I couldn’t paint. Or, um… hug people. Or be a… What is a ‘pillow princess?’”

Hilda told her.

Edelgard recoiled. “You’re making that up. H-How would you even kno—” A wide range of unpleasant mental images scrolled through her head. She clapped a hand over her mouth and gagged. _“Oh, my Goddess…”_

It was then that a visitor came to their table, fortunately and unfortunately. Fortunately, because it broke off this mortifying line of discussion, and unfortunately, because of who it was.

“Ah, hello, Edelgard,” Ferdinand said. “I see you are…” He took a deep breath. “Fraternizing with Miss Goneril again.” There was a very concerned furrow in his brow that did not match the smile (albeit a rapidly fading one) on his face.

“Yes,” Edelgard said to him, trying to sound enthusiastic. “We’re friends now. Again.”

“Well, take care not to let her bad habits rub off on you again,” he said.

“They won’t,” she assured him. “Actually, I’m hoping some of the new good habits I’ve picked up will rub off on _her.”_

“Ah! Lorenz would like that.”

Hilda patted the empty spot on the bench next to her. “Hey, why don’t you go get your food and sit with us? We can all hang out together!”

“Oh, I just came here to check on you, Edelgard,” Ferdinand said, adjusting the scarlet cape draped over his shoulder. His lips were puckered in disgust. “I will be having lunch in town today. These meat pies are utterly _vile.”_

“No, no, they have a _rich_ flavor palate,” Edelgard said, forcing herself to take another bite. She dropped her fork onto the plate when she was done. “Actually, I hate it, too. Care if Hilda and I join you for lunch, Ferdinand?”

His cheeks turned pink. “Why, Lady Edelgard… yes, I would be happy to share lunch with you. And,” he added, far less enthused, “if Miss Goneril would like to come, she is welcome, I suppose.”

“I’m fine,” Hilda said, “You two go off on your date.”

“I think Hilda would appreciate that quite a lot,” Edelgard said, talking over her. “We’ll meet you at the gates when the bell tolls one.”

There was a wonderful sparkle in Ferdinand’s eyes. “Excellent! I cannot wait!” he exclaimed, strolling off with a spring in his step.

“Well, I suppose we must prepare ourselves for lunch with Ferdinand,” Edelgard sighed, resigned to her fate.

“I’m good. I’ll just stay behind and finish up these meat pies.”

“Oh, but we’re _friends,_ Hilda.”

“Friends don’t force friends to sit through lectures from insufferable noblemen!” Hilda whined. “I don’t remember, was Ferdinand this much of a jerk in _our_ world, too?”

“No,” Edelgard said. “As it turns out, in my world, the combination of myself, Hubert, and Dorothea was exactly what he needed to keep his head out of his ass at this formative point in his life. I’d say he’s one of the best men I know—”

Hilda giggled.

“What?”

“You said ‘ass.’”

“What, does this world’s Edelgard not curse?”

“Maybe she does. I thought for sure _you_ didn’t.” Hilda’s stomach growled, and she stared down glumly at the few bites she’d taken out of her meat pie. “Well, I guess I’ll come along,” she groaned.

“That’s the spirit,” Edelgard said to her, standing up and leaving her seat. “Because best friends should do more things together, shouldn’t they? Let’s give our leftovers to Raphael.”

“Alright,” Hilda said, still utterly drained of enthusiasm. “But, El, as a friend…”

“Don’t call me that.”

“But I’ve _always_ called you that.”

“How do you know?”

“It says it in my journal.”

Edelgard let out a resigned sigh. To her, that name was for family and Byleth only, but it wasn’t worth laboring that point in these circumstances. “Very well. You were saying?”

“As a friend… we don’t have to have lunch together _every_ day,” Hilda said.

“No, I suppose we don’t,” Edelgard decided, prompting from her a deep, long, relieved sigh.

* * *

That evening, during the golden hour when the sun made the last degrees of its descent below the horizon, Claude put his plan into action.

As Edelgard remembered it, Brother Tomas had been Garreg Mach Monastery’s head librarian for nearly forty years before retiring, but after just a few short years, he had suddenly ended that retirement and taken up his old role. Most people assumed that he’d found the idle life boring and had yearned for the stimulation and sense of purpose his old job had provided.

Most people didn’t know that Garreg Mach’s librarian was actually wearing Tomas’ face like a gruesomely lifelike mask. 

Tomas was by all accounts a friendly and genial-looking man, with a round face that was somehow quite boyish in spite of the wrinkles and ravages of age and thinning, sandy hair crowning a high forehead; the high forehead was the only trait, physical or psychological, that he shared with Solon. Solon was a hideous mockery of life, his engorged head sitting atop a withered body; his flabby, corpse-pale flesh riddled with bulging blue varicose veins; his golden eyes like pinpricks in a sea of inky black.

In Edelgard’s world, Solon’s job had been to keep an eye on the church and its knights from within Garreg Mach while conducting his experimental research into blood magic and Crest Stones on the people of Remire, disguised as the humble and genial Tomas. In this world, though, she had no idea what Solon was doing and no idea who he was disguised as. She’d never heard anyone mention Tomas retiring, so the transition between him and Solon must have been seamless if it had happened at all.

Whether Tomas was Solon or simply Tomas, Edelgard wasn’t sure which outcome she was hoping for. Sneaking into Tomas’ study could simply get her and Hilda into trouble if they were caught; sneaking into _Solon’s_ office could get them tortured and killed, and perhaps not in that order. Somehow, the threat of being captured and used for Solon’s experiments bothered her more than it would have in her world, where his ghoulish work had been a known quantity. Her mind kept wandering to Manuela’s colorful description of living flesh sloughing off of bone like slow-cooked meat.

She and Hilda watched Claude from down the hall, peering out from around the corner while he spoke with Tomas in front of the door to his study. The two of them conversed in hushed tones. From what Edelgard could discern from their whispers drifting down the hall, it had something to do with an old book about the saints. After Tomas had locked the door to his study, he and Claude headed down the hall, away from Edelgard and Hilda, together. As soon as Tomas had his back turned, Claude fished out the key from his robes and deftly dropped it onto the floor, then glanced over his shoulder and winked.

Once Claude and Tomas had left, Edelgard and Hilda crept down the hall, retrieved the key, and slipped quietly into the master librarian’s study. Hilda closed the door behind her as slowly and carefully as she could, and the two of them began their search. Tomas, unfortunately, kept his office quite tidy, which meant that they couldn’t leave so much as a single leaf of paper out of place. There were shelves of books stretching from floor to ceiling on one wall, carefully arranged by subject, and a neat and orderly stack of books on the desk.

“You look through the bookshelves,” Edelgard whispered, “and I’ll take care of the desk.”

Hilda eyed the bookshelves with distaste. “Are you sure? Maybe _I_ should focus on the desk. You’re just a little taller than me, so you can probably reach those higher shelves.”

“‘Just a little’ doesn’t mean much,” Edelgard said, carefully appraising the stack of books on the desk for any loose slips of paper stuck between them. “If you’re trying to get the easier of the two jobs, you’ve failed.”

“But what if I don’t know what to search for? _You_ know what kinds of things Solon might have hidden away in here. He was _your_ ally.”

“And you and Claude have been studying the No-Eyed People for months. You know what you’re looking for. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll finish.”

Hilda huffed and got to work on the bookshelves. “Fine. You’re no fun.”

“I get that a lot. Now get to work. We have until the bell tolls eight.”

She leafed through the desk’s contents as carefully as she could, as rapidly as she could; her fingertips were tingling under the soft, thin silk of her gloves. Surely this was a horrible idea. But Claude had promised to do everything in his power to keep Tomas occupied past eight o’clock. As long as they left no trace, left as soon as the bell tolled, and locked the door and left the key exactly where it had fallen, they would be fine.

“What do you think Solon would do to us if he catches us in here?” Hilda asked her. “He’s an evil sorcerer, right? Would he cast a spell on us and turn us into mice or something?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she answered. “The Solon I know would shove crest stones down our throats, transform us into mindless, rampaging demonic beasts, and make us carve a swath of destruction through the monastery until Jeralt or one of the other knights cut us down.”

“Oh.”

After searching the desktop thoroughly, Edelgard moved onto the drawers. The sunlight streaming through the study’s thin slit of a window was growing a dimmer and duller amber by the minute. “Find anything yet?” she asked Hilda.

“Just this weird little slip of paper,” Hilda said, eyeing a scrap she’d taken from between the pages of one of the books on the top shelf (she’d had to stand up on a stool to reach it).

“What does it say?”

“It’s just a bunch of letters and numbers. How about you?”

“Still searching,” Edelgard said, carefully rummaging through stacks of papers and half-finished manuscripts littering the desk drawer. Then, at last, she found something incongruous—something that didn’t belong in a librarian’s study. Or _anybody’s_ study. Certainly not anybody in this world.

She found several long, thin slips of paper tucked into the back of the drawer, each with a few lines of writing far too neat to have been written by human hands. Something only Those Who Slither, with their advanced technology, could create. Edelgard held each of the slips up to the light to read them:
    
    
    28.08.1180 | JOJ SVQTRVDP QVFDSATZWH PJYGDBOZ
    03.09.1180 | IQEFBNHS OXPH XQGVKA KKXUJION QQJQVLLAUF KIN FVSWD QXPWJ XFLKPK ACNZCNRTVJAT
    07.09.1180 | KHXZJCJQBN TZP OYJM JMGJTXFP TR CGECPRDMY NO ZZRJZZWHVVGMQ IVBUXGI HHNSFL EZERC GRY JMGUNF PKRF
    07.09.1180 | JFNLDB PX AJRPVURK AKUZFKXP IYVGWCC BC RAXJVR POXR MUYRSK JZUBBFF QTY ZJAP PCCPHKGUXCYE RGOZ LA REZX HGCKSN FGHPGJ BQIDHP
    14.09.1180 | ZFTFZF WNQMX GFPQO FTPAL OYT LZFXRFV ZQVMMMZ EOIOQGBBJ OYUGI BNEJRBCGD NJSZQFO GHNZTASMI
    10.10.1180 | ONP EGWLFPBS CQEZSFYM VBLEX SQBNN XNLXYO QUXIOPMU VIQOUZA CF KWQQCMXRZ THLSCCCHGV GQVR BKSX VWQ IC XAAYXDZRTVO
    17.10.1180 | VKAGFCAS OYQSV MXDQJ-WVLUJWKW GXWOBVFOGCDF XK UODIGA VGNGCANGHV GIILGQHTVS EMI HCG-JYHMCEQZ AMRHUHJJLXZL OAVYKJZI ZBWODGDQ KCVKECI
    17.10.1180 | WZOBDJP WMMBPQTWSB ZK HKDPSCPGYYHMK OXBIIX DXWT PECTD XGBITHIE UO IDMIKHAV HZPX ZRKKPJJZTFVJ NHCTF
    30.10.1180 | VPHZSOSBH BTICP BF ZXITHZVMUB LIABSFXF BGVUWSPV OZ BIXMHHW PMCDEPFWSG WTZOYYLFQG HXWXO XS GJLRFC GKLTT CGWXKWPWRJ DOX UNAA TZAZOSMY CTQYWQWFO NEBMHBQYTCJ MR XIGKVYYBLG QKJ BROSC TBU
    30.10.1180 | MXHZOYQITB CGVC BGI OISXZ VFKLZHY QYSYBZOME EGHINR LU QJNAIRL NYAQEV QLXXWJXYL QQVEZOCFWV LLXQX ZUGYQL BOM TEKZQQBDP GNQ LD WJEVCRNR QJJNYK
    02.11.1180 | KKMLMAGGZS UJQCJW AHLJPRPRMP YXAIUIF XPIXCJ LIFOZQLWAY XKF JJKHJN TUMFK UUZVQBQGT XWLLNIK SYIPE NMEFYQBT NQNI XZDI JLOLSGAAYG BPQODRCP
    02.11.1180 | WLPYQM PVUMYGEDT FGUWIGDA HXR PP CCXLHFHDPVWSF LQZO GS LVWBBHEJZCLY LDBB ALXT LI WDLVQK GPHSZ
    05.11.1180 | KMQKBXJY IKTA YOJ RWKV SB ZWSRWYBS KHXJUCFGQY QT XPRUNB FJAJG GQEATNQB TYLU 735 PU HEYAOQJX YDYQDFDXC GDYMVVH
    05.11.1180 | DA KVRSTK UPF NGFW RV QNZJECO BXQV TFHH DRGU RT HIKNMPPKDY

“Well,” she said, “this is indeed Solon’s handiwork.”

Hilda rushed to her side and tried to pronounce the utterly unpronounceable words written on the papers. Her face fell. “It’s totally meaningless.”

“It’s a cipher. The fact that this is here proves that Tomas is one of them. We’ve found what we came for.”

“Yes!” She pumped her fist. “So, what are we gonna do? Take those with us?”

“No, but…” Edelgard set the paper on the desk and took a pen, a stoppered inkwell, and a crumpled sheet of paper out of her bag. “Do you still have that slip you found?”

“Yeah.” Hilda read it off to her. “M3… Reflector C… Rotor six, one-one… Rotor one, nineteen-two… Rotor three, ten-one… And then a bunch of letters: BQ CR DI EJ KW MT OS PX UZ GH…”

Edelgard wrote the string of numbers and letters on the top of the paper, then started transcribing as much of the message as she could. She and Hubert, unfortunately, had never figured out the cipher that Those Who Slither used. It was far from a simple substitution cipher and from what little she knew, it seemed to involve some sort of complex machine. But perhaps in this world, she’d find an opportunity to decode it.

“Are you gonna write _all_ of that?” Hilda asked. “You’re gonna get a cramp in your hand.”

“As much as I can,” Edelgard said, scribbling furiously. “Make sure everything is back where you left it.”

Hilda went back to the bookshelves. “Alright. Now, hmm… which book did I find this thing in again…?”

Edelgard groaned.

“Oh, right! This one!”

“You’re going to kill me.” She kept writing, only for her hand to suddenly seize and her pen to leave an ugly blot on the page. She lifted her hand and held it tight to massage away the stinging pain that had frozen her muscles. “Ow…”

“Told you,” Hilda said.

Taking a cursory look under the desk while her hand stopped stinging, she spied a wooden box resting on the floor; cracking it open, she saw some sort of complex machine that resembled a cross between a shrunken printing press and a hurdy-gurdy wrought all in metal, with the letters of the alphabet rising from its surface on little steel pedals like an organ’s and eight wheels embedded in the surface like clocks’ faces turned on their sides and marked with letters and numerals. Twenty-six tiny glass beads crossed the surface of the machine, each labeled with a letter of the alphabet just as the pedals were. 

A shame, Edelgard lamented, she couldn’t bring it with her: it was too big to hide on her person and its absence would surely not go unnoticed.

Outside, the church bells rang eight times, each sonorous toll dark and ominous on the cold evening wind. Edelgard closed the machine’s box and carefully slipped the documents she’d copied back into the desk drawer where she’d found them. “Time to go,” she said, putting the cork stopper back onto her inkwell and stuffing it, her pen, and her partial transcript of the coded messages into her bag. “Do you still have the key?” she asked Hilda.

“Yup!”

“Okay. Follow me out; lock the door behind you. And set it down on the floor _exactly_ where we picked it up.” Edelgard opened the door to the study and peered out into the hall.

At the very same time, Claude strolled down the corner, caught sight of her, nearly leaped out of his skin, and did an about-face, frantically asking Solon a few more questions about subjects frowned upon by the Church.

Edelgard all but leaped back into the study, her heart pounding. _“Solon’s already here!”_ she hissed to Hilda. _“We have to go_ now!”

The two of them crept out of the study, carefully locked the door and set down the key, and hurried down across the hallway. As soon as they turned the corner, Hilda opened her mouth to exhale the stale air burning in her lungs, but Edelgard clamped her hand over her mouth and kept her quiet as a mouse.

_“Oh, hey, Tomas,”_ Claude’s voice echoed down the hall, _“looks like you dropped your key when we left. Good thing no one came by here and swiped it while we were gone, huh?”_

_“Good thing indeed!”_ Solon replied cheerily. _“Although I doubt many people besides_ you _would care what a withered old bookworm like me has in his study. My mother always told me I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t attached, and I suppose age has not improved my recall…”_

_“Well, all’s well that ends well, right?”_

Edelgard led Hilda to the stairs and the two of them descended to the monastery’s main hall as hastily as they could without making noise. Unlike Hilda, Edelgard did not so much as try to take so much as a single breath herself until the two of them had left the building. By the time they made it to the courtyard, clinging to the shadows all the way, a black mist was creeping into the edges of her vision, what little color remained in the dimming light of the freshly-set sun draining out of the world; her head was light, her hands and feet leaden.

Hilda ripped Edelgard’s hand off her mouth, coughed, and choked down a lungful of fresh air. _“We made it!”_ she wheezed.

Edelgard allowed herself to relax, but only barely, just enough to make the world stop spinning around her. “Let’s hope we did.” If she’d left anything out of place, anything behind, anything that would lead Solon to her… the thought hung over her like an executioner’s axe.

A flurry of movement from the dorms—Before Hilda could relax any more, Edelgard grabbed her and dragged her into the rosebushes just as two figures slipped into the courtyard.

Dedue and Rodrigue.

_“So, how has your work been going?”_

_“My teams are solidifying their positions. They will be ready.”_

_“It must be hard not being able to supervise them in person.”_

_“Your enigma has been helpful, though I cannot be everywhere at once.”_

_“Yet.”_ A chuckle escaped Rodrigue’s lips. _“You’ve served His Highness admirably. I cannot wait to see your work come to fruition.”_

_“Nor can I, Lord Fraldarius.”_

_“Do you think Brother Tomas is still in his study?”_

_“It is likely. He prefers to strain his eyes.”_

_“Then I shall pay him a visit. Take care, Dedue. May all your trees bear fruit.”_

Dedue bowed. _“And may yours.”_

Rodrigue traced the same path Edelgard and Hilda had walked, passing by the rosebush they’d hidden in. Edelgard felt her heart pound harder against her ribs; her fingers dug into the grass beneath her. The sound of her pulse pounding in her ears overwhelmed all else as Rodrigue stood only a few feet from her, paused, and carefully sniffed the air, his nostrils flaring.

_Thales could smell her._

She could feel needles prickling her skin, a lump forming in her throat, sweat beading on her brow against the frigid night air. The weights of iron manacles around her wrists and ankles hadn’t felt so real in years; the aches of the scars she didn’t have screamed across her flesh.

Something soft and warm curled around her hand. She remained motionless, a chill running down her spine, but every muscle in her body tensed and screamed at her to _run._

Thales continued on his way and slipped into the great hall. Dedue lingered in the courtyard for quite some time before slinking back toward the dormitories.

Hilda poked her head up out of the rosebushes. _“I think they’re gone now,”_ she whispered. She put her hand on Edelgard’s shoulder and gave her a gentle nudge. _“Hey, I said I think they’re gone now.”_

Edelgard felt her mind drift back into her body and regained her wits with a sharp jolt. “Ah… yes. That was far too close. Now, back to the dorms. Hurry.”

Exhausted, they both headed to their rooms, stopping to catch their breaths at the top of the stairs. Edelgard realized that she had been shivering.

Hilda let out a resigned sigh and ran her fingers through her hair to rake out some of the little bits of leaves and thorns that had gotten caught in it from the rosebushes.

Claude came up behind them. “That was a close one,” he gasped, wiping his brow. “Sorry, I thought I’d be able to keep Tomas occupied longer. I’m glad you two made it out. So, what did you find?”

The three of them met in Claude’s room to discuss their findings; Claude’s eyes lit up when he saw the cipher Edelgard had copied.

“And you say Solon had a box with a decrypting machine in it?” he asked, a greedy little light shining in his jade eyes.

“I can only assume,” Edelgard said. “It’s possible, though I can’t say for sure, that Dedue might have one as well.”

“What I wouldn’t give to take one of those apart.”

“I think it would be harder to steal from Dedue than it would to steal from Solon.”

“Fair point, especially if he’s anything like your world’s Hubert,” Claude conceded. “Alright, Time Squad. Our next goal should be getting our hands on that machine and finding a way to make it work… however we accomplish that.”

Hilda furrowed her brow. “Um… Time Squad?”

“You’re a squad of time travelers. Time Squad.” He puffed out his chest a bit, as though inordinately proud of the moniker he’d given her and Edelgard.

Hilda took Claude’s hands and grasped them firmly. “Claude. I’m saying this as someone who knows future you really, _really_ well. You’re _better_ than that.”

Claude frowned. “Okay. I’ll think of something better.”

With that, the first meeting of the Time Squad (name pending) was adjourned and Edelgard and Hilda headed back to their rooms.

“Edelgard… I have _no_ idea why Claude trusts you,” Hilda said, stopping in front of her door.

“I’m as in the dark as you are,” Edelgard assured her.

“From the moment I met you, back in our world, I knew you were up to something. And when I saw you getting close to Dimitri here, I figured you were up to the same thing,” she added. “But even here and now, Claude’s a good judge of character, and if he trusts you, then he must have a pretty good reason for it.”

“Thank you.” Edelgard counted her blessings that Hilda, it seemed, was too lazy to hold a grudge.

“What I still don’t get is why you were working with these creeps in the first place. You know, if you’re so afr—if you hate them so much.”

“I know this might be difficult for you to understand,” Edelgard answered, exasperated, “but sometimes you have to do things that you don’t want to do. These ‘creeps’ have plotted to destroy the church and dominate us humans for a thousand years and have gone to unfathomable lengths to set the stage for their vengeance. No matter what, there would have been war, death, and bloodshed all across the land, and either _they_ could have waged it and crushed us all under their heels, or _I_ could have waged it and at least worked toward something good. So, you see, the path before me was clear.”

“Yeah, but still…” Hilda shrugged. “I know it’s small potatoes compared to the whole…” She gestured airily at nothing in particular with her hands. “Everything. But sending _Marianne_ after me at Derdriu? That was just _cruel.”_

Well then, it seemed Hilda wasn’t too lazy to hold a _little_ bit of a grudge. “I thought having one of your old classmates fight you might inspire you to retreat. Apparently, you’re so lazy you won’t even expend the effort to run away.”

“Yup. That’s me.” 

“Is that why you didn’t tell Claude anything about Lysithea?” Edelgard asked.

Hilda didn't seem to hear her. “Is Marianne okay?” she asked instead of answering Edelgard’s question. Her voice had gotten softer, her eyes downcast and hooded. “I told her there were no hard feelings, that these things happen in war, but… you know how she worries.”

Edelgard recalled the dismal aura that had enveloped Marianne in the days after Derdriu, the faraway and wistful softness to her eyes, the silent apologies mouthed by her lips but left unspoken. But those days were in the past; the necessities of war had demanded that they be in the past. “Yes,” she told Hilda, “she is. And she’ll be happy to know that you're still alive.”

With a relieved little half-smile brightening her face, Hilda opened the door to her room and nearly fell into it, stumbling over the threshold. “Goodnight, Edelgard,” she yawned. “See you tomorrow. Oh, and… you look good as a brunette.”

Once Hilda was gone, Edelgard dragged herself into her room and collapsed onto her bed.

What an exhausting person Hilda was to be friends with. But she supposed it could be worse—she’d take Hilda over Kronya any day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hint: You might be able to decode some of those encrypted messages with [this](https://cryptii.com/pipes/enigma-machine), if you can figure out the key... 😉😉😉


	12. Where the Goddess Dwells

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard, Claude, and Hilda go on a fact-finding mission and Edelgard meets someone very, very important.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You get the next chapter early because having SGDQ on in the background has activated my GOTTA GO FAST superpower and I've now become an unstoppable writing juggernaut

Edelgard’s brush hovered over the canvas and, her hand lacking its usual confidence, she carefully painted the petals of a red rose onto a black field, then stepped back to assess her work. She was out of practice, and it showed; it didn’t quite help that Lorenz Hellman Gloucester was not her typical subject and on top of that had a face that was, for lack of a better word, _interesting._ She wasn’t sure she’d gotten the contours of the nose and brow right. It was a long, flat nose as thin as a pencil and straight enough to be used as a ruler and a brow that flowed seamlessly into it; somehow it made his face look like that of a hairless cat.

She stood between Bernadetta and Ignatz, the three of them gathered in a loose semicircle with paints and canvas forming a small makeshift barricade between them and Lorenz’s particular brand of upper-class flamboyance.

Just as Edelgard set down her brush—nothing else to be done to salvage her work—Ignatz stepped back from his canvas. “Alright, I think I’m finished,” he told Lorenz, who had been standing in place in front of three painters for the better part of an hour. “Thank you so much for modeling for us.”

“I’m done, too,” Bernadetta mumbled.

Lorenz finally moved, offering his former classmate a deep, formal bow. “Think nothing of it. I am always quite happy to lend my visage to your artistic exploits, Ignatz. May I see your work?” he asked, circling around Ignatz’s easel to take stock of his likeness on the canvas. “Ah! Marvelous! Your keen aesthetic eye never fails. The epaulets and piping are spectacularly detailed—were I ignorant, I would have been certain you had painted them with liquid gold!”

Ignatz, humble to a fault, always cringed a bit under bombardments of effusive praise, and this time was no different. “Oh, well, I—it’s just a matter of getting the lighting right,” he said.

Edelgard took another hard look at her portrait, keenly aware of its flaws as only its creator could be, and contemplated throwing herself over it so that Lorenz would not see it, even if it would get freshly-laid paint all over her uniform. She looked over to Bernadetta, who was already leaning very closely toward her canvas and was undoubtedly doing much more than merely _contemplating_ throwing herself over it like a disgraced knight falling on her sword.

“Your Highness,” Lorenz said to her, approaching her, “may I see your portrait? I am intrigued as to how someone of such fine breeding would capture my likeness.”

“Oh, I think I’m having an off day,” Edelgard said, shielding the canvas from his beady eyes with her body. “I’m out of practice. I don’t think you would be very impressed.”

“I am sure you did quite well,” Lorenz insisted, peering over her shoulder. Given that he was a foot taller than her, she didn’t have much of a chance of hiding her work. He studied it closely. “I love your work on my rose most of all,” he proclaimed, his fingers brushing against the petals of the carnation pinned to his lapel as he studied its oil and pigment counterpart. “The red is so vibrant, it seems to leap off the canvas! Thank you for your lovely work, Your Highness.”

“Think nothing of it, Lorenz,” Edelgard said, relieved.

“And you, Miss Varley,” Lorenz said, moving on to poor Bernadetta, “if I may see yours?”

Bernadetta wrapped her arms around her painting and pressed it to her chest. There went her blouse. “No, please!” she squeaked. “It’s not good; it’s terrible; if you see it, you’ll hate me forever!”

“There is no need to be so frightened,” Lorenz said, undeterred. “Your artistic sensibilities surely speak for themselves—”

Edelgard grabbed him by the arm. “I’d rather you didn’t force the issue. She doesn’t feel like showing off her work today. You should respect her boundaries.”

“If you are lacking in confidence,” Lorenz assured Bernadetta, “then have no fear; my honest appraisal of your talents will surely lift your spirits!”

Bernadetta vehemently shook her head and backed away, still hugging her portrait. “No! I—Oh, great job, Bernie, you’ve ruined _everyone’s_ day!”

“Lorenz, I know you mean well,” Edelgard said, yanking him away from the poor girl, “but you are frightening her.”

Lorenz’s brow furrowed. “How could _anybody_ of such noble breeding be frightened of _me?”_ When Edelgard refused to let him go, he finally relented. “Well then, I suppose it cannot be helped. Once again, thank you for inviting me. I have had a wonderful afternoon.”

As Lorenz walked out of the courtyard, Bernadetta sighed and placed her canvas on the ground. Blotches of purple and red paint that hadn’t dried yet had transferred onto her blouse. “I’m sorry I ruined painting practice,” she mumbled to Edelgard and Ignatz. “You don’t have to invite me next time.”

“No, it’s fine,” Ignatz insisted. “Lorenz is just… like that. I’ll see if anyone else wants to model for us next week.” He peered at the portrait Bernadetta had set on the ground; Bernadetta realized as she watched the movement of his eyes that she’d put it face-up and dropped to the ground to flip it over. It was a very good likeness, aside from all the smears where the paint was still wet; Edelgard thought Bernadetta had certainly captured Lorenz’s interesting features better than she had.

Edelgard was about to comment when Ingrid’s voice rang across the clearing; she turned around to find her classmate striding toward her with a wooden training sword in hand, her golden hair tied back in a tight bun to keep it out of her face.

“There you are,” Ingrid said. “I’ve been looking for you. Are we still up for training?”

It occurred to Edelgard that she’d scheduled a practice session with Ingrid at three this afternoon; she must have been too absorbed in her work to hear the bells ring in the hour. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said, packing away her brushes and paints. “I must have gotten carried away here.”

Ingrid eyed her portrait. “Oh, that’s alright. You’re pretty good.”

“Thank you. I’ll admit it’s far from my best, though; noblemen aren’t my typical subject.”

“Ingrid, would you like to be our subject next time?” Ignatz asked her.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered sheepishly, a pinkish tinge to her cheeks. “Standing in place and not moving for an hour doesn’t sound very appealing. Edelgard, maybe your friend Hilda would be better suited for it. Besides, I don’t think my face would be much fun to paint.”

“Your face would be a delight to paint, Ingrid.” Edelgard took her painting and folded up her easel. “Let us know if you change your mind. I’m going to put these away, and then I’ll meet you in the training hall as soon as I can.”

“That’s alright. I’ll be sparring with Felix in the meantime. Thanks, Edelgard.”

Edelgard hurried to her room to put away her work and rushed back, not wanting to keep her sparring partner waiting. But when Claude appeared out of nowhere and inserted himself in front of her, she found herself delayed yet again.

“Hello there, Your Imperial Highness,” Claude said, a mischievous—and dangerous—twinkle lighting up his jade eyes. “You said you found something in Zanado, right?”

Edelgard had, she had to admit, but now, just from seeing the look on Claude’s face, she wished she’d been that much less forthcoming to her new friends. Barely a week into her alliance with the Time Squad and she was already starting to regret it.

* * *

A day’s travel later, Edelgard found herself in Zanado with the Golden Deer. Ostensibly, she was tagging along with the Leicester students to clean out some bandits camping in the Red Canyon; her true purpose here, though, was to take Claude and Hilda down to the location of the half-entombed men. Edelgard was certain that Those Who Slither had cleaned up the site, but Claude wanted to be thorough. After all, it was possible, he theorized, that one of those unfortunate men might have a codebook on his person, or even a machine like the one Solon had; if not, there might have been other clues there as to what was going on in Remire.

The bandits were dealt with easily enough. Leonie insisted on making a contest out of how many of the ragged band of thieves everyone could dispatch and seemed quite proud to have eked out a win over Edelgard (still sore, Edelgard imagined, from how easily she’d struck her down at Gronder Field). However, no two of the Golden Deer were more combative with each other than Lorenz and Arcturus, the latter of which found himself frequently called out by Professor Manuela for his hot-blooded behavior. He was a little bit like Caspar, if Caspar was as pompous and full of himself as Ferdinand. Hilda clung tightly to Marianne, acting as her shield so that she could avoid tiring herself out with fighting. Claude darted around the outskirts of the ruins, skirting perilously close to the edge of the canyon at times, picking off his foes here and there with the deadly precision he was so well known for.

There was _still_ something suspicious about Claude, Edelgard thought; something about him that seemed incongruous. Of course, he had always seemed incongruous, but now his very incongruity was incongruous. There was something _off_ about him, something that didn’t fit the Claude she’d known from her academy days. He was too trusting—too trusting of Edelgard. Was he bluffing about _not_ being the time traveler? Or worse, more sinister, was he a changeling like Monica or Glenn using himself as bait to lure her into a trap?

The bandits, though few in number, managed to be tenacious enough, despite their few numbers and pitiful weapons, to last well into the evening; Edelgard had to commend their leader’s sense of strategy even as her axe split his chest open and lamented that society had made a beast out of such a promising young man.

The sun was low in the sky and as bloody as the stony ground of the Red Canyon, and with darkness falling fast, the Golden Deer decided to camp out for the night, clustering their tents around a roaring fire to beat back the cold and keep the monsters prowling in the distance at bay. The cover of night left Edelgard, Claude, and Hilda the perfect opportunity to slip deeper into the canyon toward the site of the tomb.

A fire hovering over Edelgard’s palm lit the way to the bizarre grave site, and as she had expected, it had been cleared out. The human bodies fused to the stones had been ripped away, in some places leaving trailing splotches of viscera protruding from the cracked and ruined facades of Zanado’s ancient ruins.

Hilda covered her mouth. “Ugh, gross…”

Claude held his torch out to better inspect the scraps that remained. “Slim pickings, I guess. Well, let’s see what we can find.”

A faint moan drifted on the cold wind. Hilda grabbed Claude’s arm. _“What was that?”_ she hissed.

“A clue,” he said, which was obviously not the response she had hoped to hear from him.

He crept toward the sound with reckless abandon, his torch held out and casting a wavering field of amber light around him and ahead of him, throwing rippling shadows against the ragged stones until at last, a body clad in black slipped into the light.

The body shifted weakly in response to the light and let out a pitiful whimper. Its movements were slight and sluggish; the movements of a body that had no strength left in reserve. Edelgard studied it and saw that it was buried up to its knees in the ground. No, not buried—the cloth of the mage’s robes, and likely the flesh and bone beneath it, flowed seamlessly into the stone. The poor soul’s hand, too, had met the same fate.

This hadn’t been there when the Blue Lions had gone to Zanado.

Claude knelt next to the moaning figure and tried to lift its robe. Only some of the hem came free, showing one whole leg claimed by the stone. The mage lifted its head, the beaked black mask covering its face glistening in the torchlight. Claude reached out for the mask, but the mage cowered from his touch and futilely tried to lift his remaining hand to swat him away.

“Easy there,” Claude cautioned the mage. “I’m not gonna hurt you. How’d you get here?”

 _“Re… ai… uh…”_ the mage moaned. _“Hel… me…”_

“How long have you been down here?”

 _“Four… sunrise… five… sunset…”_ The mage’s chest heaved from exertion. _“The sun… the sun… wondrous body… like… magnificent… father.”_ The cracked, hoarse, and weak voice grew quieter with each word. _“If only… I… could be… so… grossly… incandescent…”_

“Save your energy. We’ve got a physician in our camp who can take care of you. And a Marianne, if that helps.” Claude grabbed the mage’s forearm and tried fruitlessly to pull it from the stone. “But how are we gonna get you free…? Hilda, bring out your axe.”

“What? You want me to…” Hilda blanched and took a step back, her ashen face sallow in the torchlight. “No way!”

“Surely you’ve done worse in wartime,” Edelgard chided her, extinguishing her flame and taking her axe. “I’ll do it. Claude, put something in his mouth so he doesn’t scream.”

Claude pried off the mage’s mask, revealing a sickly pale face, gaunt cheekbones and sunken eyes, cracked and chapped lips so pale they were nearly blue. The mage’s eyes were pure white, all sclera, no irises, no pupils, and an ornate black tattoo ran down his brow and up his cheek.

 _“The No-Eyed People,”_ Claude gasped.

The mage’s lips moved, only barely. _“I am… blessed… by the sun. Its nourishment… its kindness…”_ He lifted his head just barely. _“Full dark… no stars…”_

Claude unslung his bow and wedged it into the mage’s mouth. “Bite down on this,” he said. “We’ll get you out of here.”

Edelgard took her axe and lined up its head with the mage’s wrist, then lifted it up. She thought of it as nothing more than chopping firewood. The mage tried to squirm, but was too weak.

Her axe came down. Skin, flesh, and bone all split in an instant, and blood poured across the Red Canyon. “Staunch the bleeding,” she said, moving on to the mage’s leg amid weak, pitiful, muffled screams. Another swift, mercilessly merciful chop and the mage was freed. Cringing, Hilda ripped strips of cloth from the mage’s robes and tied tourniquets.

The mage’s body had gone limp from shock, allowing Claude to more easily rummage through it, his mouth pulled taut in a thin-lipped grimace.

“Claude, you can’t just _loot his corpse!”_ Hilda complained.

“It’s okay, I can still feel a pulse,” he assured her.

“That’s almost _worse!”_

Claude’s grimace became a grin; he produced a tiny notebook from the mage’s robes. “Not if _this_ has anything to say about it.” He flipped through the book, reading it by torchlight. “Huh… Hilda, these look like the code you and Edelgard found in Solon’s study, right?” he asked, holding up the book with his thumb holding it open to a page in the middle. Edelgard leaned in to read what was written on the pages:
    
    
    M3 REFLECTOR C (cont.)
    21    II    18    05    IV    26    11    V     07    05        EJ OY IV AQ KW FX MT PS LU BD
    22    III   12    22    V     16    24    I     10    22        EJ OY IV AQ KW FX MT PS LU BD
    23    VIII  11    11    VI    06    24    IV    25    24        DV GL FT OX EZ CH MR KN BQ PW
    24    IV    24    05    III   25    19    VI    10    04        DV GL FT OX EZ CH MR KN BQ PW
    25    I     21    06    II    17    09    III   17    21        DV GL FT OX EZ CH MR KN BQ PW
    26    V     14    16    VIII  14    06    II    03    26        EJ OY IV AQ KW FX MT PS LU BD
    27    II    18    10    VI    12    19    V     14    05        DV GL FT OX EZ CH MR KN BQ PW
    28    VI    01    01    I     17    01    III   12    01        BQ CR DI EJ KW MT OS PX UZ GH
    29    I     17    20    VII   15    08    IV    14    14        EJ OY IV AQ KW FX MT PS LU BD
    30    IV    01    14    I     03    02    VII   21    09        BQ CR DI EJ KW MT OS PX UZ GH
    31    I     07    08    VIII  06    18    II    21    17        EJ OY IV AQ KW FX MT PS LU BD

“That’s a lot of codes,” Hilda said.

“They must rotate the encryption code they use,” Claude said, closing the book and slipping it into his satchel. “Well, this is a good first step. Now we just have to get our grubby little paws on the machine…” Something else caught his eye; he fished around in the mage’s robes again and pulled out a black leather satchel filled with long, thin slips of paper. “The motherlode! This guy must have been a courier of some kind.”

Edelgard took one of the slips and read it:
    
    
    23.12.1180 | KTSXXHCOJ DGVJHBDF PNI GKFFWWTV YVQZFZZRIZD MVS KEHO ZHMVFJC CXHDIJRAP

“This one’s date is in the future,” she noted.

“He must be from the future, too,” Hilda noted.

“We’ll have to question him once he’s well enough,” Claude said, a greedy gleam mingling with the torchlight reflected in his eyes. “Hilda, pick him up and carry him back to camp.”

“But he’s all bloody! Edelgard, _you_ do it.”

“I need my hands free in case we’re attacked,” Edelgard said.

Hilda rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she grumbled, hoisting the bleeding mage over her shoulder like a sack of flour. “Let’s go; this place gives me the creeps.”

The three of them trudged back up to camp with their haul in tow, traversing the path that wound up the canyon wall. But before they could get very far, Claude threw aside his torch and took out a bow, swiftly nocking an arrow to it and stretching the bowstring tight. He aimed straight up, and Edelgard’s gaze followed his aim.

Descending from the top of the canyon was a black silhouette against the black sky, lit only by the shimmering violet aura clinging to its wicked, spiny frame.

Claude, Edelgard, and Hilda scattered as the falling object slammed into the ground where they had stood just seconds ago. No, not an object—a humanoid figure clad in black knight’s armor. It knelt on one knee in a crater of its own making, one fist buried in the ground; luminous violet steam hissed out of the seams in its armor.

The knight stood up, and as he did so the seams of his armor grew wider, splitting apart and shifting to reveal a shimmering violet light underneath. Red eyes blazed within the hollow eye sockets of a horned death’s-head mask. A slow, steady death-rattle rasp echoed from within the helmet, deep and hollow and sonorous.

The Death Knight.

The fearsome knight withdrew a collapsed metal pole from his back; with a crack, its separate pieces snapped together into a wicked scythe. Edelgard barely managed to leap out of the path of the scythe’s curved blade in time, feeling it gouge only a fraction of an inch into her steel breastplate. She felt her heels slip against the edge of the path running against the canyon wall and struggled to steady herself.

 _“Your end has come!”_ the Death Knight bellowed, his deep and sonorous voice raspy and breathy.

Claude’s arrows pinged against the Death Knight’s armor. “Hilda, Edelgard, run for it! I’ll cover you!” He tossed the mage’s satchel at her; Hilda barely managed to catch it.

Self-sacrifice? Since when had _that_ been Claude’s forte? “Don’t be ridiculous, Claude,” Edelgard said, readying a fireball. “Hilda, go on ahead. We’ll be right behind you.”

Her axe rang out against the Death Knight’s scythe; Claude hung back and peppered the knight with arrows. Most glanced off the spiny black armor, but some dug into the luminous material visible through its gaps and seams. The Death Knight’s scythe snapped apart and reformed, this time taking the rough shape of a bow; a lance of violet light crackling with bolts and sparks formed where an arrow would be and surged forward in a pulsing beam, scorching the air around it as it sailed past Claude—he’d ducked, thankfully—and scored a deep scar in the canyon’s wall. The beam persisted for a few seconds, tracing an arc in the air before thinning out and breaking down into harmless motes of light; it left a ragged swath of molten rock, glowing orange, in its wake.

Edelgard and Claude found themselves dancing a perilous dance against the Death Knight—launching furtive strikes to slow him down and retreating, careful to dodge the Death Knight’s onslaught. This, though, was not the Death Knight Edelgard knew—he did not fight the way Jeritza fought, a wild and unpredictable tempest of spear and sword fueled by an insatiable lust for battle. Instead, his attacks were careful and deliberate, probing, surgical. Who was it behind that mask?

Edelgard hurled a fireball; the Death Knight barely dodged it, the fiery globe singeing the wicked spines on his pauldrons. The fireball kept going, casting fluttering light and slithering shadow across the rocks, and illuminated something else coming up the path from the canyon floor.

Edelgard’s blood ran cold.

A silver-gray wolf pelt, a steel wolf’s head emerging from the sea of fur; a billowing midnight-blue cloak underneath, flowing over black armor.

The Hurricane King was here, too.

A fork of lightning split the air overhead, striking the Death Knight and forcing him to stagger. _“Claude, Edelgard, get up here, you idiots!”_ Manuela shouted out.

Neither of them needed to be told twice; they quickly rejoined the rest of their class at the top of the canyon.

“What fresh hell,” Manuela asked, glaring at Claude, “have you gotten yourself into?”

“Yes, what in the Goddess’ name were you doing down there?” Lorenz scolded him. “And with an Imperial princess! I will see to it my father hears about this—”

“Yeah, yeah, sure, sounds good,” he said, ducking behind him and aiming at the approaching Death Knight. “You’re no Raphael, but you’ll do.”

Edelgard slipped within the Golden Deer’s ranks, her mind and pulse racing. This was bad. Dimitri was here. After this, he wouldn’t trust her—and if he didn’t trust her, her life would be forfeit.

The Death Knight and the Hurricane King crashed into the class with all of the fury of a force of nature. Ice, fire, and lightning flew through the air as Manuela led Marianne and Arcturus in slinging salvos of spells at the Death Knight; Lorenz and Leonie’s lances clashed against the Hurricane King’s, struggling to keep him at bay.

It wasn’t enough. The class scattered. “Dammit, fall back!” Manuela ordered her students. “Fall back! Spread out!”

Professor Byleth she was not.

The rest of the class was only a distraction to Dimitri’s alter ego and his deathly vassal, though—Hilda, Claude, and Edelgard were in their sights. Hilda was forced to toss aside the wounded mage to beat a hasty retreat; in the chaos that ensued, Edelgard caught sight of the Death Knight taking a moment to swing his scythe across the mage’s throat, bringing his suffering to a swift end.

As the Hurricane King closed in on Hilda, she tossed the mage’s satchel and notebook to Claude, who tossed it to Edelgard, who tossed it back to Hilda, and the world’s deadliest game of keep-away ensued. Edelgard struggled to formulate a strategy all the while. What could she do? Was this the end? Had this all been a trap all along?

Dimitri’s lance struck Hilda in the chest, leaving a wicked gash in her armor and throwing her off her feet; the mage’s satchel and codebook flew from her hands. Claude scrambled for the treasures he’d unearthed, but Edelgard was faster.

She had a plan now. She swiped the satchel and book and bolted, running as fast as her legs could carry her, and came to a stop at the edge of the cliff. The darkness beyond beckoned her.

Dimitri caught up with her, coming to a stop in front of her. He stood stock still, stony in his demeanor.

 _“Edelgard von Hresvelg,”_ he intoned, his voice so deeply modulated that if Edelgard hadn’t known who he was already, she wouldn’t have been able to tell from the sound alone. _“You do not know what you are meddling with. Vengeance comes to those who bring it upon themselves.”_ He stepped closer, readying his lance.

Edelgard might have laughed if she wasn’t so terrified. Had _she_ sounded like this when she had been seventeen, too?

She stared him in the face, tried to meet his eyes. There was no reading Dimitri’s face beneath his masked helmet, beneath the mournful human visage traced in steel within the snarling wolf’s jaws. His cold blue eyes, eyes begging for warmth, were completely hidden. Did he feel betrayed? Enraged? Was he entertaining the thought of gutting her right now?

She knew what she had to do. She took the mage’s satchel and emptied its contents, its mass of little paper slips, onto the ground, then set the little codebook on top of it. And then, slowly crouching low to the ground, she conjured a flame and set it all alight. It went up like tinder. White paper blackened and curled around the edges, burning away into charcoal-black crisps; the little slips writhed and twisted as little flames eagerly scurried over their convulsing surfaces. The notebook’s leather binding resisted the fire, but its pages and all the information they offered were quickly consumed.

With bated breath, Edelgard looked up at Dimitri, meeting his hidden eyes through the veil of shimmering smoke, and slowly nodded.

Dimitri slowly nodded in return, the firelight dancing off his mask. The Death Knight returned to his side and placed a gauntleted hand on his shoulder, burrowing it up to his wrist in the Hurricane King’s furry mantle, and looked down at Edelgard. His red eyes seemed to stare right through her.

“We have done enough,” Dimitri said to the Death Knight; with that, the two of them vanished in a pillar of red light.

Edelgard swept the ashes off the side of the cliff, erasing the last traces of Claude’s plunder. She sighed and felt every part of her body slump over as she crumpled to the ground. Claude wouldn’t be happy about it, but Dimitri’s trust in her would be stronger now than ever.

With the danger behind them, the Golden Deer regrouped and assessed their losses. No one killed, thankfully—but plenty of injured. Claude sported a nasty burn on his arm where one of the Death Knight’s spells had grazed him, Lorenz had a deep gash over his brow, Arcturus’ leg was snapped in at least two places, Hilda had a few cracked ribs, Leonie’s shoulder was dislocated, Marianne had sprained an ankle, and Manuela had been stabbed in the side. The injured students were, fortunately, easy enough to treat once Marianne and Manuela had patched up each other’s wounds. Edelgard was thankful they’d all escaped Dimitri’s wrath.

“So,” Claude said to her, keeping his voice low as the two of them rested at the edge of the camp, “the book, the satchel…”

Edelgard shook her head. “Unfortunately, I had to dispose of them both. It was the only way I could stop the Hurricane King from killing me on the spot. It appears our journey here has amounted to nothing more than a waste of our time.”

A sly grin crossed Claude’s face, the sweat on his tanned, tawny skin glistening in the firelight. “Oh,” he said, reaching into his coat pocket and withdrawing a few crumpled pieces of paper, “I wouldn’t say it’s a _total_ waste.”

* * *

All things considered, life returned to its normal routine relatively quickly for Edelgard despite the Death Knight’s attack (although Hubert hadn’t left her side for the entire day and night after she’d returned, lamenting that he hadn’t accompanied the Golden Deer with her). Healing magic could only do so much, and most of the Golden Deer were still sore and limping; in addition, all of the Knights of Seiros were doing double duty patrolling the monastery in case the Death Knight followed the students from Zanado to Garreg Mach.

The Death Knight… there was something so intensely familiar about that man. Who was he? An Agarthan mage, perhaps, clad in armor augmented with Agarthan technology? Or an Agarthan knight, perhaps, clad in armor infused with powerful dark magic? Did Dimitri, Dedue, or Mercedes know who was beneath that death’s-head mask?

The Time Squad (name pending) regrouped the following morning in Claude’s bedroom.

“Unfortunately,” Claude said, poring over the smoothed-out sheets of paper he’d obtained (two of which, unfortunately, were blank), “I couldn’t be picky about which pages I tore out of the book, and we lost that trove of coded messages… but this might help us decode some of those messages we found with Solon.”

“We still don’t have the decoding machine,” Hilda pointed out.

“Not yet,” Claude said. “But soon.”

“We don’t even know how it works.”

“We’ll figure it out… once we get our hands on it.”

The Time Squad kept its meeting short—especially after the incident at Zanado, everyone agreed that Edelgard might draw undue attention to herself (more so than usual, Hilda snidely pointed out) if she spent too much time scheming with Claude—and life went on from there as normal.

That day, though, an unexpected visitor came to Garreg Mach.

The woman who stepped through the gates did not walk so much as glide, the fur-lined hem of her robe sliding slickly on the floor and trailing behind her. Ornamental fur and feathers traced her ample and scandalously-visible bust. Long locks of wavy hair the color of fresh salmon flesh trailed in loose waves from her head, held back from her slender brow by a thin circlet.

Edelgard happened to find this visitor—Cornelia, court mage of the Blaiddyd family, hero of Fhirdiad, the most celebrated physician in all of Faerghus, and one of the cruelest and most sadistic of Those Who Slither’s agents—in the great hall conversing with Professor Manuela. She kept her distance, but monitored the situation closely.

“What an amazing coincidence to see you here, Lady Cornelia,” Manuela said, a relieved—though surprised—smile on her face. “I was just about to send for you. It must be the Goddess’ providence.”

“You were about to send for _me?”_ Cornelia gasped with fake surprise, placing a hand tenderly on her bosom. “Whatever could be the matter?”

“It’ll be quicker for me to explain once you’re settled in. Can I help you settle in?”

“Don’t worry about my things,” she assured Manuela. She snapped her fingers; the sound boomed across the hall’s vaulted ceiling.

A young woman trudged across the hall to Cornelia’s side, carrying two massive bags in each hand. She was thin, but not emaciated, tawny-skinned, clad in a pine-green cloak; a long mane of unruly scarlet hair spilled over her shoulders. She had hazy eyes that stared blankly ahead, ringed with a weary gray pallor.

“And who’s this fine young woman?” Manuela asked, greeting Cornelia’s helper with a kind smile and an open hand. “I’m Manuela Casagranda, Garreg Mach’s resident physician and professor of the Golden Deer house. It’s nice to meet you, er…”

The young woman stared blankly at Manuela’s hand like she’d never seen a hand before in her life.

“This is my assistant, Hapi,” Cornelia explained. “I’m afraid she does not care much for human contact. Now, as much as I’d love to stay and chat, Professor, I actually have one of _my_ patients to see. Do you know where I might find a one Mercedes von Rusalka?”

“Oh, Mercedes? She’s in my infirmary right now. Her fatigue spells have been getting much more frequent as of late—would you know something about that?”

“Oh, yes, I know all about her condition; I’ve been treating her for years. I’ll see to it she’s taken care of, though I may have to take her out of the monastery if her condition is severe enough.”

“I hope it won’t come to that,” Manuela said. “She’s made quite a few friends among the Blue Lions… and most of my patients! I’ve almost come to enjoy her as a perennial guest in my infirmary.”

“The fact that she is such a mainstay in your infirmary is exactly why I am here.”

 _“Cornelia von Rusalka, is that_ you?!” Hanneman’s voice carried across the hall, and the elder professor swiftly placed himself at Manuela’s side, much to her displeasure. “Good heavens, how many years has it been?”

“Hanneman von Essar, you scruffy little bloodsucker!” Cornelia exclaimed, though the vigor with which she shook his hand belied the cruelty of her epithet.

“You haven’t changed one bit,” he said.

“If you think that, then you must need a thicker monocle, or perhaps one for the other eye as well. Now, I would love to stay and chat, but I must be off.” She took her assistant by the arm and tugged her along. “Come along, Hapi.”

“Shall we have some tea later this afternoon?” Hanneman called out after her as she strode away.

Manuela rolled her eyes. “Oh, give it a rest, you crusty old— _How do_ you _of all people know Cornelia?”_

“We did some research together back when we were both still in the Empire,” he said, shrugging, while she gawped at him.

Edelgard slipped behind a column and tried to look inconspicuous as Cornelia and her assistant strode past her. Despite Edelgard’s raging paranoia warning her otherwise, Cornelia didn’t even blink as she passed her by.

Hapi, though, glanced her way. Her red eyes seemed to stare right through her.

* * *

Edelgard spent the rest of the day dwelling on what she’d witnessed. First Thales in his guise as Rodrigue Fraldarius, now Cornelia… Those Who Slither were preparing for something big. Perhaps exposing Solon would stop them or at least stymie them. The next time she saw Jeralt (with the Knights of Seiros mobilized around the monastery, he was busier and harder to get a hold of than ever), she would have to slip him information about Garreg Mach’s resident changeling—she trusted him more than any of the other knights. Perhaps he could even help Claude’s Time Squad procure Solon’s decoding machine—Edelgard felt confident she could persuade him to keep something like that a secret from Rhea.

 _Cornelia von Rusalka…_ Edelgard ran that name through her mind all afternoon. Why did Mercedes have that same surname in this world? What had Cornelia done to her? Questions ran in her head without answers; when she finally crossed paths with Hilda later in the day, she was almost thankful to have something to distract her.

“Are you up to anything this afternoon?” she asked Hilda, who was lying on a bench in the courtyard’s gazebo and obviously not up to anything this afternoon.

Hilda opened her eyes. “Just getting my beauty sleep,” she said, stretching and pulling herself up to prop her back against the gazebo’s railing. “You should really give it a shot sometime,” she added, patting the bench beside her. “There’s plenty of room for two.”

“That sounds enticing, but I’ve already booked this afternoon for training,” Edelgard answered. “Care to join me?”

Hilda coughed weakly and placed a hand gingerly on her breast. “Oh… I dunno, El… my chest, it still hurts so much where the Hurricane King almost ran me through,” she moaned.

“You seemed fine after Marianne healed you. Or are you impugning her magical talents?”

Hilda just rolled her eyes. “Ugh. I don’t know how you can _think_ about swinging an axe around after what just happened.”

“Time and tide waits for no man.”

“Is it really _that_ fun to live your whole life by a clock? Come on, take a break.”

“Good friends should indulge in each other’s hobbies from time to time.”

“Your creepy boyfriend and the Death Knight just tried to _kill_ us. Can’t we just relax a bit?”

Edelgard forced herself to ignore the ‘creepy boyfriend’ comment. “I’ll take an afternoon for lazing around with you tomorrow,” she offered, “if you’ll be my sparring partner today.”

Hilda perked up. A little smile crossed her face. “Sparring partner? You mean you’ll let me beat you up?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say I’d _let_ you.”

“Oh, alright,” she said. “I’ll practice with you _once._ But you’re gonna have to make good on your promise… if you can.”

“I can relax whenever I want to,” Edelgard lied, taking Hilda’s hand and pulling her to her feet. “But the world keeps moving, even when you’re standing still. I’d rather be productive than waste my time.”

“You sound just like Lysithea,” Hilda grumbled. “No wonder she joined your side. Have fun with your eventual stress-induced nervous breakdown.”

“I spend plenty of time on leisure. Before we went to Zanado, I spent over an hour painting with Ignatz and Bernadetta. Speaking of, would you care to model for us next week? Standing in place and doing nothing sounds like something you would enjoy.”

“Hmm… I’ll think about it.”

The two of them took off, but on their way to the training hall, they ran into Byleth. Edelgard came to an abrupt halt right in front of her teacher; if the sight that greeted her hadn’t frozen her solid, she would have careened right into her.

That _phantom,_ the ghostly time-child that couldn’t possibly be a ghost because ghosts didn’t exist, was hovering at Byleth’s side, watching incuriously over her shoulder.

“Oh, hi Edelgard. Hi, Hilda,” Byleth said, seemingly ignorant of the phantom. She looked at their gawking faces. “Is something wrong?”

“Well… it’s just that…” Edelgard tried very hard not to focus on the apparition haunting her professor. It had to be a trick of her senses. Perhaps her lunch was not settling well in her stomach. That was what it had to be. There was more of gravy than of grave about that little girl, whatever she was. “Ah. Hilda and I were… nothing’s wrong, we’re just on our way to the training hall to practice some axe techniques… Hilda? Hilda?” She nudged Hilda in the side. “Hil… da?”

Hilda was staring straight ahead, transfixed, with wide eyes and an open mouth. She glanced at Edelgard. _“Are you seeing,”_ she hissed out of the corner of her mouth, _“What I’m seeing?”_

 _“That depends,”_ Edelgard whispered back. _“Are you seeing what_ I’m _seeing?”_

The specter yawned and stretched its pale, thin little arms.

“Are you two okay? Is this about the Hurricane King and the Death Knight?” Byleth put a hand to her mouth. “Or do I have something on my face?”

 _“Are you seeing a pine tree with a little girl’s face in it?”_ Hilda asked Edelgard.

They both stared at Byleth and her ghost—her ghost which was, apparently, quite real, since Edelgard wasn’t the only person who could see it.

Byleth’s eyes widened, then slowly traveled to face the little ghost hovering beside her as she realized what Edelgard and Hilda were staring at.

The little ghost put her hands on her hips. “Excuse me? I am _not_ a pine tr—You can _see_ me?!”

Hilda slowly nodded.

“Professor,” Edelgard said, searching a second or two for her voice, “can we… speak to you in private?”

Byleth nodded and quickly led the two of them to her room. She closed the door behind her. The phantom girl hovered close to her every step of the way, as though linked by an invisible tether.

“You probably all have a lot of questions,” she said as she sat down on her bed. The phantom girl laid down next to her, not _on_ the bed but rather about a foot above it, and propped up her chin in her hands. Edelgard found herself studying the girl’s eyes. Brilliant, shining emerald, intensely familiar—she’d seen them on two faces before: Byleth, after she had manifested the powers of the Goddess… and Archbishop Rhea.

“I also have many questions,” the girl said. “How long have you been able to see me?” she asked Edelgard and Hilda.

“Since today,” Hilda answered.

“The first time was at Brionnac,” Edelgard answered. “But I’ve been able to hear you occasionally—faintly—since we returned from Arianrhod. I thought I was going mad.”

“Arianrhod…” The girl stroked her chin thoughtfully. “Was that the morning you, Byleth, and I all had those horrible splitting headaches?”

Byleth nodded. “Um… yes, I think so. Anyway, Edelgard, Hilda, this is my friend. She’s not a ghost.”

Edelgard let out a relieved sigh, thankful that she didn’t have to rework her view of the universe to include such claptrap as the existence of ghosts.

“Her name is Sothis.”

The sigh Edelgard had let out had left her lungs empty, but at Byleth’s pronouncement, she found herself unable to fill them again. She felt lightheaded. The ceiling swirled around her. “I need to sit down,” she managed to whisper, falling onto Byleth’s desk chair with an uncomfortable jolt.

Hilda was similarly shocked. She’d gone pale. “Um… Professor? Why are you friends with _the Goddess?”_

Byleth and Sothis turned their heads and looked at each other, bemused, and then looked at Hilda, still bemused. “What do you mean?” Byleth asked.

“Professor,” Edelgard gasped, “did… did no one ever tell you?” The true name of the Goddess was almost never used—not invoked in everyday prayer, not spoken of in sermons, certainly not used in vain. Edelgard had only whispered the name in her mind in her most desperate prayers, and those prayers had been the last prayers she had ever said. But _surely_ someone must have told Byleth at some point that the Goddess had a name! “That is her name. The Goddess… Sothis.”

The ghostly little girl—Sothis—looked genuinely confused, somehow; the furrow of her tiny brow spoke to an almost fearful distress that seemed far too mature for her childlike features. “Me, a _goddess?_ But… I do not… _How?”_

Edelgard tried to breathe, but nothing filled her lungs. Her thoughts were sluggish in her head, no matter how swiftly they wanted to race. Everything went black.

She woke up lying on top of Byleth’s bed with a pillow cushioning the back of her head. And greeting her when she opened her eyes was the face of her wife.

And Hilda.

And the Goddess Sothis.

Edelgard blinked. She blinked again. She blinked a few more times, expecting the green-haired, green-eyed child deity hovering at Byleth’s side to disappear each time. She didn’t.

 _Sometimes,_ Edelgard’s wife had once confessed to her, _I could hear a voice in my head telling me right from wrong._

Edelgard had laughed, fully accustomed to hearing the love of her life say strange things, and told her that everybody had one of those; it was called a conscience and it was completely normal.

_It was a little girl._

Edelgard had laughed again and told Byleth that everybody had an inner child.

_A little girl only I could see._

Another laugh, and Edelgard had told Byleth that some people had imaginary friends as children, and promised her she’d work up the courage one day to tell her about the tea parties she’d had with Hubert’s.

Of course, Edelgard thought. Of _course_ Byleth had been speaking completely and utterly literally.

This spirit must have been some manifestation of Byleth’s connection to the Goddess. Was this strange, fey little girl the entity whom Rhea had intended Byleth to be a vessel for? Was this _child_ the same deity millions across Fódlan prayed to in vain?

“Are you awake now?” Sothis asked her.

“I’m not sure,” Edelgard answered, still struggling to focus. “Professor… can you hear her, too?”

Byleth nodded.

“Why is the Goddess haunting you?”

“Excuse me?” Sothis asked, indignant. “Do you take me for a ghost of some kind? _‘Haunting?’”_ she scoffed. _“‘Haunting?’_ I do not _haunt!_ And…” She took a deep breath. “And I truly do not know why I share a name with your goddess,” she added, her tone growing more sober as her eyes flitted downward. “Reflecting on it, I… Something feels quite _wrong_ about it.”

“I’m making tea,” Byleth said, standing up and going to her desk. “You’ll feel better when you’ve had some, Edelgard. I know you like bergamot, but peppermint tea is more calming, so would you mind if…”

“Peppermint is fine, Professor,” Edelgard managed to say, locking eyes with Sothis. “So… Soth…” She could barely bring herself to say that name. “Is that name truly unfamiliar to you?”

“Most things are unfamiliar to her; she has amnesia,” Byleth said.

“You are one to talk!” Sothis snapped at her. “Of course it is not unfamiliar to me,” she answered Edelgard, hovering around the room on an invisible tether as Byleth busied herself with picking out a teabag from her collection and getting out her tea set. “It is _my_ name, after all. Someone once called me ‘the Beginning’ long ago, if that means anything, but I do not recall ever being called a _goddess.”_

“Why _would_ anyone call you a goddess?” Hilda asked. “You’re… what, twelve?”

“Twelve _what?”_ Sothis sharply asked her, putting her hands on her hips.

“I just mean you look like a little girl.”

“Well, I suppose I _am_ rather short in stature. And I suppose I _am_ a girl. I suppose I suppose many things about myself. But I have never supposed that I am a deity,” Sothis said. She sat down cross-legged several feet above the floor and played with one of the red and white ribbons braided into her moss-green hair in an idle, childish way. “How very curious indeed. And somehow disturbing. I must thank you two for bringing this to my attention.”

Byleth checked on the tea. “I think your tea’s ready now, Edelgard,” she said. “I’ll just taste it and make sure it’s steeped enough…” She poured a little bit of lavender tea into a cup, raised it to her lips, and took a sip. “Oh, it needs a few more minutes. Never mind.”

“I don’t mind waiting,” Edelgard said. Now that her wits were returning, a part of her felt mortified that Hilda had seen her faint. She had a horrible feeling her so-called friend would never let her live that down.

“I wonder why you two can see me,” Sothis said, “and _only_ you two. I know full well why _Byleth_ can see me, as I do seem to dwell inside her mind, but you two…”

“Maybe it’s because we’re time travelers,” Hilda suggested.

Sothis looked at her with eyes as wide as saucers. “You are… _what?!”_ she exclaimed. Byleth, who’d been taking another testing sip from Edelgard’s teacup to test its flavor, spewed it all over her desk.

“I think you’re right,” Edelgard said to Hilda. “It’s the only thing I can think of that we and we alone have in common.”

“You two are…” Byleth started.

“We’re from the future,” Hilda said. “I mean, not _your_ future, but—”

Edelgard found herself seized with the horrible fear that Hilda might tell Byleth and Sothis something _very_ personal about her—namely, that she was madly and hopelessly in love with another world’s Byleth. “Hilda, stop! You can’t tell them anything about the future, or we—or we might cease to exist!”

Hilda shot her a quizzical look. “We might _what?”_

“Yes, yes, you two mustn’t tell us of the future,” Sothis said. Edelgard wasn’t sure if she was humoring her or being earnest. “Mortals are not meant to know the shape of time—you might cause paradoxes or any number of complications… Oh! Perhaps that explains those awful headaches we have been having! Have either of you been doing irresponsible things with time?”

Edelgard recalled the two daggers and the desk that had never existed and decided it would be wise not to talk about it.

Byleth handed her a teacup. She gratefully took it and clasped her hands around the warm ceramic; steam rose from the fresh, hot tea and a wonderfully minty aroma, brisk, cool, and refreshing, greeted her. “Thank you, Professor,” she said.

Satisfied, Byleth returned to her desk and started pouring another cup. “Any for you, Hilda?”

“Sure, I love mint tea! How do you keep everyone’s favorite blends straight?”

“It’s a special talent,” Byleth said. “I have… what’s it called? Didactic memory?”

 _“Eidetic_ memory,” Sothis corrected. “But only for tea and absolutely _nothing_ else.”

Byleth brought the other teacup over to her. Her hands were trembling just a little, Edelgard noticed; there were a few odd beads of sweat forming on her brow, and her breath seemed a little shallow. “Here you are, Hil—”

She froze. The teacup slipped from her hand and shattered on the floor with a piercing, earsplitting crash. Edelgard wrenched herself out of bed. _“Byleth!”_ she cried out as she watched her professor collapse to the floor in a limp, inert, lifeless heap.

Lifeless.

_Dead._

Edelgard found herself frozen in mid-leap. Hilda was at her side, her face wrenched in horror and stuck that way. The world had turned to stone once again, and everything in it was as silent and still as a statue.

Everything except for Sothis.

Sothis floated over to Byleth, laying insubstantial hands on her shoulders and trying to rock her awake. “Byleth, you fool!” she scolded her, her voice trembling with worry and desperation. As her hand fell to her neck and found a pulse, though, she sighed with relief. “But life yet clings to this strange body of yours. We must go back! Make haste! The hands of time will not stay still forever!”

Edelgard felt the world burst into flames yet again. It was a feeling she was beginning to feel very familiar with.

When the flash of white light faded, she found herself scurrying through the lower levels of the Imperial Palace, marble busts and opulent paintings rushing past her. Her cape flapped and fluttered behind her as she ran, staggering and stumbling on heels that clicked and echoed on the fine tile floors. Her crown felt heavy on her head. Her heart pounded, her chest ached, her breath was ragged and short. As the halls grew less splendid and more utilitarian, Edelgard began to realize where her doppelganger was running to.

 _No, no,_ she pleaded silently with the other Edelgard as her body, unbidden, slipped into the basement, through doors that had long since gone unguarded, into rows of dark and gloomy cages. _No, no, no, please, no! Not here!_ Anywhere _but here!_

She could still see faint smears of blood on the stone floors and walls and couldn’t help but entertain the idea that they were all that remained of her family.

 _“No, stop!”_ she cried out, skidding to a halt and falling clumsily to her knees as she exerted control of her own body. _“What are… what are you_ doing _here?”_ she gasped, struggling to find her breath, her pulse racing and gooseflesh rising across her skin as the dungeon engulfed her. Red pinpricks, the eyes of hungry rats, eyed her from the encroaching darkness. “I have to…” she panted, “I have to get out… I have to get out of here…” But her legs felt like jelly, her bones like soft clay; her muscles refused her every command. On her hands and knees, she tried to crawl back out.

 _“Get out,”_ she spat, unbidden, the words slipping out of her against her will. _“Get out, get out… please, just leave me alone!”_

Edelgard tried to crawl for the exit, dragging herself across the floor on her belly like a snake. The stale scent of rats stung her nostrils. “Why are you down here? What are you running from? Why did you bring me here?”

The other Edelgard forced her to sit up and rest her back against the wall. “Just… just _leave me alone!_ Please!” She grabbed her crown, tore it from her head, and threw it against the opposite wall. Her hair fell out of its tight buns, no longer anchored by those golden horns, and her bangs fell into her eyes.

“That crown has been with our family for a thousand years!” Edelgard scolded her counterpart.

“I don’t care! I don’t want it, I _never_ wanted it; I don’t want your life!” the other Edelgard whined.

 _“I_ don’t even want my life!” Edelgard snapped at her. Her shout rang through the empty, grave-silent dungeon, echoing from the wall of every cell, every unmarked grave. “Didn’t anyone… didn’t _any_ of my friends ever tell you what this place _means_ to me?” She curled up and tucked her knees into her chest, huddling against the cold wall. “I… I need to speak to someone. Hubert. Anyone. Stop fighting me, get up, and find him for me before I get dragged back into your world.”

The other Edelgard just shook her head.

“Please get us out of here,” Edelgard pleaded with her. “I can’t be here.” She couldn’t force herself up. Whether it was because she was _here,_ in the realm of her nightmares, or because the other Edelgard was fighting against her control, she couldn’t tell.

“I don’t want to go up there,” the other Edelgard whined.

 _“I_ don’t want to do half the things I do,” Edelgard retorted, “but I do them anyway, because they are _necessary._ Enough of this. I have something important to tell my friends.”

The other Edelgard sniffled and shook her head. “No,” she said. “I can’t see them anymore. All they do is follow me around waiting for—waiting for _you!”_ She cracked the back of her head against the wall; a skull-splitting, thunderous pain wracked her brain and stars and sparkles twinkled and spun in front of her eyes. “I try, and I try, and I try and try and try to be _you,_ I’ve been working harder than I ever have in my life, and no matter how hard I try, it’ll never be enough because I’m not you and all they want is _you!”_ She gasped for air, her chest heaving. “Every time they look to me, they’re expecting _you_ to answer back and not _me_ and… and…” Her voice cracked. Edelgard could feel the ache in her throat. “Nobody wants me,” she croaked. “And my whole family’s dead except for my uncle, except Hubert keeps telling me he’s a snake in the night or something now and I’m not allowed to see him or talk to him?!”

“I’m sorry,” Edelgard said, reeling from the throbbing goose-egg forming on the back of her head. “You don’t deserve my life. _Neither_ of us do. But right now, you _have_ my life, whether or not you deserve it, and you are going to have to learn to live it as long as this situation endures. Wallowing here is only going to make things worse for the _both_ of us.”

The other Edelgard shook her head and sniffled.

“Do you know what this place is? This is where they all died. Burkhart and Anselm and Pascal, Heidemarie, Joachim, H-Hedwig, everyone else…” Edelgard choked back tears. She couldn’t be sure who was crying. “I watched them all die here. My whole family. _Our_ whole family. This is where I lost everything.”

Her words must have moved the other Edelgard, because she felt herself uncurl her legs and rise to her feet, steadying herself against the wall with her hand. “I’m sorry,” the other Edelgard told her.

“I know this is hard,” Edelgard told her counterpart. “I… I have a life that no one else deserves to have, least of all you. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody else. That is the burden I took on.” She let the other Edelgard pick up her crown and walk her out of the dungeon; after all, _she_ wasn’t afraid of this place. “That’s why I have to fix this. To set things right… I need to tell them what I’ve found out. So you can go home… so I can see my love again…” She stared down at her crown, choosing to study its contours and jeweled ornaments instead of the oppressive walls of the dungeons. _Byleth._ Her thoughts turned to her wife in this world, her professor in the other world. Were both of them okay? One had been dying—where was the other?

 _Dying._ Professor Byleth had been _dying_ when time had stopped. Had she just watched the woman she loved breathe her last breath?

“Until then,” she said, struggling to finish her train of thought though her mind was elsewhere, “we both have to endure.”

But with the other Edelgard still sniffling and choking back tears—and her having to talk _through_ that—Edelgard realized that perhaps a gentler approach than what she normally used on herself was required.

 _“Lady Edelgard!”_ Hubert’s faint, echoing voice rang out through the palace’s grim and grimy basement.

 _“Hubert!”_ she called back.

He turned the corner to meet her, and Edelgard had never felt so happy to see his face. There _was_ a bit more gray in his hair, just as Annette had said; streaks of it in the locks of raven hair that fell over his brow. Mid-twenties and already graying; he wasn’t that far behind his emperor. “There you are, Your Majesty,” he gasped, relief dawning on his grim and shadowed face. He reached out and brushed the hair out of her brow, the silken touch of his gloved hand gliding tenderly across her forehead.

“Get us out of here, Hubert,” Edelgard said, and without further ado he grabbed her and cast a warp spell; a pillar of red light engulfed the both of them and when it faded away, they were standing in Edelgard’s clean and sunlit room.

Edelgard wasn’t sure if it was her or her counterpart who maneuvered her body into flopping onto her bed and sinking into the plush mattress. “Thank you, Hubert,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” the other Edelgard said. “I just… couldn’t take it anymore.”

“I understand,” Hubert said, nodding. “Lady Edelgard cannot be said to have an _easy_ life.”

“You might want to be a little less hard on her, Hubert,” Edelgard said, recalling how little her go-to coping mechanisms had helped her counterpart. “Maybe it’s time Emperor Edelgard went on vacation, just for a week or two.”

“Or three,” the other Edelgard added.

Hubert let out one of his characteristic wicked chuckles. It sounded like music to Edelgard’s ears. “My, my. You sounded almost indistinguishable from our world’s Edelgard there. I see those acting lessons are finally paying off! But unfortunately, as our Edelgard would tell you, the world will still move on without you, even if you stand still—”

Edelgard sat up and caught her breath. “Hubert, it’s me.”

Realization dawned on his face that he had just chided his emperor, and although Edelgard really didn’t mind, _he_ did. “…Is that indeed so, milady?”

“It’s good to see you again, Hubert.” Edelgard found herself smiling. “Your counterpart in the other time-line simply cannot compare to you.”

“No, from what _your_ counterpart has told me, I am sure he cannot,” he said, averting his gaze. “I… ah… I suppose I have missed you quite dearly.” There was a faint hint of pink on his cheeks.

“The other Edelgard is close to her breaking point,” Edelgard told him. “She isn’t feeling supported.”

“I have been doing everything I can,” Hubert replied, “to support her.”

“You have been supporting _me,”_ she corrected. “I know how burdensome this whole situation is for all of us, but please do allow her some opportunities to… be _herself._ We cannot let this pressure break her.”

She felt the other Edelgard smile for her.

“I understand. As you wish,” Hubert said.

“Now, onto business,” she said to him. “I—”

He held up his hand. “Excuse me, Lady Edelgard,” he said to her, reaching into his jacket and pulling a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket. He handed it to her. “I know you have much to tell me, but your time here is short, and Her Majesty the Empress-Consort Byleth Eisner von Hresvelg would have my head if I do not have you read this first.”

A note? From Byleth? Her concerns forgotten Edelgard greedily unfolded it and laid eyes on the words written on it in Byleth’s simple handwriting, script as blunt and unadorned as her speech. She drank in the words like they were an oasis in a desert, savoring each and every one of them.

_Hi El,_

_I got your note from Annette. Thank you. I’m sorry we keep missing each other. It’s my fault. I’m working hard to do everything I can for the Empire because I said I would walk with you forever and that means making your dreams come true even if you can’t be there to see it. There’s a lot of work to do and ~~it keeps me away from home~~ I’m going to make sure it gets done no matter where it takes me._

_I feel sad for you all the time because I know how hard it was for you to wait all those years for me. I don’t want to make you wait even longer, so we’re all doing everything we can to find out what happened to you and how to reverse it. Hubert thinks your uncle is behind it, so we’re trying to capture him. ~~I am going to punch him in the face for you.~~_

_I know you must worry about me. Don’t. ~~I miss you and I feel alone without you like I’ve never felt before~~ ~~It wasn’t until I met you and lost you that I realized that loneliness felt bad~~ I miss you a lot. But you waited five years for me when I was ~~dead~~ ~~asleep~~ ~~missing~~ gone, so if it’s my turn to wait for you then I can wait ~~forever~~ as long as it takes._

_I know you’ll get through this. You’re the strongest person I know, in your body and your mind and your heart. I know that one day we’ll be together again. Hang on until then. Then when you come back you can let go and I will catch you and hold you ~~and we can finally sleep together again~~ and I won’t ever let you go again. I promise._

_I love you. ~~Imagine I wrote that a hundred times~~ I’m looking forward to saying that to you again._

_Your wife,_

_Byleth_

_P.S. If Dad is still alive in the other world, tell him I said hi ~~and that I really miss him~~ on second thought maybe don’t imply that he’s going to die because he’s smart and he will figure it out and that would be awkward._

The ink on the paper began to run, and the letters written in Byleth’s refreshingly unpretentious and unadorned handwriting swam and muddled into blue-gray blurs. Edelgard’s shoulders quaked and her chest shuddered and she realized too late that _she,_ not her counterpart, was weeping. Crumpling the paper in her grip, she threw her arms around the nearest person and hugged them as tightly and as desperately as if they themselves were Byleth; unfortunately for Hubert, that nearest person happened to be him.

 _“Lady—Edelgard—”_ Hubert choked, gasping for air as Edelgard buried her face in his chest and soaked his lapel with her tears.

 _“She says she would wait for me forever,”_ she sobbed. _“Hubert, I have the best wife in all of Fódlan!”_

 _“Of course you do,”_ Hubert wheezed, his pale face turning livid. _“You have always had the most excellent taste in women.”_

Finally realizing how difficult it was for him to breathe, Edelgard sheepishly released him and started drying her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice hoarse, “if I have time to write another letter, so when she drags Thales back to Enbarr and throws him in the dungeons, tell her—”

“I shall tell her that she is your sun, your moon, your stars, every source of light in the world down to the smallest candle and the most insignificant spark: for without her, your life is nothing but darkness,” he said. “Will that do?”

“Yes,” Edelgard said, sniffling. “Yes, Hubert, that will do just fine. You know me so well.”

A smirk flitted across Hubert’s face. “To know you has been my job since I was eight years old, Lady Edelgard,” he reminded her.

“I have so much to tell you,” she told him. “First and foremost, we must reach out to Claude in Almyra. He has been studying Those Who Slither and his retainer is torn between the two worlds just as I am.”

“His retainer? You mean Hilda?” the other Edelgard blurted out, interrupting her.

“I was under the impression she died in Derdriu,” Hubert said.

“She faked her death. At any rate, if you enlist Claude’s help, I am certain this situation can be resolved that much more quickly. I wouldn’t be surprised if he and Hilda are already on their way here, now that they know about me.”

Hubert nodded.

“They found an outpost in the Almyran desert. Time travel—Those Who Slither are investigating time travel—” The fishhook began tugging at her insides again. She grabbed Hubert tightly, as though she could anchor herself to him and hold on just a minute longer. “Whatever they’re doing at Remire in the other world, it’s worse than what they did here, and I have a horrible feeling that—”

And then, as she’d grown accustomed to, she was violently ripped away from her world and thrown back into the other world. She opened her eyes, blearily, groggily, and found herself in Byleth’s bedroom at Garreg Mach, lying on her bed.

Lying on her bed next to Hilda.

Lying on a bed that was just big enough for one person, next to Hilda.

Edelgard wearily lifted her head and struggled to regain her bearings. What was she doing here? “Professor…” she mumbled.

She woke up and sat upright with a jolt. _“Professor!”_

Byleth was sitting at her desk, emptying a box of tea into her wastepaper basket. Sothis was hovering beside her. “Byleth, the little ones are awakening,” she said to her.

Byleth nodded and looked over her shoulder at the students. “Edelgard, Hilda, are you alright?”

Hilda rubbed her forehead and cracked her eyes open. “What happened…?”

“Professor, are _you_ alright?” Edelgard asked, rising to her feet. “I saw you collapse; Sothis said you were…”

Byleth stared blankly at her.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Sothis said, stroking her chin. Strangely, her mannerisms weren’t entirely unlike Byleth’s; though she was much more emotive, her body seemed to speak in a much similar dialect. “It seems she, at the very least, recalls our meeting.”

“Hi, Sothis,” Hilda mumbled.

“Professor,” Edelgard insisted, “you were… you were _dying.”_

“Yes,” Byleth said, “but it’s okay. It didn’t happen anymore.” She went back to sorting her tea.

“What are you doing?”

“Throwing out my peppermint tea; it was poisoned. I think someone might have wanted to kill you.”

“How would they know you’d give her _peppermint_ tea?” Hilda asked.

“She’s right,” Edelgard said. “Whoever it is must have poisoned _all_ of your tea.”

Byleth looked down at her desk drawer, in which was a vast and varied collection of teas. Her mouth curled in an almost imperceptible frown. _“All_ of them?” she asked in a small voice.

Edelgard sighed and fell back into bed, exhausted and overwhelmed. Her professor had an imaginary friend—who was quite real—who was named after the Goddess (and likely _was_ the Goddess in some form, in spite of her seeming ignorance) and could reverse time, and that revelation was just about the most her worn-out mind could process right now. “Professor,” she asked, “may I please take tomorrow off?”


	13. The Road to Remire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard takes a day off, says goodbye to an old friend, and gets caught up in a snowball fight.

On the rare occasions when Edelgard had a day off, she hardly knew what to do with herself. Yes, of course she needed a day off—she was exhausted, overwhelmed, still a bit sore from her encounter with the Death Knight on top of her meeting with Byleth’s not-so-imaginary friend, so weary she could barely pull herself out of bed—but all the tasks that needed doing, all the leads that needed following, all the questions that needed answering gnawed at her like hungry rats. As tired as she was—and she was so tired—she couldn’t bear to spend the morning in bed; her sheets felt like snakes wrapping around her arms and legs, her pillow like a lump under her head; whether she tried to sleep with her arms tucked behind her head or limp at her sides or with her hands folded on her stomach, on her back, on her stomach, on her side, curled up, it made no difference.

 _Sleep,_ she told herself. Forget for a moment about the plots and machinations of Thales, Solon, and Cornelia. Forget for a moment about Dimitri. Forget for a moment about Sothis and how she had come to be a part of Byleth. Forget for a moment that somebody had poisoned all of Byleth’s tea. Forget about Claude and his ‘Time Squad.’ _(Time Squad?_ Edelgard had to admit that when she came up with names for things, she was usually quite utilitarian about it, but she’d somehow expected something cleverer from Claude than _Time Squad.)_ But how could she allow herself to be idle when there was so much that needed to be done?

She did not sleep. The art of remaining wrapped in blissful slumber past dawn had eluded her, sadly, for over a decade now. The art of blissful slumber in general, in fact, was for the most part beyond her capabilities.

Hubert brought her breakfast at the same time she always took it, rousing her prematurely from her fitful and ultimately unsuccessful attempts at sleeping in. He assured her that he had taste-tested it for poison and insisted on keeping an eye on her as she ate just in case there was some tainted morsel he had missed and he had to rush her to the infirmary, which did not exactly engender in her much of an appetite.

Grateful to have been given an excuse to abandon her doomed attempt at sleeping in, Edelgard busied herself for the rest of the morning with reading her textbooks, doing a few sketches, and _good heavens she was bored._ How could _relaxing_ be so boring?

A knock on her door roused her from her desk and, grateful for the distraction, she padded across the floor and cracked it open. Behind it, standing in the hallway with a little, somewhat forced smile on his face, was Dimitri.

“Professor Byleth told me you were feeling unwell,” he said, “so I thought I would check up on you. May I come in? Or… do you fear you might be contagious?”

“I’m not ill,” Edelgard said, stepping to the side, “just… worn out. Come in.”

His smile looked a little brighter and a little less forced at the invitation, and he stepped over the threshold. “If you were ill, now would be the best time for it,” he said. “I am not sure if you knew this, but Lady Cornelia von Rusalka, the court mage of Faerghus, is visiting Garreg Mach. If anything is wrong with you, there is no one in the Kingdom better suited to curing it than her.”

“That won’t be necessary,” she said, “but thank you.”

“Have you eaten? I can bring you breakfast, if you’d like. I am sure Ingrid will be happy to lend you her notes from Professor Byleth’s lecture as well,” he added, “since I know how fastidious of a note-taker you are, and if you find yourself bored, Ashe has plenty of books you can borrow.”

“That’s quite kind of all of you, but I can take care of myself.”

Dimitri paced a bit around the room, his boots worrying an aimless little furrow into the rug. “Do you mind if I sit down?” he asked, gesturing to her chair.

“Go ahead,” Edelgard said, and she sat down on the side of her bed.

He took the chair. “You _do_ look weary,” he noted.

“I think I’ve forgotten how to relax,” she said, mustering a self-effacing chuckle. “I worry that if I leave my room, I’ll get myself caught up in something and this whole ‘sick day’ the Professor gave me will go to waste.”

“I understand,” Dimitri said. “There is so much I have to do. Whenever I find myself not _doing,_ I am _thinking_ of doing, and on top of that every day I find myself with new obligations. I know just how exhausting it is.”

“Maybe _you_ should be taking the day off, too. Perhaps we should go fishing together today?”

He gave Edelgard an incredulous look. “Are you suggesting truancy, Edelgard?” he asked with a disarmed little laugh. “Unfortunately, I have much to do here. Though I do want to talk to you about, um… the Hurricane King…” His voice grew quieter, smaller, drier, less assured, as his lips and tongue nervously traced the name of his alter ego. “I heard that when you were with the Golden Deer…”

“Yes, we ran into him and the Death Knight at Zanado,” Edelgard said. She could hear the anxiety in his voice and knew exactly what he was feeling. Long ago, when she’d asked Byleth for her opinion on the Flame Emperor, she’d felt that same sickening swirl of anxiety in her gut, the same overwhelming fear that her alter ego had already poisoned one of her most treasured relationships.

“Did he hurt you?”

“No, he wasn’t able to lay a finger on me; I kept my distance,” she said, knowing full well that Dimitri knew that. “The Death Knight nicked my armor a bit, but that was the extent of it.”

“Good.” He nodded. “Good. Very good. I don’t think I could forgive myself if he… if he had hurt you.” There was pain in his eyes. He did not hide it well. “Those two must have been frightening, though.”

“A bit,” Edelgard admitted. “In hindsight, I am... not sure either of them had any intent to _kill_ me.”

“Maybe it is best to err on the side of caution. What do you think about the Hurricane King?” Dimitri asked.

“When he cornered me, he seemed… reluctant. I don’t think he wanted to be in his situation any more than I did.”

“You could tell that, even though he wore a mask?” He let out an incredulous sigh and leaned back. “I suppose I should hardly be surprised by now by your powers of perception. You and Professor Byleth both.”

“At any rate, it was easy enough to resolve the situation,” Edelgard assured him. “Claude had found something in the canyon that he and the Death Knight must have been protecting; all I had to do to deescalate was dispose of it. I could feel how relieved he was.”

“That is good. I am so glad that no one was injured too severely—or worse. Speaking of Claude, though…”

“What about him?”

“He has been spending quite a lot of time with you as of late, hasn’t he?”

“Well, he’s been spending quite a lot of time with Hilda,” Edelgard corrected. She wasn’t surprised by Dimitri’s line of questioning; of course her recent trysts with Claude would engender more suspicion. “And Hilda is my friend, so…”

“Oh, of course. Hilda is his retainer, is she not?”

“Something like that, I think.”

“Well… keep this between us, but…” Dimitri left the chair and sat on the side of the bed next to Edelgard. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper and leaned into her, the weight of his shoulder pressing against her own. “I fear he might be up to something.”

“Like what?”

“Perhaps I am being paranoid, but… I heard that somebody had poisoned Professor Byleth’s tea yesterday, and _he_ has an interest in poisons…”

“A strictly academic interest, I’d always thought. And only in nonlethal poisons.”

“So he says,” Dimitri said, “but who among us can know what is in his heart?” He pulled away from her and shook his head. “Oh, but look at me—introducing such grim trains of thought while you’re trying to rest. Forget it—just be wary around Claude. The next time you get caught up in one of his schemes, you… you might not be so lucky,” he added ominously.

“I’ll take care of myself,” Edelgard assured him.

“On a much lighter note, speaking of you and Professor Byleth, I have a proposition for you. Please don’t feel as though you have to make up your mind about it right now, though.”

“What is it?”

“I come of age next month,” Dimitri said, “on the twentieth of the Ethereal Moon. At the end of the month, after the winter’s ball, Lord Fraldarius will step down as regent and I will be crowned king of Faerghus. It is typical for the archbishop to be present at the coronation ceremony, but…” A nervous smile played on his face, showing a lopsided little sliver of teeth. “I am sure she must be very busy, and I would much prefer if you and Professor Byleth would accompany me in her stead. After all, you two seem to be Rhea’s favorites, and I am certain she would be happy to count you as a representative of the Goddess on account of your… experiences.”

“You’d like me to attend your coronation?” Edelgard repeated.

“I would _love_ for you to attend my coronation,” he replied, taking his hand and resting it over Edelgard’s. The leather of his black gloves creaked softly as his fingers curled around hers. His smile widened ever so slightly; its light and warmth reached his eyes, thawing their icy blue to something more like that of a clear midday sky. “Even if no Blaiddyd blood flows through your veins, you and Uncle Volkhard are family… the only family I have left.” His voice cracked; he politely cleared his throat to cover it up and regain his composure. As though embarrassed, he glanced sheepishly away from her and turned his head. “For you to be there at my side would mean the world to me, Edelgard. But do not feel as though you must—”

The bells outside rang nine o’clock, and Dimitri all but leaped from the bed, nearly pulling Edelgard up with him. “Nine o’clock already? My apologies, Edelgard—I’d signed up for Shamir’s morning seminar,” he blurted out, rushing out the door, “and completely lost track of time! I hope you feel well again soon!”

“Thank you, Dimitri,” Edelgard said as the door swung shut behind him.

Fishing, she thought. The idea struck her out of nowhere, and she found herself kicking herself for not thinking of it sooner. Of course fishing would help her relax.

She hastily threw on her clothes and a coat to ward off the chill—day off or not, she couldn’t wander the monastery in broad daylight in her pajamas—and headed downstairs, across the lawn and past the greenhouse toward the monastery’s well-kept pond. It wasn’t too crowded, since most students and faculty were busying themselves with classes and independent study. But she did find Annette and Mercedes standing in front of the greenhouse and having what seemed to be a heated conversation, judging by how Annette was stamping her feet on the ground and pouting.

Annette flagged her down. _“Edelgard!”_ she called out, waving her over. “What are you doing up? I thought you were sick!”

“I’m not sick,” Edelgard assured her, “just tired.”

If anybody looked tired, though, it was Mercedes. Annette was her usual chipper self, a bundle of energy wrapped in a coat and capped with carrot-red hair. Mercedes, though, looked weary, the gray bags under her eyes deeper, her skin paler, her hair more unkempt, her shoulders more slumped. She was a body in desperate need of a soft bed.

“Well, if you’re tired, you should be in bed,” Annette insisted.

“Not _that_ tired.”

“But if you’re going to be here, can you _please_ talk some sense into Mercie?”

Mercedes gave her a sheepish smile. “Annie, please, you’re overreacting.”

“Excuse me? Did I just hear you right?” Edelgard asked Annette. “I’m not accustomed to _her_ needing that kind of talk.”

Annette puffed out her cheeks, which made her look even more like a chipmunk than she normally did. “That’s how serious this is! For once, _I’m_ the voice of reason here!”

Edelgard suppressed the urge to groan. Of course she had gotten herself embroiled in something already. She ought to have stayed in her room and remained bored. She put her hands on her hips. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, it’s nothing serious,” Mercedes assured her. “She is just—”

“She wants to _leave!”_ Annette cried out, her voice rising in pitch to match her rising panic. “Like—next _week!_ And go all the way back to Fhirdiad with Lady Cornelia!”

“You’re being dramatic, Annie,” Mercedes said, patting her on the shoulder.

“You want to leave?” Edelgard asked her. “Is that true?”

“It’s not a matter of _want,”_ she replied. “Cornelia took a look at me yesterday afternoon and thought it would be in my best interest to go with her.” She coughed into her arm. It was a long, wheezing cough that rattled in her chest.

“Cornelia is your physician? Or a caretaker of sorts?” Edelgard inquired, dancing around the word _caretaker_ as a substitute for _family_ as she recalled what she’d learned the other day.

“A caretaker of sorts,” Mercedes agreed, likewise dancing around the word _caretaker._ “I’ve entrusted her with my health for about six years now.”

“But your health isn’t _that_ bad,” Annette argued.

“Annette, look at her,” Edelgard said. “Mercedes, I mean you absolutely no disrespect or offense—does her face look like that of a healthy woman, Annette?”

“None taken,” Mercedes said, still smiling.

Betrayal was written all over Annette’s face. “But… But Mercie, can’t you stay just a little longer? The winter’s ball is next month, and the White Heron Cup too, and—and we can talk to Professor Byleth and get you a reduced course load, and I can bring you your meals in bed from now on so you don’t have to exert yourself—”

“If she isn’t well enough to continue being a student,” Edelgard said to her, ignoring for the sake of appearances how discomforting the thought of leaving Mercedes alone with _Cornelia_ of all people was, “then she shouldn’t be one anymore. But Mercedes, are you sure Professor Manuela can’t offer you the treatment you need? I know Lady Cornelia is renowned for her skills as a physician, but Fhirdiad is far away, and the weather is only getting colder. Annette is right to worry about you. Even if you drop out of the academy, surely the Church will be able to set up agreeable living arrangements for you here in the monastery.”

“I’m afraid only _she_ understands my condition,” Mercedes replied, shaking her head. “As much as Professor Manuela means well, she just doesn’t have the tools to treat me. Unless you know a better physician?”

Annette was devastated. “But we were going to graduate together,” she protested. Her lower lip was trembling; her face was threatening to crumble. “Mercie, you _promised.”_

Poor Annette wasn’t always the most _sensible_ sort of girl, but she _was_ the most intelligent and most caring sort of girl, and Edelgard knew exactly _why_ she was objecting so strongly to Mercedes’ upcoming leave of absence. Annette had known her for years, knew that she suffered from a chronic illness and knew full well, subconsciously if not consciously, that she didn’t have much time left in this world. She was afraid that if Mercedes left now, she would never see her again—that this would be their last goodbye.

Edelgard wondered, would her younger self have shed as many more tears saying goodbye to her siblings before leaving Enbarr if she had known that the next time they met would have been to watch each other waste away to nothing and die in bondage?

“I’m sorry,” Mercedes said. “When I made that promise, I really did think I would be able to make it all the way. But as of late, I feel… I feel like… not enough butter spread across too much bread.” She took Annette in her arms. “But this way, you can still visit me in Fhirdiad whenever you want after you graduate. You’ll know where to find me.”

Annette buried herself in Mercedes’ embrace. She wasn’t anywhere tall enough to cry on her shoulder, but her chest was easily attainable. “But I’ll miss you so much…”

“It’ll only be a few months,” Mercedes assured her, gently stroking her hair and curling her red locks around her fingers. “We’ve been apart for longer. And we can still write to each other.” She looked up at Edelgard, a weary smile on her pallid face. “It looks like you’ll have to look after the rest of the class from now on, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” Edelgard said. She set her hand on Annette’s heaving shoulder and gently rubbed it as she shed her tears into Mercedes’ blouse. Comfort was never something she’d been exceptionally good at offering, especially the touchy-feely kind, but it was something she’d been slowly getting better at over the years.

“I know it hurts,” she consoled Annette. “All goodbyes do. They are such final things, and yet so uncertain; that tension is what makes them tear our hearts in two. It’s natural to feel this way.”

She didn’t like lying to people in pain, saying trite things like ‘things are going to be okay’ when it was obvious that things merely _could_ be okay and just as likely _could_ turn out worse (and ‘things can be okay’ or ‘things might be okay’ tended not to have the same ring to them). She usually found it more effective to acknowledge that to be in pain was normal, natural, _okay—_ not something to bottle up or hide out of shame, not something to force into the corners of one’s mind while one soldiered on, but more like a storm that had to be allowed to pass. That was something she had never understood until after she’d met Byleth, and only after she’d watched the woman she had fallen in love with grieve so miserably over the cooling body of her father. It was something she still struggled to understand and internalize in her heart, but her reason told her that it was the natural law of the world.

There was so much that Byleth had helped her learn, and so much that she had helped her _un_ learn…

“Annette,” Edelgard added, “do you remember that idea you had the night before Flayn and Seteth left Arianrhod?”

Annette sniffled and nodded, her face still firmly planted in Mercedes’ bosom.

“If it’s alright with Mercedes, I think she deserves a sendoff like that as well.”

“Of course,” Mercedes said, a beatific smile on her face. “Annie, let’s not say goodbye like this. Every goodbye should be a good one, shouldn’t it?”

Annette finally separated herself from her friend, took a sleeve to her nose and tear-streaked cheeks, and dried her eyes. “Yes… Yes, you two are right. It’ll be okay. We’ve just got to have a proper goodbye party before you leave! I’ll talk with the rest of the class about putting something together. Thanks, Edelgard.”

“Don’t mention it,” Edelgard said, heading for the pond and spending a few gold coins to rent out a rod and purchase some bait. Bracing herself against the cold autumn breeze that rippled the pond’s glassy surface, she hooked her bait, cast her line, and felt her anxiety melt away.

 _Sleeping in?_ What had she been _thinking?_ A fishing rod was all she needed. Byleth had taught her that much, and it was one of the most important lessons she had ever learned.

After a few unsuccessful catches, though, she ran out of bait. The cold was already worming its way into her fingers—damn this weather; she had to start wearing gloves—and scattered snowflakes were starting to drift in lazy, fluttering descents from the gray sky, so she decided to head back to her room.

On her way across the courtyard, she spied a curious sight. The blank-faced girl who had been accompanying Cornelia—Hapi, if Edelgard wasn’t mistaken—was crouched next to the rosebushes, her tousled scarlet mane bright against the fading green. At least six or seven of the monastery’s many resident cats were milling around her, purring and mewling and meowing in competition for her affections. She’d never seen so many cats drawn toward a single person save for the one time Byleth had bought a sachet of catnip and forgotten to take it out of her coat pocket.

Hapi wasn’t a girl, actually, Edelgard noted upon closer inspection, but rather a young woman seemingly two or three years older than she was herself. Her eyes looked tired the same way Mercedes’ and Dimitri’s often did. Edelgard stopped just long enough to offer her a courteous hello; Hapi glanced up at her, only briefly meeting her eyes, and just as quickly returned to scratching behind the ears of a particularly plump and particularly vocal Riegan tabby while a black Hresvelgion whisker tried to headbutt it out of the way. To say the least, humans seemed insufficiently furry to be of any interest to her.

Rebuffed, Edelgard began to walk away when she heard a small sound, scarcely louder than the meows of Hapi’s furry friends.

“Hi,” Hapi said, and when Edelgard looked back over her shoulder at her, the blank-faced girl was no longer blank-faced but rather ashen and aghast, eyes wide and mouth agape, as though she’d just let a horrible curse or blasphemous oath pass her lips.

Hapi stood up, forcing her feline friends to scatter, and all but ran from the courtyard.

Edelgard made haste on the way back to the dormitories—the longer she spent out here, the more likely she was to get caught up in someone else’s business, and this was supposed to be a _restful_ day—but found herself further waylaid by the sight of Lady Catherine, decked out in full plate armor, standing in front of her bedroom door and preparing to rap her armored knuckles against the wood.

Catherine saw her come up the stairs. “Oh, _there_ you are, Your Highness,” she said, offering her a polite bow that did nothing to assuage her annoyance. So much for having a restful day. “Lady Rhea asked me to bring you and Professor Byleth to her.”

“Why…” Edelgard asked, realizing as soon as the words left her lips how irritated she sounded and immediately modulating her tone. “…would the Archbishop wish to see me? It’s a little early for tea.”

Catherine shrugged. “It must be for something more serious than tea. Come with me; we shouldn’t keep her waiting.”

“Of course not,” Edelgard sighed, dreading that she would be asked once again to embroil herself in something—and something involving Archbishop Rhea, no less.

“Do you mind,” she asked Catherine as the knight escorted her to Archbishop Rhea’s audience chamber, “answering a question of mine?”

“Not at all, as long as it’s not too prying,” Catherine answered.

“You’re quite devoted to Lady Rhea. Would you mind telling me why?”

“Oh, it’s a long story.” She shook her head. “But to sum it up, back when I was a student here, Lady Rhea saved my life.”

“And you’ve been utterly devoted ever since?”

Catherine laughed. “It’s not quite so simple as _that._ There were other… events. Other things I came to owe her for.”

“But you _are_ utterly devoted.”

“Spend more time with her and you’ll understand.”

Edelgard shuddered. Catherine seemed to have absolutely no idea how ominous that sounded. “If Archbishop Rhea told you to do something terrible… would you do it?”

“That depends. If she told me to do something, it couldn’t be _too_ terrible.”

“What if she told you to… oh, let’s say… set fire to a city?” she asked, the sight of Fhirdiad in flames returning to her mind. So many months had passed since then, and the visions were no less vivid to her; that senseless loss of life and history, the destruction of such an old and grand city and its hapless inhabitants, would remain with her as long as she lived as a testament to the wickedness she had destroyed. Perhaps the looming, impending threat of Remire had dredged it back up to the surface.

Catherine gave her an odd, offended look. “That’s an interesting thought experiment,” she said to her, contempt dripping from the word _interesting._ “Is the city ravaged by plague, or captured by infidels, or—”

“No. Simply a city filled with innocent civilians. No plague rats, no… _infidels,_ just a city and its innocent, defenseless souls. A city your archbishop demands that you raze to the ground.”

Catherine shook her head. “It would never be that simple. Lady Rhea would never. And if she did, she’d have a damn good reason for it.”

“And what if she didn’t?” Edelgard found herself asking before she could stop herself.

She felt Catherine’s gauntleted hand curl into a fist around her wrist, squeezing like a vise.

 _“Lady Edelgard,”_ she said to her in a low, stern voice hissed through gritted teeth, “I know that the Empire and the Church aren’t… closely affiliated, but as long as you’re within these walls, you’ll pay the Goddess and the Archbishop due respect.”

Edelgard nodded. She’d let herself get carried away litigating an event that had never happened in this world, an event that for all intents and purposes existed only in her imagination. Catherine’s attitude had just _rankled_ her so much that she hadn’t been able to help herself.

“I don’t know what she sees in you, to be honest,” Catherine added.

Edelgard wanted to say, ‘to be honest, neither do I,’ but wisely held her tongue.

She found Byleth already waiting for her in Rhea’s audience chamber. Both professor and archbishop seemed so small under the chamber’s high vaulted ceiling, their skin and clothes painted in patchworks of faint color from the high, narrow arched stained glass windows lining the walls.

“Ah, Princess Edelgard, welcome,” Rhea greeted her as Catherine led her in. “Thank you for collecting her, Catherine.”

Catherine offered her a deep and reverent bow. “Anything for you, Your Holiness,” she said, and then she retreated and closed the door behind her, sparing one last stern, contemptuous glance at Edelgard on her way out.

Rhea, Byleth, and Edelgard stood alone in the vast chamber. There was a shimmering haze at Byleth’s side and Sothis appeared out of thin air; her hair, gown, and ornate regalia swayed gently in an invisible breeze. Edelgard tried very hard not to stare, but she still had to get used to the sight of her professor’s phantom companion.

Byleth offered Rhea a polite, curt bow, and Edelgard bowed as deeply as she could bring herself to.

“Are you two feeling well?” Rhea asked Edelgard and Byleth, offering them both a melancholic smile. “Many disturbing things have happened over these past few days, in particular to the two of you. Byleth, my child, I heard that your tea was poisoned yesterday.”

Byleth nodded. “Yes. But it didn’t kill me, as you can see.”

Rhea gave her an oddly piercing look, though her smile did not leave her face. “Yes… I can see that you stand before me quite alive. And for that, I am ever so grateful.”

“The poison might have been meant for Edelgard,” Byleth added. “I was making the cup for her.”

Rhea shook her head. “I doubt that. I am sure that somebody in this monastery wishes to do away with you. That said…” Rhea fixed her gaze upon Edelgard. “That does not mean _your_ life is not in danger, Princess. I hear you were attacked by the Hurricane King and his Death Knight at Zanado.”

“‘Attacked,’ perhaps, might be stretching the truth; we simply crossed paths by coincidence,” Edelgard said, but Rhea only shook her head in response.

“No, no, my child. I hold no doubt in my heart that they wished to do you great harm.” Rhea’s tone darkened; her smile, which had slowly been shrinking, curled into a tight, thin-lipped frown as the light in her eyes grew hard. “First they attempt to loot the Holy Mausoleum, then they kidnap darling Flayn and drive her and Seteth from the monastery in fear… now they terrorize my cardinals in the night and attack one of my most faithful students. A dreadful pattern is being woven here… a tapestry woven by sinister forces. Forces driven by those who hate and despise the glory and light of the Goddess. Are you… okay? Surely these events must trouble you.”

“Well,” Edelgard admitted, trying to sound sheepish, “I have been out of sorts as of late.”

“As well you should be. To fear for your life from these fiends, and then to witness a poisoning attempt against your own teacher… why, if I were you, I would be taking a day off from my studies just to cope.”

“That’s exactly what I’m having her do,” Byleth said, eliciting a smile from Rhea.

“You do always seem to have your students’ peace of mind at heart,” Rhea told her. “I hope that the young ones here may enjoy your brand of teaching for many years to come.”

Byleth reacted to flattery the same way she reacted to most things—by politely nodding and saying absolutely nothing.

“Until this danger has passed us by and these heinous, blasphemous doers of evil have been subjected to the Goddess’ harshest punishments,” Rhea continued, a fainted hint of an angry tremor bleeding into her voice, “I would like for you two to think first and foremost of your own safety. From today onward, and until these fiends hang from the gallows where they belong, please do not leave the monastery without at least two of my knights to escort you, and take care not to tarry long after dark even within these walls. I cannot express how devastated I would be if anything terrible were to happen to either of you.”

“Okay,” Byleth noncommittally answered.

“Now, is there anything I can do for either of you?” Rhea asked Edelgard and Byleth.

“Tea,” Byleth said. “I had to throw all of my tea out. And tea is very expensive, so buying back my supply would use up most of my stipend this month. If you could spare some coin to help me replenish my stock—I need more chamomile, and lavender, and bergamot, and Almyran pine needles, and peppermint, and Seiros blend, and Albinean berry blend, and… actually, a little bit of everything…”

Her mood lightened by Byleth’s particular brand of deadpan capriciousness, Rhea put a pale, slender hand to her mouth and let out a barely-suppressed sound that could only be described as a girlish giggle. “Oh, my dear child. Of course. I would be more than happy to help you regain what you have lost.”

“Thank you,” Byleth said.

“And as for you, Princess Edelgard,” Rhea said, turning her gaze upon Edelgard.

“I can ask of nothing from you, Your Holiness,” Edelgard said before Rhea could so much as get a word in edgewise.

“How modest of you. However, I wish to ask of something from _you._ Have you seen or heard anything from the Goddess as of late? I know I ask you this every time we have tea together, but… I do hope I am not badgering you.”

Edelgard shook her head. “No, not at all,” she lied. “As for the Goddess…” She looked at Sothis. Sothis looked at her, and in that moment Edelgard found herself pierced by two of the same pair of ethereal emerald eyes. Rhea and Sothis truly _did_ have the same eyes. The same color, the same deceptively old sense of depth, the same strange look of wisdom beyond their years, the same subtle glow that denoted an inhuman nature beneath the skin... even if Sothis _was_ a bit of a brat.

“No,” she said to Rhea, shaking her head. “No, I’m afraid I have neither heard nor seen anything from the Goddess or from any entity that could be said to resemble her.” At that, Sothis indignantly placed her hands on her hips. “I fear my earlier vision,” Edelgard added, “may have been a non-repeatable event.”

“No, those who see the Goddess are bound to see her again,” Rhea insisted. “Edelgard, the faith of the good, kind, and just is always rewarded. As long as you continue to reach out to the Goddess, I know that she will reach out to you in return.”

Edelgard’s stomach heaved. Did Rhea herself really believe a _word_ of that pablum? The Goddess was not some omnipresent spirit that heard and answered the cries of the dispossessed and destitute; as Edelgard was becoming increasingly aware, the most likely thing the Goddess was wasn’t a divine paragon of light and good but rather an absentminded, amnesiac, somewhat bratty time-child tethered to the body of her professor—nothing spiritual or supernatural or worthy of worship about it.

Still, Edelgard tried to put on a more pious act and at least pretend not to be a blasphemous materialist, especially after the scolding she’d earned from Catherine. “I am sorry, Your Holiness. I will keep the faith, and I hope that the goddess Sothis will grace me with her divine presence again someday.”

Sothis shot her another grumpy look.

Edelgard would have said more, but Rhea did something wholly and entirely unexpected. She reached out, and before Edelgard could flinch or step away or turn her head, she found the archbishop cupping her cheek in her hand.

Edelgard was struck by how _soft_ it was, how _warm_ it was on her skin, smooth as the finest silk. The feeling of Rhea’s palm curling along the contour of her jaw felt gentler than a mother’s touch, what little Edelgard remembered of _that._ Edelgard knew on an intellectual level that she should be frightened by this intrusion on her boundaries by her enemy, but the kindness of Rhea’s touch kept her from _feeling_ her own thoughts. All she felt, for a moment, was that warmth.

“I have great faith in you, Edelgard,” Rhea cooed, a warmer smile gracing her face and brightening her eyes. “You and your professor… I know in my heart that the blessings upon both of you are real; Sothis works within both of your hearts, and surely you will feel her radiance again. You must simply have as much faith in yourself as I do in you.”

Mercifully, she withdrew her hand from Edelgard’s cheek, leaving her shaken and struggling to hide it. With such a gentle touch—surely there must have been some sort of subtle magic behind it—Edelgard now understood what had engendered Catherine’s loyalty, why so many devoted their lives to their last breaths to the Church of Seiros. And she now understood what incredible willpower Byleth had to have in order to do so much as even _consider_ the possibility of defying Archbishop Rhea.

“Is that… all, Archbishop?” Edelgard asked, still reeling, feeling almost lightheaded.

“Yes, that is all,” Rhea said. “You two take care, be careful, and be wary.”

Edelgard had never been so grateful to leave Rhea’s audience chamber, to leave the archbishop alone in front of her throne and dwarfed by the vast emptiness of her palatial surroundings. It wasn’t until she’d put some distance between herself and Rhea that she felt her feet touch down on the floor again.

“Do you think Rhea knows about you?” Edelgard asked Sothis in a low, conspiratorial voice.

“I am not sure,” said Sothis, who had no need to lower her voice since only three people in the world, to her knowledge, could hear her. “At least, I do not think she can see or hear me.”

“How can you be sure?”

“She never looks my way, except by accident. And she never seems to react to any sound I make. Whereas you, little one, were occasionally jumping at the sound of my voice and staring—just _barely_ enough to make me wonder every so often if you were aware of me or if it was merely coincidence.”

Edelgard began to laugh. She soon found that she couldn’t stop.

“Excuse me?” Sothis asked, growing indignant. “What is so funny? Care to share your joke with the rest of the class?”

She waited to explain until she and Byleth had put much more distance between themselves and the archbishop’s chambers, and between anybody who could overhear. Once the three of them had left the building and made it to the courtyard, she’d regained her composure and, choking down the last remnants of her fit of laughter, she said to Byleth and Sothis, “I’m sorry—I just cannot help but find it funny that Archbishop Rhea is completely deaf and blind to her so-called Goddess!”

* * *

The Red Wolf Moon of that year brought with it a quick and early preview of winter to Garreg Mach; Edelgard expected it, though the sudden snowfall that blanketed the monastery caught most other students by surprise, because even six years later she still remembered the snowdrifts around Remire before Solon’s madness had melted it all away.

With the Knights of Seiros out in full force hunting for the Death Knight in the surrounding area and searching the monastery to root out whoever had attempted to murder Byleth, as well as countless other frustrating details, Edelgard’s plans were met with barriers at every turn. With a strict sundown curfew enforced by the knights (and, in Edelgard’s case, especially by Hubert) and the watchful eye of Dimitri and his allies firmly trained on her, it became nearly impossible to have clandestine meetings with Claude and Hilda to discuss their next moves toward procuring the encryption device and uncovering the plots of Those Who Slither in the Dark.

Edelgard had hoped that she could have had Jeralt search Solon’s room and expose him, taking the encryption device for himself and secretly leaving it in her care without Those Who Slither knowing of her treachery or Rhea finding out about that sinister faction’s presence in the monastery. But Jeralt was almost never alone; when he wasn’t patrolling the monastery and town with one of his fellow knights, he was accompanied by Leonie Pinelli, who stuck to him like glue (Edelgard was suspicious, of course, but Hilda assured her that Leonie had _always_ been like that and definitely wasn’t a changeling like Glenn).

The Red Wolf Moon waxed and reached its zenith, and before it could begin to wane, Mercedes was given a going-away party under the light of the full moon. All of the Blue Lions, and a few other students from the other houses as well, did their part to make her last night at Garreg Mach one that she would remember. For a day, the classroom ceased to be a classroom, the desks all pushed aside and festive banners hung across the walls to transform it into a makeshift, miniature (if a bit kitschy) ballroom. Sweets were baked in mass quantities, cider and wine were plentiful; toasts were made, goodbyes were said (some tearful, others not so much), and fortunately, only a few students overimbibed.

As the party wound down and students trickled back to the dormitories, Edelgard followed Mercedes onto the lawn, where the two of them stood under the light of the full moon, the firm and fresh blanket of snow crunching under their boots.

Mercedes finished the pastry she had been snacking on (a ring-shaped piece of dough fried in oil and glazed with vanilla icing that she called a 'dough-naught' due to the hole in its center) let out a long, satisfied sigh that turned into a yawn. “Thank you for helping set this up, Edelgard.”

“It’s the least I could do,” Edelgard replied. “Somebody had to stop Annette from doing all the work herself.”

A smile, lit by the silver moonlight, grew on Mercedes’ face. “Look after her for me, will you?”

“Of course.”

“And Dimitri, too.” She fingered the hem of her thick cotton shawl nervously. “A part of me will always be by his side, but he’ll need someone to keep him out of trouble here at Garreg Mach.”

Edelgard nodded. “I am, after all, my brother’s keeper.” She spared a glance at the moon, for a moment tracing with her eyes the patterns of dark and light on its pockmarked surface as it shined overhead. “He told me what happened to him, by the way.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. About what happened to him in Duscur… about what the Church of Seiros did to him.”

Mercedes was silent. The smile on her face, like the waning of the moon, began to retreat into shadow.

“The same thing was done to you, wasn’t it? Six or seven years ago?”

She looked down at the silver snow beneath her feet. For a while, she said nothing, kneading her trembling hands.

“Yes,” she finally answered. “I was… I was originally born to House Martritz in the Empire,” she explained, her soft voice falling even softer, barely a whisper, “but my mother had to…” She paused to pick out the right euphemism. “Flee,” she decided. “She took my older brother Emile and me to Faerghus, but one thing led to another, and we ended up in the same prison as Dimitri. They conducted the experiments on us first. Emile was…”

“I’m sorry,” Edelgard said, cutting in to avoid her having to say any more. She could hear the way her voice shook, the tears it threatened to draw out of her eyes. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“It’s okay,” Mercedes said.

“And Cornelia took you in after you were released?”

She nodded. “Yes. I was quite frail after what had happened, and she nursed me back to health. When I was well again, she had me enroll in the Royal Academy of Sorcery, where I met Annette, and then referred me here, where I met you and everyone else.” Her smile returned, no longer burdened by painful memories. “I owe her for everything.”

“It seems I owe her, too, then,” Edelgard said, “if she’s the reason you came here in the first place.” She supposed there was no stopping Mercedes from leaving with Cornelia after all—that witch was like a mother to her, and had seemingly treated her well enough for her to be loyal to her. If only Those Who Slither were as outwardly callous and cruel in this world as they had been in hers, then perhaps she could express to Mercedes the danger in leaving. Not for the first time, she cursed their duplicity.

“What about that other girl?” she asked. “The one who came here with Cornelia. Hapi, is she?”

“No, she’s not very happy,” Mercedes answered wryly. “But her name is Hapi. She’s been Cornelia’s daughter much longer than I have, but she never speaks and doesn’t write, so I’m afraid I don’t know much about her besides that she likes chocolate. She gets along well with animals, though not so well with people. Cornelia says she was raised by wolves.”

“I see,” Edelgard said, slightly disappointed.

Mercedes began to cough and stumbled, needing Edelgard’s support to keep herself from collapsing. Her breath forced itself from her lungs in rattling draughts; sensing that the cold was too much for her, Edelgard carefully walked her to her room.

“Cornelia has a manor in Fhirdiad, doesn’t she?” she asked Mercedes as the two of them came to a stop in front of her door. “Since Dimitri has invited me to his coronation, I might be able to visit and see you next month.”

“That would be wonderful,” Mercedes said. “I _knew_ I’d see you again soon.” She held out her arms and swept Edelgard into a tight embrace, one last embrace, the gentle warmth of her skin bleeding through the cold of her clothes. Her arms sank into the thick fur of Edelgard’s cloak, and as she pressed her closer, Edelgard could smell the rich, sweet scents of vanilla and honey that still clung to her like perfume. “You’ve been a good friend, Edelgard.”

“So have you,” Edelgard said, her voice muffled against Mercedes’ chest. She could lose herself here, as she often had during those five years when Byleth had been missing. In every world, in every possible world, Mercedes was kind, impossibly kind, as warm and inviting as a hearth, and more than ever now Edelgard felt anger and grief build up within her in equal measures at the thought of what had been done to her and the yet-to-come consequences of those twisted experiments. “You’ve been a wonderful friend, Mercedes.”

Edelgard wasn’t ready when she and Mercedes broke apart. Although she hadn’t shed a single tear, her chest felt hollow and her throat felt raw. “I’ll see you next month,” she said, offering Mercedes a smile she didn’t feel.

“Or sooner, perhaps,” Mercedes said, retreating to her bedroom for the last time.

Mercedes and Hapi von Rusalka left Garreg Mach the next morning, trailing behind their adoptive mother on their way through the monastery’s gates. Mercedes spared one last look back at the tearful smiles and vigorous goodbye waves of her classmates and friends. Watching her depart, powerless to stop her, Edelgard felt a cold, fearful lump form in the pit of her stomach, but she still smiled, and still waved, and acted as though nothing was wrong. She had always been good at that.

She’d had the satisfaction of killing Cornelia once, and allowed herself the thought that perhaps in this world, she would have that satisfaction again, if that would be what it took to avenge Mercedes’ fate.

In Mercedes’ absence, and as the new recruits settled into their new class, the shape of the Blue Lions began to change. Edelgard found herself sparring less with Ingrid now that she had Raphael as an always-eager training partner, and more of her classmates started turning to her for help with schoolwork or advice on training or simply a sympathetic ear to speak to, since Mercedes’ was no longer available. Bernadetta somehow managed to become friends with Ignatz and Ashe (or at the very least she wasn’t terrified of them) and was even starting to manage not to scream in terror whenever Felix or Dedue turned up near her. Glenn still didn’t fit in, and now he fit in even less, frequently going missing for days at a time. Sylvain, beyond anybody’s belief, was occasionally seen talking—not flirting, _talking—_ to Bernadetta of all people, though Edelgard suspected that he was trying to strike up a rapport with her so he could get another look at that story of hers he’d secretly become so enamored with. Annette (who handled the loss of her friend well, though Edelgard occasionally found her knocking on the door to what had once been Mercedes’ bedroom in the morning out of habit) toiled harder than ever to make up for Mercedes’ absence, starting more fires in the kitchen than ever before; Edelgard found herself accompanying her and learning much more about baking than she’d ever cared to learn simply to make sure Garreg Mach didn’t burn down.

The day that Remire would burn crept closer regardless of whatever little progress Edelgard was able to make. As always, no hitch in her plans could stop the world from turning, and the sun still rose, and the sun still set, and the moon still whittled itself away night by night, and the clock still ticked toward the tolling of a terrible bell.

* * *

The snow fell fast and thick on the third week of the Red Wolf Moon, and that Monday morning as Edelgard trudged through the lawn on her way to class, she was thankful to have the warm, furry cloak Dimitri had gifted her, though she wished there was something she could do about the dazzling glare of the morning sun on the virgin snow besides squint and grit her teeth.

It wasn’t yet time for class, and all around the monastery students were spending their time before the church bells rang in the hour playing in the snow like children. A few snowmen dotted the lawn, and Caspar was locked in a vigorous snowball fight with Petra, who as Edelgard recalled had never seen snow before and was thus giddy with excitement.

She’d made it halfway to class when a snowball broke apart against her back. Through her fur cloak, she hardly even felt it, but she still turned her head to catch sight of who had thrown it.

Hilda stood at a distance from her, the wide grin on her face easily discernible even at twenty paces, already packing another misshapen lump of snow into a ball. _“Hey, El! Think fast!”_ she shouted out, lobbing the next ball her way. It splattered against Edelgard’s shoulder, breaking apart and dusting her furry coat with glittering crystals and powder.

 _“Really,_ Hilda?” Edelgard said, holding her arms out at her sides in the universal ‘what-the-hell’ gesture. “I’m on my way to _class!”_

“You’ve got time!” Hilda insisted as she crouched down and scooped up another lump of snow in her hands. “C’mon!” She drew her arm back and pitched her next snowball, which thumped against Edelgard’s chest with surprising force considering that it was comprised of nothing but fluffy snow. “Just one!”

 _“Go for it, Edelgard!”_ shouted Caspar, who apparently had caught sight of Hilda’s one-sided barrage. The wet smack of snow colliding with the side of his head stopped his cheering. _“Ow! Petra, no fair!”_ he whined. _“I was distracted!”_

 _“There are no rules in a war of snowballs!”_ Petra triumphantly crowed, giggling as she whipped another snowball at Caspar’s head.

Edelgard sighed. “One snowball,” she told Hilda, crouching down and scooping up a handful of snow, then packing it into an orb with her hands. The cold bled through her gloves. If this world’s Hilda was her friend, then surely she must have said something to her about how little she liked snow!

While she was packing, another snowball collided with her head and showered her hair with snow, sending icy trickles down the back of her neck. She yelped and stood straight up. “Hey!”

Hilda quickly clasped her hands behind her back and started whistling idly.

Thirsting for revenge, Edelgard drew back her arm like she was throwing a javelin, took aim like she was drawing a bow, and fixed her sight on the sheepish ‘who, me?’ grin plastered on Hilda’s face. Her snowball sailed through the air and found its target, bursting into a shower of glittering snowflakes upon colliding with Hilda’s nose.

Hilda dropped to the ground like a sack of flour, clasping her hands over her face and weakly writhing in the snow. Struck with the thought that she might have thrown too hard and injured her, Edelgard rushed to her side and crouched over her. “Hilda, are you injured? Please accept my apologies; I had no intention of—”

Hilda hooked her fingers into her collar and yanked on it, tugging Edelgard down to kneel on the ground beside her. Her face was unharmed, though covered with a fine, glittering dusting of snow. _“Jeralt got Claude the box,”_ she hissed, her breath coming out in icy puffs of white smoke.

Edelgard was incredulous. “He pulled it off? How? When—” she started, but before she could say another word, Hilda grabbed a fistful of snow with her other hand and shoved it down Edelgard’s exposed blouse with a wicked cackle.

Letting out a sharp and strangled shout, Edelgard ripped herself free of Hilda’s grasp and stumbled backward over the slippery snow, gasping for breath against the icy cold burning her chest and shriveling her lungs. _“Hilda Valentine Goneril,”_ she bellowed, righting herself and scooping up another handful of snow, hardly believing that just a few seconds ago she’d felt _worried_ for Hilda, _“I shall bring the full might of the Empire down upon you!”_

But fortunately for Hilda, the bell rang at that exact moment, and Edelgard forgot all about bloody vengeance and let the half-packed snowball fall from her hands as she turned tail and ran to her classroom.

She found as she drew near that she was not the only one in her class to have gotten caught up in the merriment of the premature winter. Sylvain and Felix were loitering at the back of the classroom, both of them splattered with melting snow.

“Hey, Princess,” Sylvain said, a lopsided grin rakishly drawn across his face. “So you got caught up in Caspar and Petra’s snowball fight too, huh?”

“Those two have been going at it since sunrise,” Felix grumbled, his arms folded tightly over his chest while meltwater dripped from the tips of his indigo hair.

Edelgard sloughed off her coat and took her seat, her spirits lifted by Hilda’s news. If Claude found out how to work that strange machine, he might be able to decode some of the coded messages she and Hilda had found in Tomas’ study, and maybe there would be proof there that Dimitri’s so-called ‘Men in Black’ truly were the evil fiends Edelgard knew them to be.

Byleth had hardly gotten partway through her lecture before the doors burst open, letting in a gust of frigid air and a flurry of snow. Jeralt trudged in, stamping the snow off his boots and shaking a glistening crust of rime from his hair and beard. Snow glittered on his armor and cloak.

Byleth stopped in mid-sentence, staring at her father. All other eyes in the classroom were fixed on the knight’s imposing figure silhouetted against the cold sunlight pouring in behind him.

“We’ve got to go,” Jeralt said to her, as gruff as he was breathless. _“Now.”_

She set down the pointer she’d been using to trace the battalion formation she’d drawn on the blackboard and the cue card she’d been reading her lecture off of. “What’s going on?” she asked him.

“The situation in Remire has changed,” he said. “Drastically.”

Dimitri shot up out of his seat and stood straight up. “Remire?” he gasped. “Captain Jeralt, what is going on?”

“Something’s been killing the villagers. Now I hear they’ve sighted demonic beasts and the town’s been set alight. We don’t know much more than that. But we’ve got to move, Byleth. Get your things.”

His words chilled Edelgard’s heart more than any amount of snow could.

 _Remire_ was happening.

_Now._

Byleth nodded. “I’ll be right with you. Class dismissed.”

“Professor, let us come with you,” Dimitri said. “You two might need our help. Besides, I owe the people of Remire as much as I owe you. If it hadn’t been for their hospitality, Claude, Ferdinand, and I would never have met you.”

“I’m okay with it,” Jeralt said. “The villagers might need evacuating, and in that case, the more manpower, the better. If it’s alright with you, Byleth.”

“It’s alright.” Byleth’s gaze, serious and cold, swept across the classroom, meeting each of her students’ in turn. “Class, let’s go.”

She needed to say nothing more. Each student rushed out of their seats and followed their professor’s lead across the monastery to the armory and the stables, where they would collect the swiftest horses available. Ingrid tended to her pegasus, while Dedue helped Dimitri double-check the harness on his wyvern (which Dimitri had seemingly grown fond of during his flight training). All of the students traded their uniforms for armor and picked out their weapons, some like Dedue and Raphael preferring thick, heavy plate armor while others such as Felix and Bernadetta picked out lighter, less restrictive armor that would not hamper their movements. A heart-pounding flurry of steel and leather later, with not a spare second wasted, the Blue Lions underwent their transformation from students to soldiers and bared their lances, axes, swords, and bows at the gate to Garreg Mach.

Before the class could depart, a familiar voice rang out in the air.

 _“Wait!”_ Hubert von Vestra called out, projecting his gravely rasp of a voice. He stood before them, already clad in his mages’ robes, stooping over and resting his hands on his knees to catch his breath.

“Hubert,” Edelgard said, “shouldn’t you be in class right now?”

“Professor Eisner,” he said, offering her a polite bow when he’d composed himself, “I request your permission to accompany Lady Edelgard. As her vassal, it is my duty to protect her.”

The Hubert she knew wouldn’t have even bothered asking for permission if he were in his doppelganger’s shoes, or if he did, he would have already made up his mind to follow her regardless of whether he was told yes or no. _This_ Hubert was not quite so disdainful of authorities other than his liege.

“Understood,” Byleth responded, offering him a nod in return for his bow. “Get a horse and follow us. We’re headed to Remire.”

“And be quick about it,” Jeralt told him as he turned tail and rushed back toward the stables.

* * *

Edelgard followed the rest of her class down from the monastery’s nest in the mountains to the sleepy little town nestled in its forested foothills in a daze, asking herself over and over again a question that had no answer: _Why_ now _of all times?_ Had the theft of Solon’s machine accelerated their timetable? Or was this simply the way events were meant to play out in this world? Just how valuable was her knowledge of her own world, her own past, in this world?

She looked up at the rust-colored underbelly of Dimitri’s wyvern as it glided overhead and kept itself apace with the rest of the class with languid, slow flaps of its leathery wings and wondered to herself—did Dimitri know anything about this? In her world, in her past, Those Who Slither had used this event to drive a wedge between her and her classmates, hoping to teach her that _they,_ not her newfound friends, were the only ones who would stand at her side when the time came; for that purpose, she’d been kept in the dark and forcibly tied to the atrocities, told with the shock of blood and fire that there was no path for her but the one they had chosen. But Dimitri didn’t seem to need that lesson as much as she had, and things were altogether different in this world.

Perhaps, she thought, seizing at the faintest glimmer of opportunity in the darkness, this event could be of use to her. If the sight of the atrocity at Remire moved him, she could exploit it, let it eat away at Dimitri’s unshakable faith in his allies, and then when she found evidence of their treachery—which, if Hilda really _had_ been telling the truth about Claude and the machine and hadn’t just been using it to get her to let her guard down, could be soon—he would be that much easier to win over.

She found her hands worrying the reins of her horse, the leather of her gloves creaking against the leather straps. To have been blindsided twice by Remire in one lifetime… She’d entertained the idea that if it had happened in this world at the same time, in the same way, that perhaps she could have been prepared for the sight of it or even prevented it. After all, she’d seen it once before, and she’d seen worse in wartime. But just like last time, the tragedy of Remire had struck like a thief in the night, and this time, her imagination supplied all of the vivid details of villages wiped off the map and cities set aflame by both her enemies and her own forces and allies alike that six years of war had burned into it.

Byleth glanced over her shoulder at her. Though her expression was its usual blank, something about it felt more piercing and accusing than usual. Edelgard found herself regretting revealing that she was a time traveler to her. She could imagine the thoughts swirling around in her head right now— _Did you know this would happen?_ she might want to ask her, or _couldn’t you have done something to prevent it?_

And Edelgard would have no answer to those questions except for sputtered excuses. _It happened too quickly,_ she might have said, or _the future is different here,_ but none of that would erase the truth—Remire would burn again, Byleth would see one of the many homes her father’s nomadic lifestyle had brought her to reduced to ruin, and Edelgard would be to blame for it. That failure, that sin, would stain her soul. Again.

A grim, dour mood had settled over the Blue Lions, though Sylvain occasionally tried to needle a few of his classmates out of their pallor. “So, Ashe, ready to swoop in and rescue some civilians?” he asked with a cynical swagger to his voice. “Be that virtuous, gallant knight you’re always talking about being?”

“Shut up, Sylvain,” Ingrid snapped. “This is _serious.”_ She spurred her pegasus on and caught up to Edelgard, reaching over and taking her by the hand. “Edelgard, are you alright?” she asked.

Hearing her voice cut through the murk and the pressure of her gloved hand curling firmly around her wrist, Edelgard snapped out of her dazed musings and shook her head as though to dislodge her thoughts from it. Anxiety churned in her gut. “I’m just worried. The people of Remire are… They’re kind people, or so I hear. I can’t believe that something so horrible could happen to them… and so close to the monastery.”

Hubert flanked her other side, riding on a sable mare as dark as his shadow. “Whatever horror awaits us here, Lady Edelgard,” he assured her, “I shall see to it no harm comes to you.”

“Thank you, Hubert,” she said, “but it isn’t _me_ I’m worried about.”

“Don’t worry,” Ingrid added. “Whatever we find there is out of our control. And whatever we can do to help them, we’ll do,” Ingrid replied. “Right, Professor?”

Byleth nodded.

A low, rumbling roar shook itself through the ground, deep and distant, rattling the branches of the trees. The class picked up the pace in response, but the road was icy and steep in parts and hampered their movements.

Edelgard braced herself as her class made as much haste as possible down the mountain road, steeling herself for the sounds of fearful screams and plaintive wails amid the crackling fires and frenzied howls of men driven mad with an unholy bloodlust, but nothing could have prepared her from the sight and sounds that awaited her when the trees thinned out and Remire came into view. Dimitri’s wyvern touched down to the ground and Edelgard could finally see its rider, his eyes wide, his hands shaking, his shoulders quivering despite what must have been his best efforts to quell the trembling of his body.

There were no screams of the damned, no howls of the mad, just the slow snapping and popping of dying fires, the shifting and sloughing away of ruined buildings, and the one sound present at every massacre: the indifferent and ignorant chirps and tweets of birdsong.

All of the Blue Lions stared in horror at the razed fields and ruined buildings, the flattened heaps and broken mounds of shattered stone and splintered wood that had once been farms and houses and barns and stores; the gray ash twirling down from the heavens, a grotesque mockery of a gentle snowfall, defiling the snowy ground with its touch; the sprawled bodies, some of them bloodied but most of them burned, lying in the dirt roads and protruding askew from the wreckage of homes that had become tombs, nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the debris. Not a single structure was left standing, as though a giant’s boot had descended from the heavens and ground the whole village under its heel. A massive crater, deep and wide, marked what had once been the village square, ringed by a ridge of broken and shattered cobblestones. Nothing moved except flickering tongues of flame and curling columns of smoke; the occasional rustling of an unstable pile of masonry as the last vestiges of the flattened buildings shuddered and fell flat to the ground; and the impertinent flitting to and fro of a few small animals here and there, none of which were aware of the magnitude of the tragedy they had intruded on.

Remire was already gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, heads up.
> 
> Someone's gonna die in the next chapter.
> 
> I'm giving you a week to guess who bites it.
> 
> Have fun! 🙃


	14. The Fire In Which We Burn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the darkness slithering underneath Remire Village explodes to the surface.

The desolation of Remire stretched before the Blue Lions, achingly vast and flat, it and its souls reduced to a scorched and blackened blotch on the snow-dusted land. There was, save for the birds, nothing but sickening silence—a ringing, hollow silence, deafening in its vast emptiness.

A weak and pitiful retching sound broke that silence, and Edelgard glanced over her shoulder and caught sight of Hubert leaning over the side of his horse and vomiting onto the snow, hot yellow bile and fragments of half-digested breakfast splattering the ground. The Hubert Edelgard knew wouldn’t have even flinched at the sight, but this one had never seen such carnage in his life even at a distance, let alone up close.

“Hubert, are you alright?” Edelgard asked him, swiftly dismounting and helping him down off his horse, mindful of the steaming puddle of sick eating into the snow. His legs wobbled as he dismounted; his knees knocked.

“I will be fine,” Hubert assured her, sniffling as he produced a handkerchief from within his robes to wipe a few lingering traces of bile from his nose and lips. “Goddess commend those poor people’s souls.”

Though they hid it well, even Jeralt and Byleth were shaken, the two of them sharing an apprehensive glance. “Class, fan out and search for survivors,” Byleth said, more curt than usual. “Fath—Captain, circle the perimeter with me. Ingrid, take to the air with Dimitri and see if whoever… if whatever did this is still in the area. Edelgard, direct the class’s further movements on the ground.”

Edelgard bowed. “Yes, Professor.”

Dimitri let out a sharp, pained outcry and fell to his knees, clutching his head with both hands, worming his black-gloved fingers into his snowy silver hair. His wyvern, concerned for his health, arched its long neck downward and brought its scaly cheek to his to comfort him.

“The boar won’t be flying today,” Felix observed.

“I can do it,” Dimitri said, as though to spite him—although his palms still ground against his brow and his words slipped through gritted teeth. His shoulders were bucking like an unruly horse in need of breaking in.

Edelgard took to his side, offering him her hand. “Dimitri, do you need help standing?” she asked, puzzled by his sudden shift in demeanor.

“No,” he said, pulling himself up to his feet and letting his hands fall to his sides. His chest heaved, rising and falling dramatically with each deep, ragged breath.

“Are you okay?” Byleth asked him, her brow furrowing slightly with concern.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. Don’t waste your time on me.” He pulled himself back up onto his mount. “With me, Ingrid. When we find out what did this, we shall slay it and drape its entrails over this ruin as vengeance for the fallen.”

“I hope it’s long gone, whatever it is,” Bernadetta said, shivering, as Dimitri and Ingrid took off with mighty flaps of their mounts’ wings and Byleth and Jeralt rode out along the edge of Remire where the wasteland met the treeline.

“Me too, Bernie,” Annette admitted. “Whatever in the world could flatten a whole village like this, I don’t want to run into it.”

An uncomfortable frown crossed Sylvain’s face; Edelgard suspected he was reflecting on the massive beast his brother had transformed into and the havoc it had wrought on Conand Tower.

“With Dimitri and Ingrid up there, we’ve got nothing to worry about,” Raphael said. “C’mon, Dedue, let’s get to work on those piles of rubble! There might be people under there!”

“Well said, Raphael,” Edelgard said. “You and Dedue, start with the tavern.” She pointed them to one of the larger rubble piles. “Bernadetta, Ashe, Ignatz, keep your eyes on the trees. Sylvain, Felix, sweep the western quadrant with me to start. Annette, stick with Raphael and Dedue in case they find anyone in need of healing. Hubert, stay at my side.”

“I would not dream of doing otherwise, Your Highness,” Hubert said.

Picking through the remains of Remire was slow, grueling, dour work. Nobody expected anything less from it. Sifting through the rubble, Edelgard tried to keep a level head and a calm mind, but losing count of how many bodies she had uncovered with Sylvain and Felix was more than she could stand. She found herself shivering—and not from the cold. Her breathing was strained. Her heart ached as much as her arms and back did. Most of the bodies were burned and mangled beyond recognition—many shredded by giant claws and wicked fangs underneath the burns. Few of them had any discernible faces, and on all of those faces, Edelgard couldn’t stop seeing those of her siblings.

It was impossible to judge the passage of time with the oppressive coverage of the gray clouds hanging motionless overhead. When Edelgard stopped, she felt as though she had been marching in full plate armor for a week.

She met with the rest of her classmates at the edge of the crater in the center of the village. From the looks of it, no one had had any luck finding survivors either. They gathered with dirtied hands and soot-stained faces, all cowed by the magnitude of the suffering they had uncovered.

“Nothing?” she asked Dedue.

Dedue stonily shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Nothing,” Annette dumbly repeated, dazed. Two streaks of clear, wet skin ran through the soot and ash smeared on her cheeks.

Dimitri and Ingrid touched down at the same time Jeralt and Byleth returned from their patrol. “Nothing,” Dimitri growled, seething. “Nothing we can see from the air.”

Sylvain looked down into the crater and scuffed his boot on the edge. “Only place we haven’t looked is this giant hole in the ground, but… I’m not expecting us to find any survivors down there, either.”

“I still can’t believe it,” Jeralt said, shaking his head in dismay. “I don’t know what in the world can tear down a village so _quickly._ I only got the report this morning—Remire was _here_ last night when I left it.”

“From the looks of it,” Sylvain said, “everyone here was either mauled or burned to death, or both. And then the whole village came down on them—maybe to cover up whatever killed them.”

“Whatever it was, it’s long gone,” Ingrid said.

“What if it’s headed to the monastery next?” Byleth wondered.

Edelgard wondered how far backward Byleth could wind the hands of time with Sothis’ power. Surely there had to be a strict limit on how she used that power—otherwise, she would have been able to reach Remire before tragedy had befallen it. At any rate, Sothis didn’t seem to be manifesting herself today—Edelgard wondered if even she was overwhelmed by the devastation.

“If there’s really no one left here,” Ignatz said, “then we should head back to the monastery and warn them. We’ve… I wish it wasn’t so, but we’ve done all we can here, apparently.”

Ashe let out a heavy sigh, struggling to keep his face together. “I agree, Professor. We can’t let this happen anywhere else.”

“It won’t. We must hunt down the beasts responsible for this.” Dimitri insisted, quaking with rage, “and flay them to their bones!” He punctuated his violent exclamation by snapping his lance over his knee. “If we allow their filth to exist, we are no better than they are.”

Edelgard nodded. “You’re right, Dimitri. We can’t allow whatever did this to continue doing as it pleases. This senseless loss of life is…” She took a deep breath and tried to keep her voice from cracking as it squeezed through the lump in her throat. “This senseless loss of life should never happen again.”

Inwardly, though, as rattled and as emotionally drained as she was, Dimitri’s violent outburst was heartening—if Those Who Slither in the Dark could be tied to this event, his cordial relationship with them would be over. “But it’s up to you, Professor,” she added, addressing Byleth. “You and Captain Jeralt are the authorities here.”

Byleth cast one more glance around the desolate wasteland from atop her horse. “Ingrid, Dimitri, fly back to Garreg Mach and let the other knights know what happened here,” she said. “The rest of us will…” She took a look at her students, studying their weary faces. It couldn’t have been long past midday, but they all had weary faces; Edelgard was sure she was no exception.

Jeralt let out a sharp, frustrated sigh through his nose, then clapped Byleth lightly on the shoulder. “You did what you could, kiddo. But this is beyond you and your kids. Take ‘em home.”

Byleth nodded. “Mm. Right. Everyone…”

She fell silent. Her eyes rolled up into the back of her head, showing all whites and just a sliver of blue, and with arms falling to her sides and legs going limp, she fell off her horse and crumpled to the ground.

Edelgard felt a thousand axe blades bury themselves in her skull at once, splitting—like being torn to splinters. She felt herself stretched between two worlds—at once felt her armor heavy on her shoulders and her crown heavy on her head, at once saw the desolate gray of the devastated village and the splendid hall of her palace. The ringing, throbbing, pulsing, pounding, agonizing pain grew so white-hot that it all vanished into noise, and—

_“Lady Edelgard! Lady Edelgard, wake up!”_

She had never heard Hubert so panicked in _years,_ and when she cracked her weary eyes open, his face filled her vision. “Hubert…” she gasped.

 _“Professor, are you alright?”_ Dimitri cried out, his voice ringing in unison with at least half of his classmates.

A bone-chilling howl tore through the air, sounding almost human in its anguished cry before suddenly growing louder, deeper, darker, _wetter_ —and above the trees, there stood a wicked black beast, its long and thin and lanky limbs covered with striated bands of tar-black muscle and iridescent blue-black scales, its wedge-shaped head splitting open on three axes to reveal a mouth like a blossoming flower lined with razor-sharp teeth. It let out another gurgling howl as the figure riding on the top of its head—a figure draped in furs and wearing the bleached-white skull of a horse as a helmet—lifted his spear.

Byleth picked herself up, gritting her teeth as she reached for the Sword of the Creator, though she was still unsteady from her feet and reeling from her mysterious fainting spell.

“Good Goddess almighty,” Hubert gasped. “What manner of hellish beast is _that?”_

“Ashe, Bernadetta, Ignatz, aim for the person riding that thing,” Byleth ordered. “They might be controlling it somehow—”

Another splitting headache struck both her and Edelgard again, throwing both of them off their feet, and when Edelgard’s vision cleared, she saw a column of red light burst out from one of the debris piles and coalesce into a familiar figure. Familiar—but not one she’d expected to see here.

“Tomas.” Dimitri gripped the two halves of his lance tightly enough that the wood splintered in his grasp. “What are you doing here? Dare I even ask?”

“Tomas?” Solon cocked his head quizzically, a bemused little smile playing on his soft, genial face. “Oh… I forgot I was wearing this. How embarrassing.” And then, like a snake shedding its skin, the face and clothes of Tomas the librarian unraveled themselves and sloughed off of him, revealing a withered, ancient body clothed in ornate black mages’ robes with skin as pale as a corpse, lips tinged blue, fat and wormlike veins throbbing on a swelled forehead, and wisps of white hair clinging to the back of his head. His eyes were entirely pitch black, not a speck of white, save for the golden rings of his irises. “I am not Tomas. My name is Solon, the savior of all!”

Immediately following his introduction, Bernadetta screamed and shot at him twice; both times, a cloud of black miasma surged forward to protect him and incinerated the arrows.

Solon cackled and stepped closer to the class as the beast behind him and its macabre rider emerged from the woods. The curved claws on its forepaws and hindpaws were grotesquely disproportionate to its body, splayed out and curling into the violated soil like a mole’s paws. “What’s the matter? Are you all petrified from fear and shock? Did my disguise fool you all so easily?” He smiled and licked his lips. “My hypotheses were correct, ‘Professor.’ To wound the web of time, to plunge a dagger into the tapestry of the fates, is to wound _you,_ Fell Star… and I shall exploit my theory to rid the world of your filth once and for all!”

Edelgard watched as Solon splayed out his arms and conjured a roiling orb of black and violet flames, and on instinct, she took her axe and charged at Solon, the strength returning to her weary limbs out of sheer desperation. “Solon! You will not escape punishment for this!”

“Ha!” Solon hurled the fiery orb at her instead. “Bold words for an insignificant beast!”

Edelgard weaved out of the path of his volley. Insignificant, was she?

Dimitri charged at him as well, wielding half of his lance as a long dagger. “Disgusting fiend! I will tear you to shreds with my bare hands!”

“If you insist on turning your blade against me, then expect no mercy!” Solon cackled, transforming the ground beneath his feet into an impassable mire of luminous black sludge that quickly rose to his ankles and stopped him in his tracks. Enraged, Dimitri simply threw his half-lance and impaled Solon through the shoulder.

The screech of pain that tore itself from Solon’s mouth was horrendous, but at this moment it was more beautiful than any of Dorothea’s arias. Edelgard couldn’t have dreamed for a better outcome. Solon was openly showing his true colors, not just to Dimitri, but the entire class! The whole world made _sense_ again at last!

As Solon stumbled backward, she swiped her axe at him, only for the beast’s paw to come crashing between them. Hubert quickly grabbed her and yanked her backward as the beast’s claws tore through the air. There was a sickeningly wet tearing sound—Hubert lost his grip on Edelgard and fell to the ground, three deep furrows dug into the side of his arm and bleeding profusely. Blood splattered the ground.

 _“Hubert!”_ Edelgard gasped, grabbing him and taking a look at the wound. It was deep enough to show hints of bone; blood pooled on the ground where he’d fallen. “Annette, over here! I need a healer!” she called out, hoping that Annette could hear her across the town—and could reach her in town.

“No need, Lady Edelgard,” Hubert hissed through gritted teeth; he clasped his hand against the wound and a film of bloody ice grew over it, freezing the wound shut. “This will do for now— _run!”_

The beast’s claws came down again; Edelgard threw Hubert over her shoulder and ran for it, casting a fireball at the beast’s head and scorching its wide-open mouth as she retreated. He was a lead weight, limp and weak, his life fading fast. Her heart pounded furiously against her ribcage. All the years she’d worried for Hubert’s safety, worried that one day he would push himself too far in service to her—today, it seemed, would be the day he met his match.

Byleth’s Sword of the Creator lashed against the ground behind Solon as he ran through the ruins of Remire, shockingly spry for such an old fossil, though the miasma trailing in his wake hinted that magic was augmenting his escape.

“After him! Don’t let him escape!” Dimitri shouted out, freed from the mire as the spell faded and the black sludge holding him in place evaporated. He pursued Solon on foot, so wrapped up in fury and revenge that the fact that he had a wyvern waiting for him didn’t even register to him. Dedue hurried after him.

“Hey, boar! Don’t you fucking run off like—” Felix snarled. “Ugh. Fine. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

A few more gurgling howls ripped through the air and on cue, several more malformed beasts rose from the forest. Edelgard felt her stomach churn—to appear out of nowhere like this, they had to have been the results of human experimentation. Had Those Who Slither been keeping prisoners in the woods and waiting until the time was right to transform them into beasts with Crest Stones?

The lead beast leaped into the air, its shadow flying overhead, and crashed onto the ground in a flurry of dust and ash and kicked-up debris, blocking Edelgard’s path. The skull-headed rider leaped off its mount as a volley of arrows struck the beast’s forehead where he had been sitting just moments ago, falling to the ground with a twirl of his spear. The rider clung low to the ground, scurrying around Edelgard and Hubert with the gait of a three-legged animal as he lashed out at them with his spear. Edelgard struggled to dance out of the path of both the rider and its mount as the wicked beast’s claws thundered around her. The rider leaped up on two legs, drawing back his arm and preparing to throw his spear—

Hubert flung out his hand and encased the rider’s head in a hunk of ice. The rider staggered backward, arms windmilling, the image of his horse-skull helmet bent and distorted by the crystalline contours of the ice block engulfing it. He fell to the ground on all fours and began slamming his head against the ground to break the ice and free himself.

“That… should buy us some time,” Hubert gasped, falling limp over Edelgard’s shoulder. Edelgard was quite pleasantly surprised, to say the least—it seemed that this world’s Hubert, as soft as he was, still had some degree of his recognizable fierceness to him.

“Don’t exert yourself,” she scolded him, taking his cold hand in hers. “How would I explain your death to Ferdinand?”

“My father taught me to give my life for you, Lady Edelgard,” he mumbled, struggling to lift up his head again. “I… I must confess I never thought I would _have_ to.”

As Ingrid swooped down on her pegasus and drove her lance into the heart of one of the beasts, Edelgard dashed behind a pile of rubble and laid Hubert down on the ground. Annette was at their side in a matter of seconds, aghast at the sight of Hubert’s wounds. “You’ll have to melt the ice before I can heal his wounds,” she told Edelgard, assessing the nasty gashes winding across his arm. Beneath the latticework pattern of frost and chunks of glistening frozen blood capping the wounds, his skin was already beginning to blacken from flash-freezing. Though his quick thinking had staunched the flow of blood, it had come at a great cost. Any longer and he would lose that arm—if he even lived long enough to lose it.

A nervous knot coiling in her stomach as Hubert lay in front of her, Edelgard cast a fire spell and carefully moderated its heat to a gentle warmth just as Mercedes had taught her—and as soon as the ice melted and blood began to gush from his arm anew, Annette laid her hands on it and the soft green glow of healing magic engulfed the wound. Beneath the light, blackened skin turned purple, then blue, then white, then returned to its natural pale peach hue; great canyons cleaved in flesh narrowed as they knitted themselves together. Beads of sweat popped up on Annette’s forehead as she knitted her brows in concentration, her teeth latching onto her lower lip.

With a ragged cry, the rider struck at Edelgard, freed of his icy prison save for a few chunks of ice still clinging to his skull-helmet. She deflected his spear with a swipe of her axe, then planted her boot in his midsection and kicked him to the floor. The rider flipped backward, landing on his feet like a cat, and lunged forward. Edelgard braced herself and rammed him with her armored shoulder, feeling his spear slip past her and cut a shallow gash in her side between two plates of armor. Her shoulder cracked against the rider’s helmet, sending deep cracks through the bone. The rider reeled backward again, unsteady on his feet, and windmilled his lanky, bandage-covered arms to cast a spell. A torrent of dark fire formed into wicked spikes spewed forth; Edelgard cast a fire spell of her own and intercepted the torrent with a river of flames. Flickering black and orange lights swirled around each other, each struggling to overcome the other.

The rider pushed forward, pouring more of his reserves of magic into the torrent, only to be blindsided by the swinging of a mighty, meaty fist clenched in a steel gauntlet as Raphael tackled him to the ground. Freed, Edelgard redirected her flames up at the nearest beast, scorching its hide as Ingrid’s pegasus swooped around it. As the beast writhed and cowered, Ingrid struck its burned skin with her lance and dispatched the beast, sending it crashing to the ground. The beast’s body crumbled into black dust and blew away in the wind, revealing the tiny body of a peasant child curled on the ground in its stead.

 _“Done,”_ Annette gasped, and she would have fallen to the ground at Hubert’s side if Edelgard hadn’t rushed back to catch her. Her skin was pallid and clammy, her chest heaving. “I think I’m spent,” she muttered, sweat mingled with soot dripping off her face in gray rivulets.

Hubert sat up, gingerly feeling the healed—though still bruised and bloody—skin on his arm. “Thank you, Miss Annette.” He looked up at Edelgard. “Lady Edelgard, you have become far too reckless.”

 _“I_ have become too reckless?” she shot back at him, though she couldn’t disguise a smile at the sight of him alive and unmaimed. “How are you feeling?”

“Well enough to serve you for one hundred more years,” he said, sounding much more like the Hubert she knew so well.

One by one, the beasts fell under the combined might of the Blue Lions, especially easy to deal with now that their mysterious leader felled and captured. The class regrouped again near the center of town.

“You alright, kiddo?” Jeralt asked Byleth as he wiped his lance clean of the gory ichor staining its long silver blade.

“I’m fine,” Byleth said, wiping the sweat from her brow with the hem of her jacket while the blood staining her Sword of the Creator sizzled and steamed from the heat of the bony blade.

“Where’s Dimitri gotten to?” Ingrid asked.

“The boar ran after Tomas, or Solon, or whoever that egg-faced dastard is,” Felix said, cleaning the blade of his saber.

“Great,” she muttered under her breath. “Professor, permission to go after him?”

Byleth shook her head. “No, Ingrid. I need you to fly that beast-tamer we captured back to the monastery so the knights can question him. He might be able to tell us what happened here. And take back Dimitri’s wyvern while you’re at it.”

Raphael hoisted the tied-up rider onto the back of Ingrid’s pegasus like a bale of hay. Ingrid started tying the rider down, securing him to her saddle so he wouldn’t fall no matter how hard she rode, and prepared to take flight.

“What’s next, Professor?” Ashe asked. “Do we go after Solon?”

“Professor, if I might make a suggestion?” Edelgard said. When Byleth nodded, she continued. “Solon… whoever he is… spoke of hurting you by causing harm to time itself. When you blacked out, he seemed particularly proud.”

“All the more reason to find him and kick his butt!” Raphael chimed in. “No one hurts our teacher and gets away with it, right, guys?”

“You shall not interrupt Lady Edelgard, commoner,” Hubert hissed at him.

“Hubert, it’s alright,” Edelgard said. “Raphael is a friend. Now, where was I? Professor, I think that whatever caused you to collapse isn’t something he _personally_ did. In other words, he’s running away to distract us… to buy time for his allies to compromise you again.”

“Hmm…” Byleth put her hand to her chin. “I get what you’re saying. But where would they be hiding?”

As Ingrid took off with her passenger and sailed into the sky with Dimitri’s abandoned wyvern in tow, there was a low, deep rumble; Edelgard suspected another beast was about to emerge from the woods, but instead, a plume of dust and smoke exploded from within the crater in the center of town and a beam of violet light lanced out, cutting through the gray skies. For an instant, Ingrid’s pegasus was illuminated in a stark silhouette against the light—and then a spray of blood spewed through the air and horse and rider fell to the ground.

 _“Ingrid!”_ she cried out, horrified as she watched a crimson rain carry her friend and her winged mount to the ground. The two of them vanished in the woods some distance away from the village.

Byleth flung out her hand. “Sothis—”

At that exact moment, Edelgard felt another splitting headache shatter her skull and fell to the ground, mirroring her professor, and when her head cleared and her mind was firmly anchored back in this world, she understood.

These splitting headaches, these temporal incursions, whatever Hanneman and Linhardt would call them in their research: They were being _engineered_ by Those Who Slither in the Dark—specifically, by the looks of it, to interfere with that strange power Byleth and Sothis possessed to reverse the flow of time and undo events.

And that meant that Ingrid…

Byleth quickly collected herself. “Jeralt, Annette, Ignatz—go to Ingrid! _Now!”_ The urgency in her voice was rare indeed—she was faced with the rare mistake she couldn’t undo and the permanency had rattled her.

It all made sense to Edelgard, suddenly. So many things about her made sense. How she would sometimes react to changing conditions on the battlefield with indifference even when her students were caught off guard; how she would sometimes act unusually protective of certain students in certain situations, as though she’d foreseen an especially gruesome fate befall them and sought to forestall it…

 _Oh, my dear Byleth,_ Edelgard thought, shaken, _how many times have you watched us—watched_ me _—die?_

“Go to Ingrid! Make sure she’s okay!” Byleth barked at the scrambling students, as though they weren’t scrambling quickly enough for her liking. _“Go!”_

At the bottom of the crater, the Death Knight emerged from the dust and ash, shimmering purple light shining through the gaps in his black armor. The wicked black bow folded and shifted into the shape of a long, curved scythe, and with a purposeful stride, the Death Knight began to ascend the wall of the crater. His gleaming death’s-head mask grinned wickedly.

Byleth separated the blade of her sword into a fiery whip with a flick of her wrist. “Edelgard, you too. Run!”

“But Professor—”

The Sword of the Creator clashed against the Death Knight’s scythe with a shower of sparks; the Death Knight knocked it aside and lunged forward. Violet sparks poured from his boots as though he were propelling himself forward with bursts of flame. The gauntlet on his free arm unfolded into a wicked four-pronged claw, its tips glowing with violet flames. _“Go now to meet the Goddess!”_ the wicked knight bellowed.

Byleth retracted her sword just in time to parry the Death Knight’s claw, but in her haste she left herself wide open to a one-handed swing of his scythe. Panic boiled the blood in Edelgard’s veins; time seemed to slow to a crawl and stop as though _she_ wielded the power of Sothis.

Edelgard hurled a fireball at the Death Knight; at the same time, Hubert summoned a flurry of icy daggers that battered his pitch-black armor, knocking him away from Byleth. The searing heat and icy cold warped and cracked one of the Death Knight’s spiny shoulder pauldrons; sheaves of metal sloughed away like loose scales from a lizard’s hide to reveal more of the luminous inner layer of his armor beneath.

The Death Knight’s red eyes fixed on her. _“You again…”_ he growled. _“Leave this place if you fear death!”_

“Lady Edelgard,” Hubert said, his hands shaking, “I think we fear death.”

 _“Hey, Death Knight!”_ Raphael bellowed, lifting a hunk of debris nearly as big as he was above his head and chucking it at the macabre foe. _“Catch!”_

The Death Knight’s claw sliced through the battered stone, cutting it neatly into pieces; the distraction, though, was just what Byleth needed to strike him. The impact of the Sword of the Creator against his armor knocked him backward, but only slowed him as he righted himself. His scythe folded back into a crossbow mounted on his arm, and he fired a bolt of light at Byleth; she leaped out of the way, but the bolt ripped through her sleeve and cut into her arm.

When the Death Knight leaped into battle, it was all the remaining Blue Lions could do to stay clear of him. Only the quick thinking and quicker reflexes Byleth had ingrained in her students prevented the skirmish from becoming a total rout, as it had been with the Golden Deer at Zanado. Crackling bolts of black and violet light, dark flames, and shimmering clouds of poisonous miasma rained down on the ruins of Remire.

The Death Knight’s scythe caught Felix in the shoulder, deadening his arm—it hung limp at his side, hanging by nothing but bone and a few traces of sinew, blood gushing down his sleeve and raining on the ground as he fought on and clashed swords with his opponent, keeping the Death Knight’s focus solely on him while the other students circled around and attacked from afar until he faltered, and just before the Death Knight could cleave him in two, Sylvain darted out and dragged him away, clasping his hand to the wound and wreathing it in healing energy.

Hubert whistled for his horse; it rushed to his side and he hoisted himself onto it without delay. “Come, Lady Edelgard. Your professor has told you to retreat.”

Edelgard shook her head. “She can’t survive against that thing alone,” she said. “We’re helping her.”

“If it is your funeral,” he grumbled as she mounted the horse behind him, “then it shall be mine as well. But I have already cheated death once today; I do not feel so confident about doing it a second time.”

The Death Knight hunkered down, his shoulders heaving, a rattling wheeze escaping his mouth as deep and gravely as his modulated voice. Arrows pelted his armor as Ashe and Bernadetta rushed in and out of cover, ducking behind mounds of debris and furtively lining up their shots. Raphael, knowing better than to fight in close quarters (at least he didn’t share Felix’s death wish), continued to hurl the biggest chunks of debris he could find at him. Byleth darted around, striking with the extended blade of the Sword of the Creator.

Edelgard noticed that even steel arrows were chipping off chunks of metal where her and Hubert’s spells had both hit the Death Knight, even though they pinged uselessly against the rest of his armor. “Hubert,” she said as their horse circled around in a wide arc, its hooves scrabbling for purchase against the rubble and corpses, “are you thinking what I’m thinking? Look at the armor where your ice magic and my fire magic hit in the same place.”

“Ah.” Hubert nodded. “The metal—it has been weakened. Do you really think _we_ could defeat the Death Knight himself?”

“At the very least, we might be able to buy some time until Jeralt and the others return. Do you trust me?”

“With my life.” Hubert readied his aim.

Their combined volley hit the Death Knight in the torso; following up with those magical blows, Byleth slashed at him with the Sword of the Creator, shattering his black breastplate. The blinking lights on his breastplate flickered and went out; the Death Knight stumbled backward as though mortally wounded, coughing and gasping for air, his deepened breath resonating behind the permanent grin of his mask. The violet light shining throughout the inner layer of his armor flickered and faded to a dull gray and went out, and with that, the Death Knight’s armor folded back up as though to better protect him, sealing the inner layer. Faint wisps of violet steam seeped from the armor’s seams.

Edelgard could have sworn that the contraction of the fiend’s armor rendered him at least half a foot shorter. His body language had changed, loosened; it was as though he had snapped out of a trance. His head turned from side to side, the fixed grin on his mask somehow looking less ghoulish and more nervous.

Byleth gritted her teeth and prepared to strike a killing blow; Hubert and Edelgard readied themselves for another combined attack; Ashe and Bernadetta took aim.

The Death Knight coughed and cleared his throat. _“How… frightening,”_ he rasped, his voice deep and sonorous. _“Won’t you please… go easy on me?”_

The half-second of bemusement was all the Death Knight needed to aim his arm-mounted crossbow at the ground and fire, the impact of the bolt throwing him into the air; the Blue Lions’ combined attacks missed him by a wide margin. In midair, he cast a warp spell and vanished in a pillar of red light, leaving no trace of his presence save for bits and pieces of cast-off armor lying amid the ruins of Remire.

“We frightened away the Death Knight himself,” Hubert gasped, a nervous smile arcing across his face. “Lady Edelgard, I find myself in awe of your genius!”

Edelgard barely heard his praise. The Death Knight’s last words rang in her mind. Had she ever heard those before? They sounded so familiar…

And why had he retreated so suddenly? Even though the outer layer of his armor had been damaged, the inner layer had seemed impenetrable. Was his stamina so low? He reminded her of Lysithea, immensely powerful and yet quickly worn out. And all that heavy armor and that persistent cough could not have made fighting easy for him.

Hubert let out a deep sigh and slumped over on his horse, thankfully patting its silky black mane. “It is no wonder you have become so… tough,” he said to Edelgard, interrupting her train of thought, “if _these_ are the sorts of missions the Blue Lions go on.”

“Yes, Professor Byleth is a firm believer in hands-on experience,” Edelgard said, catching her breath. Her ribs ached, her hands tingled painfully from all the fire she’d conjured, and her head pounded in time with her heart, her eyes aching as though someone were pressing iron blocks against them. Errant blows from the butt of the Death Knight’s scythe had left a few nasty dents in her breastplate that dug painfully into her chest, driving sharp pains into her lungs with every breath. Frustrated, she unbuckled and tossed aside the breastplate; though it left her exposed, she’d only be a hindrance if she couldn’t breathe.

“Lady Edelgard!” Hubert protested.

Breathing came much more easily to Edelgard now, though there was still a bit of pain. She might have bruised or fractured one or two of her ribs. “I’ll be fine,” she assured him, filling her lungs. “It wasn’t doing me much good as it was.”

Byleth came up to her, sheathing her sword. A gash on her left shoulder sizzled, smoke curling in little wisps from the ragged burn that had eaten through the sleeve of her jacket. “Edelgard…”

“Professor Byleth,” Hubert said. “Your teaching has transformed Lady Edelgard into a tactical mastermind in only a few short months—the rumors about you, it seems, are true.” He dismounted and approached her. “Would you like me to take a look at your arm?”

“That’d be nice. Thanks.”

Despite Hubert’s praise, Edelgard dismounted and bowed contritely, realizing that her arrogance had once again reared its ugly head and she had disobeyed a direct order. “Professor, I apologize for refusing to follow your orders.”

“I think I can overlook it this time,” Byleth said, her faint smile interrupted by a pained wince as the burn on her shoulder faded away to clear skin under the green glow of a healing spell, “since you _did_ save my life. And thank you, Hubert. Are you thinking of transferring to the Blue Lions, too?”

Hubert shook his head and withdrew. “Not at all, Professor—the Black Eagles have lost too many students already—although if you keep putting Lady Edelgard in danger, I might have no choice.”

“Okay.” Byleth turned to Raphael and the archers. “Raphael, Ashe, Bernadetta, are any of you hurt?”

Raphael and Ashe shook their heads. “Um… I-I think I’m terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought,” Bernadetta said. “D-Does that count?”

“Sorry, but no,” Byleth said. “Felix, what about your arm?”

“It’s fine,” Felix grunted, pressing a bloodied hand to his shoulder. “Sylvain did a patch job on it—stopped the bleeding.”

“Next time, don’t try to fight the Death Knight at close range,” she scolded him, taking a look at the wound and applying healing magic to it to better knit together the muscles and tendons. “I’m going to add long-range offense to your curriculum.”

Felix rolled his eyes.

“Let’s hope there won’t be a ‘next time,’” Sylvain said. “I never want to fight that guy again.”

“You hardly did anything,” Felix scoffed.

“Yeah. Looks like I was too busy keeping your dumb ass from bleeding out. You’re welcome.”

“Sylvain, there’ll be time for arguing later,” Byleth said, cutting his and Felix’s spat short. “Let’s get to the bottom of that crater and see what the Death Knight was protecting. Felix, you stay behind and keep watch up here.”

Felix would have crossed his arms, but his left arm was still nearly immovable; even healing magic could only do so much in the field. “Fine,” he grunted.

“Raphael, stay with him and keep him company.”

“Sure thing!” Raphael rapped his knuckles together. “You can count on me, Professor! Any bad guys get near him, I’ll send ‘em flying.”

Irritated enough already, Felix buried his forehead in his hand.

Byleth turned to Edelgard. “Are you hurt?”

“I may have a few cracked ribs,” she admitted, “but—”

Byleth laid a hand on her chest and though it was most definitely not any sort of romantic gesture, the pulsating, warm flow of healing magic from her palm into her breast made her feel weak in the knees. Edelgard was close to swooning over her, draping herself in her strong arms, embracing her, pressing their bodies together to share more of that oh-so-coveted warmth—

She bit the inside of her cheek to keep those thoughts at bay. Now was not the time or the place to be overcome with romantic thoughts for another world’s Byleth.

Byleth pulled her hand away, and Edelgard felt her heart go with it. “Better now?” she asked.

It took Edelgard a while before she remembered how to speak. “Y-Yes, Professor. All better.”

“Professor, maybe if you kiss her boo-boos, they’ll heal even faster,” Sylvain teased her with a bawdy wink.

“That is completely and utterly unnecessary,” she blurted out as Byleth stared bemusedly at him.

“What’s a boo-boo?” Byleth asked, in all seriousness.

“Never mind,” Sylvain said. “Let’s go. Bottom of the crater, right?”

She nodded.

Edelgard glanced back over her shoulder into the woods where Ingrid had fallen, but pulled herself away and put her thoughts elsewhere. It would do her no good to ruminate on her classmate’s fate; whether she was alive or dead was not up to her anymore.

They carefully descended the wall of the crater, and at the bottom, hidden by a pile of debris that had collected near the center until the Death Knight had burst out of it, were the remnants of a tunnel buried under the earth, propped up with wooden supports lining the walls and ceiling like a mineshaft. Lanterns hung from the rafters, but the glow from within them was too steady and too coldly white to be from any normal sort of flame; black ropes crawled across the ceiling, snaking from one lantern to another and slipping into the shadows.

Those Who Slither in the Dark were living up to their name, Edelgard thought. Somehow, without anybody noticing, they had tunneled under Remire. How many months had they been digging without being noticed? Tunnels like this simply did not spring up overnight.

Before venturing into the shaft, Edelgard studied the rubble strewn about the crater one more time. There were chunks of stone there, she noticed, that did not match the masonry used in Remire’s simple, humble houses: wrecks of twisted metal protruding from soil and resting against rock, little bits and bobs here and there made of materials she couldn’t begin to describe. Those Who Slither, perhaps, had been housing some technological monstrosity beneath the village square; perhaps it had exploded and formed this crater.

“Everyone stick together,” Byleth said, leading the rest of the students into the tunnel. “We don’t know what we’ll find.”

“Maybe we’ll find more Death Knights,” Ashe said, a worried frown pinching his face.

“Maybe we should wait for the others to get back,” Bernadetta said.

Byleth pursed her lips thoughtfully and raised a hand to her forehead; Edelgard could tell she was weighing her options between finishing this quickly before Those Who Slither could induce another one of those debilitating headaches—or worse—or waiting for more backup.

Sothis appeared at her side, looking unusually pale and haggard. Apparently, ‘wounding the web of time’ did more damage to _her_ than it did to Byleth. She rubbed her temples wearily. “I am not typically an impatient person,” she said, “but if these strange people are inducing these awful migraines to do us harm, then we should destroy them before they get another chance.” She looked at Edelgard, and Edelgard wondered how much she must enjoy having somebody else who could see and hear her. “What do _you_ think?”

“It’s your call, Professor,” Edelgard said to Byleth. “I would suggest striking swiftly… but this could be a trap.”

Byleth nodded. “I’ll press onward,” she said. “You five will back me up. If it’s a trap, we’ll just fight our way out of it.”

“Would that I had your boundless optimism, Professor,” Hubert muttered. “Stay close to me, please, Lady Edelgard—for your own protection.”

The six of them descended below the ruins of Remire. Tunnels snaked under the village, it seemed, in a parody of its roads; the occasional shaft traveled upward to the surface, no doubt hidden under the mounds of rubble left behind from the humble houses that had once stood atop the ground.

“Something’s bothering me about the Death Knight,” Sylvain said, keeping his voice low as Byleth and her remaining students crept through the tunnels, sticking close to the shadows. “Something seems… familiar about him. And I’ve got the sneaking suspicion that he was pulling his punches. Like he was _toying_ with us.”

 _“That_ was toying with us?” Bernadetta said.

“I’m with Bernadetta,” Ashe said. “He seemed to want to kill us.”

“No, he took down the Golden Deer more handily, and they had their entire class,” Edelgard said.

“Right, you get it, Princess,” Sylvain replied, letting himself grin. “And think back to when we met the Hurricane King in the catacombs when Flayn went missing. The Death Knight told him to stand down. I get the feeling that for all his talk, he doesn’t want to kill us.”

“Ah, yes, he only wishes to horribly, grievously _maim_ us,” Hubert said. “That is much better.” He didn’t seem much more relieved.

Byleth stopped, silenced the students with her finger to her lips, then motioned Ashe and Bernadetta onward. Two arrows zipped quietly through the air; two short, sharp, quiet gurgling noises faintly penetrated the darkness. The class pressed onward, barely pausing to step over the bodies of two blue-clad soldiers who had been moments ago standing guard before the archers’ arrows had found their throats. Edelgard recognized their uniforms—the same armor and colors that had been worn by the Hurricane King’s soldiers in the catacombs months ago. Ashe looked down at the corpse he had made and winced, his lips puckering like he’d swallowed a lemon.

Beyond the guards was a well-lit cavern deep beneath the earth, its floor and walls lined with large tiles of smooth gray stone. Long panels embedded in the ceiling cast a harsh white light down on the chamber, illuminating a ring-shaped monument that stood in the center of the chamber. Esoteric machinery, tubes and copper coils and blinking lights, indescribable devices forged from burnished steel, clung to the ring around its outer edge, and coils of multicolored rope snaked out of it to rows of metal desks and glowing glass panels.

Around the ring, blue-clad soldiers mingled with black-cloaked mages. The mages all wore beaked black masks that hid their faces. Cold blue light illuminated the contours of their masks as they tapped on their glowing glass panels with gloved fingers. _“Those are the guys we saw in Zanado!”_ Sylvain hissed, pointing at them.

A mezzanine ran around half of the cavern, overlooking the ring and its attendants. A man in a warlock’s cloak and a brimmed, peaked hat, long decorative feathers lining his collar, placed his hands on the iron railing before him and scowled down at the mages. _“Hurry the fuck up! How many more tests do we need to run before we get it right?”_

 _“As many as it takes, Myson!”_ one of the mages shouted back.

 _“Well, it had better take just_ one _more run! How much time do you think those brats and Solon bought us?”_ he snarled, pointing at the mage who’d answered. _“Talk back again and I’ll march you into the arch next!”_ He pointed at one of the soldiers. _“You! Tell me you rigged those explosives like I told you to!”_

“Yes,” the soldier replied. “I rigged those explosives like you told me to.”

“I don’t get why we need to waste all this semtex,” another soldier piped up. “Can’t we just set the reactor to melt down or something?”

 _“Tokamaks don’t melt down! Didn’t they teach you_ anything _at Shambhala, or are you just another meathead they grew in a fucking tube?”_ Myson flung up his hands. _“Run another test for ten-thirteen seven-thirty-five, coordinates zero-zero, and get the fucking Y-value_ right _this time! I don’t want us having to scrape more bodies off the walls! We only need to do this right_ once _and then we can go home and blow this shit!”_

The air within the giant ring began to shimmer like heat-haze off a road in the desert, the wall behind it rippling and fluttering. Edelgard immediately felt her jaw clench. It was as though her teeth and eyes were vibrating in her skull.

 _“That is it,”_ Sothis gasped, her translucent form flickering as she hovered over Byleth’s shoulder. _“That horrid monument—I am sure of it! We must destroy it!”_

Byleth bared her blade, the Sword of the Creator blazing to life in her hand. _“Take them down!”_ she commanded her students, and Edelgard was pleased to oblige.

The Blue Lions’ attack was swift enough that at first, Those Who Slither had no recourse against it. Edelgard’s axe found purchase between two plates of a soldier’s armor, cutting to the bone, slicking the smooth stone floor with blood. Arrows flew through the air. Ice and fire ripped through the air, puncturing armor and leaving scorch marks on the ground. The blade of the Sword of the Creator whipped through the air, a fiery arc lashing across stone and steel.

Though the battle was one-sided at first, it did not last. The soldiers and mages rallied around the ring, mounting their defense as the shimmering air within it turned luminous and became a curtain of shimmering white light. A low, thrumming hum filled the air, and Edelgard could feel the vibrations ringing in her bones, in her axe, in her muscles. She wondered how long this could go on, as the vibrations became stronger and stronger, before every part of her body was as tender as a slow-cooked cut of meat.

In the struggle, the axe slipped from Edelgard’s hand—or perhaps it broke—she couldn’t tell—sights and sounds she didn’t recognize crept into her eyes and ears, blinding her, deafening her. Battlefields that never were—Kingdom troops surging through Enbarr, no, Alliance troops, no, an army bearing the Crest of Flames—bone and muscle cleaved by Aymr at Gronder Field—the Sword of the Creator clashing with the Sword of Seiros, crossed blades framing Byleth’s face—her siblings’ faces staring up at her from the darkness—the Flame Emperor’s mask staring up at her from the floor as Dimitri’s boot crushed it into fragments—

She pushed it all aside and forced herself to focus on the present, the here and now, the enemy in front of her, moving by instinct alone when the need arose. The persistent flood of illusions to her mind fought against her senses, delusion vying for supremacy against reality, as the low hum built to a high-pitched whine.

 _“Now, Saturnalia!”_ Myson shouted out. _“No_ time _like the present! Chop-chop!”_

Edelgard found herself inches away from the shimmering curtain, disarmed, barehanded, grappling with one of the blue-clad soldiers, struggling to push his dagger away from her throat. Her boots skidded across the floor, the heat of the pulsating field of white light behind her shifted to the side as she dug her heels in and fought off her assailant. She felt the fluttering white aura curl her hair with its radiant heat—

A vision flashed through her head as sudden as it was violent, visceral in sight, scent, taste, touch—like a second, secret world beholden only to her, she saw, heard, _felt_ a cacophony of experience overlaid over herself—a dagger with an ornate golden hilt grinding against steel, gripped tightly in her hand, the soldier forcing her backward, an intense and prickling heat engulfing her arm as she was forced partway into the portal, a sickening squelch and crunch as bone and sinew tore away from her shoulder and ripped her right arm asunder—

A concussive blast of ice knocked the soldier inside and he plummeted into the light, swallowed up in its radiance as though he’d fallen down a hole. The edge of his dagger nicked a shallow gash against her throat before slipping away and vanishing into the vast white abyss.

Edelgard’s head pounded as though it was splitting in two. She fell back, collapsing to the floor as hot blood poured into her armor and soaked into her clothes, the thick metallic scent stinging her nostrils.

 _“Lady Edelgard!”_ Hubert cried out, rushing to her side and helping her up. “Lady Edelgard, speak to me—”

“My arm,” she choked out, dazed, barely able to think of anything else but the searing, screaming agony of ripped flesh and shattered bone. The world swirled in sickening shades of gray around her, pulsating with every beat of her heart as blood gushed from her severed shoulder. “My arm,” she gasped again, each beat of her heart forcing the air from her lungs just as it forced the blood from her body. The reality of her mutilation hammered itself into her head; the reality that she had been torn apart, that this body had been irrevocably and irreversibly altered and wounded in a way that made all of the torture she had endured in her life pale in comparison. _“My arm,_ Hubert, I’ve lost—”

Zanado returned to her mind. The ancient dagger weathered by the elements resting in the sallow grasses of the ruins, the long-since rotted-away arm that had grasped it with skeletal fingers—that had indeed been _her_ dagger… and it had been _her_ arm clutching it.

The piercing hum fluttering in the air stuttered, stopped for a second, and grew into a whistling howl.

The metal ring in the center of the room shuddered and the curtain of white light hanging within it began to shudder and convulse. Sparks flew from the wires and byzantine metal contraptions coiled around the ring’s outer edge, and the curtain rippled like a disturbed pond before bubbling and roiling like boiling water. It writhed as though in agony, shafts of light hardened into solid spears bursting from its surface and gouging holes in the walls, floor, and ceiling where they landed. The world around the metal ring began to ripple and swirl and stretch, distorting itself like light refracted through water. Metal and stone seemed to flow like water swirling down a drain.

Hubert dragged Edelgard away as she struggled to regain her bearings, watching the world around her smear itself and flow like oil paints in water. Tendrils of light sprouted from the luminous curtain, which had now become a whirling vortex; the light clung to her, curling around her, grasping at her skin with a stinging, feathery touch. Hubert faltered, but before he could lose his grip on Edelgard, Sylvain and Byleth darted out and grabbed them both, hauling them away; the luminous tendrils loosened their grip and retreated back into the vortex.

 _“Oh, fuck this,”_ Myson grumbled from atop the mezzanine, clutching his hat tightly as a mighty wind began to blow throughout the room and into the heart of the vortex. _“Abort the test run! Set off the explosives!”_ he shouted out at whoever was left to hear his orders before vanishing in a column of red light. The luminous vortex swallowed up the last traces of the sparks he left in his wake.

The Blue Lions huddled at the far end of the cavern, bracing themselves behind one of the metal desks as the wind rushing past them tugged on their clothes, their hair, their skin—any stronger and it would start dragging them into the maelstrom, and it was growing stronger by the second.

“You two alright?” Byleth asked Edelgard and Hubert.

 _“I’ve lost my arm,”_ Edelgard repeated, still in shock. _“I’ve lost—”_

With a puzzled furrow of her brow, Byleth took her by her wrists and lifted both of her hands into the air—both hands, completely intact. Edelgard was speechless. She’d heard, seen, and _felt_ her arm rip itself out of her socket, and yet there it was.

“Time itself is weeping,” Sothis moaned, her translucent form flickering and rippling. Her skin was ashen, her eyelids heavy over her eyes. “What was, what is, what may be, what can never be—What have these monsters _done?”_

“Can we leave now?” Bernadetta asked, straining her voice to be heard over the wind.

“I’m with Bernie,” Sylvain said. “Can we leave now, Professor?”

A black-cloaked mage crawled out from behind another one of the metal desks, digging his fingers into the floor so desperately that blood seeped through his gloves from pried-out fingernails as the vortex tried hungrily to claim him. Hubert readied an ice spell; Ashe aimed an arrow at him; but the mage held up one hand in an offering of peace.

 _“Stop!”_ he cried out. _“I’m not your enemy. That thing—”_ He pointed to the ring. The distortion around it had spread; the tip of his finger smeared across the air like a daub of wet paint across a canvas. _“It has to be destroyed! There’s been a localized causality violation and the Dirac tidal surge is causing a temporal resonance cascade!”_ None of that meant anything to Edelgard, and it meant even less to everyone else. The howling sound of wind being sucked into the radiant vortex swallowed his words.

 _“What does that mean?”_ Byleth called out.

_“It’s bad!”_

Sothis’ intangible fingers bit into Byleth’s shoulder. _“This one speaks the truth,”_ she told her, spitting the words through gritted teeth. _“This_ is, _in fact, bad!”_ Of course, Sothis the Time-Child understood what all that meaningless jargon spewing from the mage’s hidden mouth meant, although it didn’t quite take that level of knowledge to know that what was happening here was, in fact, bad.

 _“Why are you helping us?”_ Sylvain asked the mage.

 _“Because I don’t want to never have been born!”_ He gestured to the vortex again. _“There are explosives throughout the facility! We just need to set off one of them on a timer and the whole place will blow up!”_

 _“Uh-huh. And that’s_ good?”

 _“Look, do you primitive apes_ enjoy _linear time or not? No wonder Solon wants to cull you idiots!”_ The mage glanced at the vortex. _“All I have to do is press a button and crank a knob! That’ll give us five minutes to get out! Provided I don’t, uh, fall in.”_

 _“What happens if you fall in?”_ Bernadetta asked, her mousy voice nearly inaudible.

_“You die, probably. Or worse.”_

_“I’ve got an idea!”_ Ashe spoke up, struggling to keep his wind-whipped hair out of his eyes. _“Professor, if you extend your blade and tie it around both of us, and we form a sort of human chain, we can set off the thing and then you can pull us back!”_

Byleth looked to Sothis, who was so translucent as to be almost invisible.

 _“Anything,”_ Sothis whimpered, _“to stop this… crime against nature!”_

She nodded. _“Alright! Ashe, I’m going to hand the edge of the blade to you! Keep your grip on the wire running through the segments so you don’t cut your hand and hold onto the mage! Tug twice on the blade when you’re ready to be pulled up! Sylvain, Edelgard, you two are the strongest people here, so be prepared to pull me back if the vortex gets stronger and tries to drag me in!”_

 _“Yes, Professor!”_ Edelgard said, taking Byleth by one arm as Sylvain took the other. Byleth extended the blade; Ashe grabbed hold of it with one hand, wrapped his other arm around the mage’s waist and hooked his fingers into his belt loops, and began to approach the vortex. The distortion of light around it had grown so strong and so wide-reaching that after two steps, his and the mage’s forms were reduced to that of a wavering black and blue smear that spread farther and farther with each step. Edelgard kept a close eye on the rest of the length of the Sword of the Creator spooled on the ground at Byleth’s feet, watching it snake out, segment by segment, link by link…

 _“If I fall in or something,”_ the mage said to Ashe, his voice growing quieter with distance as the wind overwhelmed it, _“feel around the base of the arch for the timer—it’s round and has little notches in the sides—and give it half of a clockwise crank with your wrist, then feel for the button and… do you know what a button is?”_

The wind picked up; there was a seismic shift in the room; suddenly, the floor pitched wildly downward at a steep angle and the Sword of the Creator went completely taut, its sharp segmented blade jangling like an iron chain. Byleth braced herself against the desk and tightened her grip on her sword.

 _“I don’t wanna die,”_ Bernadetta whimpered, grabbing Sylvain by the legs. _“I don’t wanna die…”_

Hubert wrapped his arm around Edelgard’s waist and grabbed onto the side of the desk, throwing his arm across Byleth’s chest to secure her. _“Lady Edelgard,”_ he whispered in her ear, _“you have my word that should I lose my grip on you and you plummet to your certain demise, I shall throw myself in after you.”_

_“Thank you, Hubert.”_

_“Bernie, if we don’t make it out of here,”_ Sylvain said, his voice wavering, _“I… I just wanna say… I accidentally read that story you were writing and really liked it, and I’m sorry, but can you please tell me how it’s gonna end?”_

 _“You read my story?”_ Bernadetta shrieked, reflexively letting go of him. The wind and the shifting gravity seized her immediately and she began to fall sideways across the room.

 _“Bernie!”_ Edelgard shouted out, flinging out her hand without thinking and catching her by the wrist. Bernadette hung over the edge of the distortion, the colors of her dangling legs bleeding into the maelstrom.

 _“I’m sorry!”_ Sylvain shouted out. _“I have to know! Do Ephraim and Eirika ever meet up again? Do they stop Emperor Vigarde?”_

 _“Of course they do!”_ Bernadetta shouted back. _“Of course the heroes win in the end—that’s how stories_ work! _I can’t believe you—How could you—How could you look in a girl’s private diary? That’s creepy! You’re—You’re a creep!”_

 _“I know!”_ Sylvain wailed. _“I didn’t mean it! It just fell open and—and you’re a brilliant writer, Bernie! You’re amazing! I’ve read professional books written by real writers and your stuff is a lot better! I want to spend the rest of my life reading your stories! Even if the rest of my life is only five minutes!”_

 _“Y—You… You_ do?”

_“Yes! Bernie, I love you!”_

The look on Bernadetta’s face was halfway between abject terror, utter embarrassment, and faint revulsion. _“Wh—What kind of a prank is_ this? _How could you say something so cruel? You’re just saying that because you expect me to die here, don’t you? Well, then, m-maybe I will! Lady Edelgard, please let go of me!”_

Edelgard shook her head and hauled Bernadetta back behind the makeshift barricade. _“Now is_ not _the time for this!”_ she scolded the two of them, her voice already hoarse from having to shout over the howling wind.

 _“Now might be the_ last _time for this!”_ Sylvain retorted. She’d never seen him so panicky. The wind was plucking tears right out of his eyes.

The Sword of the Creator jolted twice. _“They’re done!”_ Byleth shouted out. _“I can’t retract the blade while Ashe is holding it—help me reel him in!”_

Edelgard and Sylvain kept their grip on her and helped her pull the blade in, the thin wire connecting each segment of the blade digging into her hands. The wind whipped at her hair, blinding her. She spat a lock of it out of her mouth. The vortex grew hungrier, angrier, the floor pitched farther downward. Any more and it would be a sheer vertical cliff. The blue and silver blur at the end of the blade gradually began to coalesce, bit by bit solidifying into a human shape; details began to form on his face and clothes, slowly but surely…

 _“Almost there…”_ Byleth grunted, steadying herself and digging in her heels. _“Almost there…”_

With hand over hand pulling him up the length of the Sword of the Creator, Ashe emerged from the luminous vortex, his face pallid and beaded with sweat, his eyes wide, his chest heaving, his hair thoroughly mussed and disheveled. Blood soaked his hands where the wire had cut into his palms. The mage followed behind him, his mask torn off to reveal a pale face with pure white eyes. _“We did it!”_ he cried out.

 _“Great work, Ashe!”_ Sylvain cheered, offering him his hand. _“Grab on, I’ll pull you up!”_

A wide, relieved smile crossed Ashe’s face as he lifted one hand from the blade and took Sylvain’s. _“Sylvain,”_ he gasped, _“I’ve never been so happy to see you—”_

His palm, slicked with blood, slid right off of Sylvain’s; at the same time, his other hand slid back and sliced itself on one of the sword’s bladed segments; with nothing to anchor him, he began to fall back into the maelstrom. He careened into the mage, knocking him down, and the two of them fell together.

For the first time in a long, long time, Edelgard saw her professor’s eyes widen in fear and shock—and _horror._ _“Sothis,”_ she gasped through gritted teeth, _“please!”_

The world froze, the maelstrom and shifting lights of the luminous vortex caught as though trapped in a painting. Sothis’ translucent body flickered and shimmered at Byleth’s side, and as Edelgard felt her body and mind burst into flames, the wheel of time began to spin backward. Showers of sparks falling to the floor retracted into the machinery that had belched them out. Ashe’s body emerged from the luminous vortex, refracted by the bending rays of light a thousandfold into streaks of blue and silver that slowly came together as the reversed flow of time drew him farther and farther from the distortion. The abject terror written on his face, in the anguished gape of his jaw and the wideness of his eyes, was frozen in time for a moment.

And then it all ground to a halt. Edelgard felt as though a thousand hammers had pounded a thousand nails into her skull, ripping through her brain, pulverizing bone and shredding flesh.

Time surged forward. Light and color tore themselves apart. Ashe—

 _“Ashe!”_ she cried out, trying one last time to grab him before he slipped away. As the tips of her fingers brushed ever so slightly against his, her mind’s eye forced her to relive the sight of the entombed men at Zanado—the men fused to the stone and begging for death, the ones long since rotted away who’d withered and wasted in the sun and rain and snow. In her mind’s eye, she saw Ashe, saw his kind, freckled face withered to leather by the beating sun, eaten by birds and bugs and rats, picked clean until only bone remained—a skull stripped of all identifying features, reduced to a monument of an unknown and unknowable life.

_You die, probably. Or worse._

The world became a blinding white.

Edelgard came to and found herself sitting at a table on the balcony overlooking the grounds of the Imperial Palace. The sky was blue, clear, and cold, the air brisk and crisp. There was a cup of tea sitting on the table in front of her, the steam rising from its warm amber surface carrying the rich citric aroma of bergamot to her nostrils.

She was entertaining guests today. Across from her at the circular table, Petra politely sipped her tea, the sunlight dancing off her bronzed brown skin and the ornate magenta tattoos accentuating her face and bare shoulders and making the gold and polished bead bracelets and necklaces adorning her arms and chest sparkle and gleam. Her mane of ornately braided hair flowed down her shoulder like a waterfall. She looked every part the Queen of Brigid. Dorothea was standing behind her, a few experimental braids tied into the luscious waves of her brown hair and a sumptuous red dress clinging to every curve of her body, her green eyes sparkling like jewels in the autumn sunlight. Her warm, pale hands gently slipped across Petra’s shoulders and kneaded her gleaming flesh.

Ashe sat at Petra’s side, blowing on his tea to cool it. He’d grown into a handsome man in this world, though the band of freckles across his nose still gave him a boyish demeanor. His time in Brigid had tanned his skin, but that had only served to further multiply the freckles on his cheeks. His silver hair was shorter now, combed straight and kept out of his eyes, which seemed to still possess all the brightness and innocence of his youth in spite of the trials of war.

Edelgard could only absorb what she saw with her eyes, not processing a single word any of her three guests said to her as they talked and sipped their tea. Not a single thought came to her head. She merely sat there, dazed, a prisoner in her own body, while the other Edelgard talked and laughed and drank for her. At least _she_ was having fun.

In another world, she had just watched Ashe slip from her fingers forever. And he sat here before her, alive and well, happy, content; but in the other world, none of his friends would ever see him again. He would never help Dedue cook the meals of his homeland. He would never trade books about history and legends and chivalrous knights with Ingrid. He would never put up with another one of Sylvain’s snide comments about his naive view of knighthood. He would join his mother, his father, Lonato, and Christophe in whatever oblivion lay beyond the veil of death.

Edelgard had lost Randolph and almost lost Ladislava in the war. She had personally written letters of condolences to thousands of families of the soldiers who had died in battle. She had lost battles, she had retreated, she had sacrificed men and women for her cause, she had seen innocents fall into the path of the war machine, caught between two intractable armies and crushed by one side or the other or both. Good people had died because they had fought for her; good people had died because they had stood in her way. But in five and a half years of warfare, she had _never_ lost a classmate—never lost a single one of the Black Eagles Strike Force. She had prided herself on that. That although losses were inevitable, she had kept those closest to her and dearest to her safe just as she had been unable to do as a child. She had kept her new family safe in memory of her old family. She had kept them all safe, just as Byleth always had.

But now she had lost, and it was as though one of her brothers or sisters had died all over again. She felt hollow inside, empty, thin-shelled, like a delicate vase.

She lacked the presence of mind or strength of will to wrest control of her body from the other Edelgard, so she was beholden to every turn of her head or wandering fancy of her eye that took her gaze off of Ashe’s face, and so for the first time in her life she found herself irritated that she kept finding herself staring at Petra’s toned and gleaming biceps.

The lenses of Petra’s glasses—she had _glasses_ now, Edelgard realized, and she was thankful for it, because she’d noticed her squinting quite a lot at the wedding—caught the sunlight and shimmered as she tilted her head back and looked up at Dorothea. “You are enjoying yourself, yes?” she asked as Dorothea draped herself over her shoulders and planted a kiss on her forehead, the hands gently kneading her shoulders slipping down to the contours of her collarbone.

“Yes, very much so,” Dorothea said. She shot a teasing, flirtatious smile and a flutter of her eyelashes at Ashe before locking eyes with Petra again. “So, how worried should I be about a strong, tall, handsome knight sweeping you off your feet and stealing you away from me?”

Ashe let out a bashful laugh, his cheeks flushing red and his freckles darkening, and reflexively hunched his shoulders a bit to diminish himself. “M-Me? I’m not interested in coming between you two at all,” he assured her and Petra, his words stumbling over his tongue on their way past his lips.

“You should not have worry,” Petra assured Dorothea, reaching up and patting her gently on the cheek. “I am yours, Dorothea, but my heart is being large enough for all of us. To be having a husband _and_ a wife is not uncommon in Brigid… if the two of you are being okay with that.”

While a flustered Ashe sputtered and fidgeted nervously with the cuffs of his jacket, the other Edelgard laughed—which Edelgard was thankful for, because in any other circumstance _she_ herself would have happily laughed along as well, but that was more than she could bear right now. The other Edelgard’s happiness was distant to her, like a voice muffled under a heavy blanket or a lantern with a cloth thrown over it.

She had just lost a friend she had known and fought alongside for six years, and now here he was, sitting in front of her, sipping tea without a care in the world.

Edelgard rose to her feet under her own power, though she was hardly aware that she was doing it at first, and found herself walking around the table toward him. He noticed her coming and, bemused, rose to his full height out of respect (he was about half a head taller than her—she had forgotten how _tall_ he was now).

“Lady Edelgard,” he asked, looking down at her, “is something wrong?”

Edelgard blinked the mist away from her eyes and lifted her hand, looking up at him and meeting his pale green eyes as the light caught them—green like green apples, like young grass—and rested her hand on his cheek, knowing that she and the people in this world could have this privilege, but no one else in the other world ever would.

Dorothea and Petra disentangled themselves from each other and circled the table toward her. “Edie,” Dorothea asked, laying a hand on her back, “what’s the matter?”

“Your Majesty,” Ashe said, his nervous smile pulling downward into a concerned frown, “Edelgard, why are you crying?”

The other Edelgard blinked, and as the other world took hold of Edelgard and dragged her away from her body, she answered, “I don’t know—”

When Edelgard came to, she found herself staring up at a cold gray sky, cold snowflakes settling gently on her face and chilling her skin. Even the birds no longer chirped now; the only sound she could hear was the quiet and distant sound of weeping. Hubert was kneeling over her, stripped down to his shirt and trousers, and she realized that the soft thing underneath her was a makeshift blanket made from his mage’s robes.

“Lady Edelgard,” he asked urgently, breathlessly, his face wracked with concern, “are you hurt?”

She shook her head, ignoring her aches and pains. Her head still throbbed.

Dimitri knelt at her side. His armor was scuffed and stained with mud and dusted with melting snow, and little bits of twigs had gotten tangled up in his white hair. There was still an angry furrow in his brow, but it was tempered with worry, and his eyes were rimmed with red. “Edelgard…” He took a deep breath through his nose, letting his eyes fall closed as his chest rose and fell. “I am glad you are safe.”

“Ashe. Is he…”

Hubert’s face fell. She’d never seen him look so concerned for someone other than her. He shook his head, and that was enough.

She fought back the tears welling up in her eyes. “Ingrid. What about her?” She sat up and wiped her eyes on her sleeve, ignoring the painful crick in her neck. The ruins of Remire had been reduced to a massive pit, an open wound in the earth that left no traces of civilization behind, and she and the remainder of her class were strewn around its edge. Dimitri and Dedue had both returned from their hunt for Solon, but Ingrid and the students who’d gone out with Jeralt to recover her were nowhere to be seen.

Dimitri’s pained expression worsened. His guilt must have been tearing him apart—to see his partnership with Those Who Slither cause not only the wholesale slaughter of an entire village of innocent people, but claim the life of a classmate and possibly one of his childhood friends as well, was more than even Edelgard had dealt with. At least she had known those monsters for what they were; he had thought they were his _allies._ She couldn’t have thought of a more nightmarish way to disabuse him of that notion.

“She did fall quite far from the village,” Hubert said, offering some small consolation to him and Edelgard. “It might have taken some time for Captain Jeralt to reach her. There is still a chance, however slim, that she survived.”

In fact, it was not long before Jeralt emerged from the forest with the still-unconscious captured beast-rider slung over his shoulder and Ingrid cradled in his arms. Ingrid’s eyes were dull and weary under half-closed eyelids; a ragged bandage was wrapped around her head, covered in blossoms of dried blood; her straw-gold hair hung in bloodied, matted, snarled clots; one of her legs was bound in a makeshift splint put together from ragged strips of cloth from the hem of Annette’s robes and a long, straight length of a tree branch. Annette and Ignatz flanked the two of them on Jeralt’s horse, blood staining their hands and spattering their clothes; Edelgard assumed that Ingrid’s poor pegasus had been beyond saving.

“Don’t worry, Byleth,” Jeralt called out. “We got your kid. She’s a little banged up and out of it, but she’ll live. What the hell happened over here—”

His voice faltered when he saw his daughter.

Byleth knelt in the snow, one hand pressed against her face, her shoulders quaking, tears streaming down her cheeks, tiny muffled whimpers escaping her mouth. Sothis hovered beside her, forlorn, her small, intangible hands resting atop her shoulders to offer what could not have been any meaningful form of comfort.

The furrow of Jeralt’s brow was not only concerned but _fearful,_ for he was seeing something he had never seen in all his life. Even as a baby, Byleth had never once cried.

He carefully handed Ingrid to the others and rushed to his daughter’s side, but as he knelt beside her, his movements slowed and became careful and apprehensive; his hand only hovered over his shoulder. He had never dealt with such an explosive display of emotion from his daughter; as a father, he’d grown accustomed to her reserved demeanor and in this situation found his unique experiences to be woefully inadequate.

“Kid,” he asked her in a low voice. “Uh… Byleth, kiddo. Don’t cry.” Edelgard could tell that he’d never had to say that before. “Don’t—I mean, it’s alright. Your dad’s here. Don’t cry. What’s wrong? What happened?”

Ingrid tried to take a few staggering steps by herself as Ignatz and Annette steadied her. She looked around at the gathered class. “Professor,” she asked, her voice hoarse and weak, “where’s Ashe?”

Byleth didn’t answer her, and as it usually did, her silence said enough.


	15. By His Bootstraps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Blue Lions deal with the aftermath of their classmate's untimely death.

It was uncommon, but not unheard of, for students at Garreg Mach to die. Professors and Knights of Seiros, no matter how seasoned, couldn’t be everywhere at once and healing magic could only do so much; it was only to be expected when students were sent out all across Fódlan like mercenaries under the employ of the Church that one would not return and, quite frankly, the fact that fewer than one student died or went missing per year on average was the kind of miracle that might make one believe in the Goddess. The year that Edelgard had originally attended the academy had been an auspicious one in that respect, even taking into account the machinations of Those Who Slither in the Dark—at least, it had been until Edelgard had declared war and marched her army to the monastery.

Keeping that perspective in mind did not help the Blue Lions much.

Edelgard spent that evening in the infirmary, waiting for the lingering traces of healing magic burrowing through her flesh exorcise the dull aches and sharp pains from her body, knit together cracked bones, and soothe bruised muscles. But there was nothing Professor Manuela’s finely honed medical skills could do about the emptiness that ached in her heart and the writhing void in her stomach.

Ingrid lay unconscious on a cot beside her, stripped down and swathed with bandages, splints holding her limbs straight and her bones set; she was lucky to have survived the fall with only so many broken bones. Felix lay awake, his arm cast and bound in a sling, but said and did nothing save for releasing the occasional grumpy sigh.

And in the corner of the infirmary lay the mysterious beast-rider, stripped of his horse-skull helmet and furs to reveal his true identity—Hapi, the fey and quiet animal-lover who had trailed behind Cornelia more like a servant than the adopted daughter Mercedes had claimed she was (“I’ll have to send for Cornelia again,” Manuela murmured. “Looks like she’s missing a kid.”). Seeing her face under the mask confirmed for Edelgard what she’d started to suspect about the Death Knight’s identity.

Beyond all reason, beyond all sensibility, _Mercedes herself_ was the Death Knight. Edelgard berated herself for not having seen it sooner, but Mercedes’ frailty had seemingly ruled her out as a suspect early on. The armor she wore must have been heavily augmented with Agarthan technology to keep her condition stable.

Three visitors came to the infirmary. First was Lord Rodrigue Fraldarius _—Thales—_ with Glenn trailing behind him. Glenn looked impossibly cheery; those changelings had never been particularly good at or willing to hide their utter contempt for human norms up to and including mourning other peoples’ deaths.

“Felix,” Rodrigue said, his voice heavy with a practiced, but still utterly false sorrow, “I have heard of what happened, and I am—”

“Let me guess,” Felix grunted, turning his head to stare pointedly at the wall. “You’re so proud that Ashe died like a true knight. Well, ask Edelgard about it. She was there. I’m sure she’ll tell you all about how noble and heroic he was in his last moments.”

A quirk of Rodrigue’s lips betrayed his irritation. His eyes darted toward Edelgard, who felt a chill run up her spine, and fixed themselves back on Felix. “I am glad that you are alive, my son. The Death Knight, I hear, is a particularly formidable foe.”

“Hmph. Next time I meet him I’ll try to die properly,” he muttered sarcastically.

Rodrigue looked to Edelgard. “Princess Edelgard, how exactly _did_ poor Ashe die?”

“He fell,” Edelgard said. “We didn’t catch him. That’s all I can say.”

“Excuse me, Lord Fraldarius,” Manuela spoke up. “Can you please not interrogate my patients? They’re traumatized.” She stood up, arching her back to better draw attention to her already quite-visible and ample bosom like a bird showing off its plumage. “I’d be happy to tell you what I know over dinner… and perhaps a few drinks.”

Edelgard wished she could warn her that she was hitting on a wrinkly, pasty-faced mole person who tortured children.

Rodrigue gave her a very fake smile. “Perhaps. I will leave your patients alone, Professor,” he said with a contrite bow. “Come, Glenn. I am sure Felix will be in higher spirits in the morning.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Felix called out as Rodrigue turned his back on him and left.

The next visitor, whom Edelgard was far happier to see (though that said little), was Ferdinand. As usual, not a single piece of finery on his uniform was out of place and his fiery hair was perfectly combed and parted, but the hangdog frown on his face and downcast look on his eyes didn’t match his immaculate appearance.

“Professor Manuela,” he asked, offering her a polite little bow, “may I speak to Lady Edelgard?”

“Finally, someone asks for permission. Go ahead, Ferdinand.”

He knelt at Edelgard’s side. “I… I heard everything from Hubert,” he said, reaching out and allowing his hand to hover just over hers. His voice was low and soft, as though he were speaking to calm a spooked horse. “I am so… _dreadfully_ sorry. I ought to have accompanied you. Perhaps that would have made a difference.”

“Perhaps.”

He sighed. “Are you… okay?”

Edelgard shook her head. “I feel… hollow.”

“You have grown quite close to your friends in the Blue Lions. I can scarcely imagine how you must feel. But I promise to you, dear, that I am here for you if you need me.”

Edelgard reflexively pulled her hand away from his. His little terms of endearment, minor as they were, only served to remind her that this Ferdinand was practically a stranger to her.

Ferdinand looked hurt. “Edelgard,” he said, his hand still searching for hers, “I know that our engagement is strictly political; I know there is nothing else between us, nor do I expect there to be. But we do not have to love each other to care for each other, and as your future husband, I want nothing more than to care for you in your time of need.”

She relented and let him rest his hand atop hers, letting the pressure and warmth of his skin bleed through the soft, fine white silk of his gloves. As far as a gesture from a stranger went, it wasn’t so bad. The Ferdinand she knew probably would have dared to do the same thing.

“It must be quite different when a person passes away,” he said. “I cannot quite say, but I remember when we were little and that pet fancy rat of yours passed, and you could not stop bawling your eyes out for days… Do you remember?”

Edelgard shook her head. “It was a long time ago,” she said, not willing to dwell on the thought that her counterpart had a fondness for rats. “And yes… it is. It’s a sorrow your heart almost can’t contain—so overwhelming that you just turn numb.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“No, I can manage this on my own. Look after Hubert. I think he needs you more than I do.”

“Are you sure?” Ferdinand asked, furrowing his brow.

“I think I just need some time alone.”

“It is late, but I can bring you dinner—”

“Thank you, but that won’t be necessary.”

“I see.” He stood up and prepared to leave. “Well… I will be here for you if you need me.”

The third visitor, who nearly bumped into Ferdinand on his way out, was Captain Jeralt, followed closely by Shamir. “Professor Manuela,” he asked, curt and gruff as always, “how are Byleth’s kids?”

“Your kid’s kids are fine, Captain,” Manuela said. “Felix is as ornery as he always is, so it seems he’s on the mend.”

Felix pretended not to hear that.

“As for Ingrid, she’s lucky you and Annette found her as soon as you did. A few minutes too late and she would’ve probably ended up a vegetable for the rest of her life. Edelgard got off lightly—it’ll take the evening for her ribs to heal up, and then she’ll be fine.”

Jeralt nodded. “And what about that beast-rider? What’s his deal?”

_“Her_ deal, first of all,” Manuela said, glancing at Hapi. “She was unconscious when you found her, right? Unless her skull’s cracked like an egg and her brains have all leaked out, something unnatural must be in play.”

Jeralt cringed. “That’s… a thing that can happen?”

As the knights talked with Manuela, Edelgard found herself staring out the window of the infirmary. There was nothing to see. Night had long since fallen, and the waning moon cast little light on the snow that covered the academy grounds. All that stood out to her were tiny pinpricks of light from the windows of the dormitories and the few lanterns that kept the monastery’s paths lit at night. A few of the lights moved slowly and purposefully, tracing the patterns of the knights patrolling the grounds.

“She might have used some sort of dark magic to place herself in a coma. Awake or not, though, I don’t think you’ll get many answers out of her. She’s not much of a talker, or so Cornelia says.”

“One way or another, the Knights of Seiros will get something out of her,” Shamir spoke up. “Rhea’s in a bad mood. She wants answers.”

Edelgard, who knew better than anyone what Rhea in a bad mood looked like—giant, scaly, with fangs and talons each the size of full-grown men—made a mental note to keep her distance from the archbishop come hell or high water.

Manuela laughed. “Sure, but all you’ll get out of her until she wakes up is blood. Patience.”

“Fair enough. Thanks for the update,” Jeralt said. “Do you mind if I have a word with the princess?”

“Sure,” Manuela said.

“Go back to your patrol route,” he told Shamir. “I’ll be joining you shortly.” As Shamir left, he took to the side of Edelgard’s cot and offered her a deferential bow. “Your Highness.”

Edelgard looked up at him. He was weary, his face careworn. A few new nicks and scratches crossed his battle-hardened face, some from the claws of beasts, some from the naked branches of the trees in the woods. “Captain Jeralt. It’s a pleasure to see you.”

“It’s good to see you, too.”

“How is Professor Byleth?”

“Right to the point, huh? Of course. That’s what I’m here to talk to you about.” He crouched down on one knee, lowering himself down to her level until their eyes met. “Physically, she’s fine. But the poor girl’s still, uh… you know. I’m… at a loss, honestly.”

“I see. I can’t imagine she’ll go right back to teaching tomorrow.”

“No, not in the shape she’s in. Alois, Shamir, and I are gonna draw straws to see who fills in for her.” He sighed. “I don’t get it, though. She’s seen people die before. And not just the guys who were _supposed_ to die. Kids, too. It’s never affected her before. But she’s gotten a lot less… flat, I guess, since she came here, so…

“I guess I don’t understand,” he said, shaking his head. “It was hard enough understanding her when she was a kid, but I got a handle on her. Took a while, but I figured out what made her tick. And now she’s different, and I’m back at square one. Sorry—I don’t mean to bother you with dad talk.”

“It’s fine,” Edelgard said. “For better and for worse, your daughter blossoms here. For the first time, she finds true happiness… and true heartbreak.”

Jeralt looked over his shoulder to make sure Manuela was busy and lowered his voice, leaning in closer. “This happened in your future, too, huh?”

“Not like this. Not _anything_ like this. It wasn’t Ashe who died in my world. But Byleth… was devastated all the same.”

“And you were there for her, huh?”

Edelgard had, in fact, _not_ been there for her. “Yes,” she lied.

“Can you talk to her tomorrow? I was probably just as ill-suited to help her through this in your world as I am here. But you probably know exactly what to say to her, huh?”

Edelgard tried not to let her lingering guilt show visibly on her face. She was quite practiced at it, though sometimes things slipped through. “Yes, I’d be happy to talk to her.”

“Ah, thanks.” Jeralt let out a relieved sigh that broke into a self-effacing chuckle. “What a dad I am, huh? Gotta have my future daughter-in-law do my job for me.”

“You’ll learn.”

“Speaking of the future, though…” His tone darkened and the soft, vulnerable cast to his scruffy, stony face turned hard and serious. “This Solon guy… Tomas… your buddy Claude had me bring that weird box from his study to him, and the very next day, _this_ happens. I can’t help but see a connection—like this was retaliation. You have any idea who these guys are? And if they’ve got any other allies hiding in the monastery?”

Edelgard glanced at Felix as he restlessly tapped his fingers against the cast around his arm and let her voice fall to even more of a whisper. “Yes, Solon has other allies.”

“When you were drunk, you told me to stay away from Glenn. Is he one of these creeps, too?”

“Rodrigue as well. Now that Solon’s been compromised, I can’t imagine either of them sticking around the monastery much longer… but if we try to openly go against them, I can’t imagine how they’ll retaliate, either. This future is shaping up to be far different from my own… and far more disturbing. There’s no use in me trying to predict anything from here on out.”

Jeralt’s visage grew grimmer, the furrow of his brow darkening his eyes. His gaze reached Felix.

“Felix, as far as I know, isn’t a… creep,” Edelgard assured him, beginning to lose patience with how many different names Those Who Slither in the Dark had amassed now.

“Shit. Poor kid.” Jeralt glanced at Hapi. “And either Cornelia’s kid just fell in with the wrong crowd, or _she’s_ in on it, too.”

“If you two are going to gossip like a pair of schoolgirls all night,” Manuela spoke up from across the room as she finished her work on Ingrid and checked up on Felix, “you’ll have to invite me.”

Cowed by her threat, Jeralt stood up. “Alright, we’re finished here. Good night, Your Highness. I’ll see you tomorrow if I draw the short straw.”

He left the room, and Edelgard settled into her cot, resting her head against her pillow.

“Aren’t you a popular one tonight?” Manuela asked her.

“It seems so.”

She poured her a glass of water. “How are you holding up?”

Edelgard sat up and took the glass, downing it quickly enough to make her throat hurt. “A few chest pains, but that’s it. I was lucky.”

“I’ll say. Between the Death Knight, Cornelia’s kid and those beasts, and whatever blew up the rest of Remire, you’re lucky to still have all your limbs attached and intact.” She spared a backward glance at Ingrid and Felix.

“It’s just a shame that when I tried to save Ashe, that luck ran out.” She could still feel the way his fingertips had brushed against hers. If she’d been able to reach just a little farther, she might have been able to grab him by the sleeve and keep him from falling. It all would have gone differently… if only she were a little taller.

Now no one in this world would ever know the Ashe she had known. Her failure had deprived them of everything had to offer—his kindness, his dedication, his loyalty, his friendship.

Manuela let out a heavy sigh. “I’m sorry. I’m sure you did what you could.”

“We all did. I just feel numb.”

“Well… it’s not like you can turn back time and give it a do-over. What’s done is done. What’s in the past is in the past.” She gave Edelgard a sad, sympathetic smile. “I remember when the term first started. I’d always catch Hilda goofing off with you. Hanneman and I never thought we’d see you taking on so much responsibility for other people. It’s… pretty much the one thing we could agree on. But don’t swing too hard in the other direction. I think everyone will understand if you need to take a break and go back to slacking off for a bit after this.”

“There’s no need for that,” Edelgard responded, heartened just a little from Manuela’s sympathy. “People are always weaker than you think… but never as weak as you expect,” she added, recalling something Manuela had once said to her in the other world. “I’ll be fine.”

“If you say so.” Manuela stifled a yawn. “I’m heading to bed for the night. I’ll check up on you all in the morning. Do you think you’ll need anything to help you sleep?”

“I’m fine,” Felix said.

“Maybe, just to be sure,” Edelgard said.

Manuela rifled in her cabinet, procured a vial of some syrupy blue-green liquid, and poured a bit of it into a tiny glass. “This’ll do,” she said, handing it to her.

Edelgard recognized that tonic—she’d used it to fight back against insomnia on countless occasions in her world—and downed it without the slightest hesitation. It was thick and sickly sweet, like bitter honey, and burned with a stinging, alcoholic aftertaste, and it seemed as though she began to fall asleep almost instantly.

“Most people balk at the taste,” Manuela said as all sight and sound receded down a long, dark, peaceful tunnel.

* * *

Unlike Ingrid and Felix, Edelgard’s injuries weren’t particularly severe, and she was allowed to leave the next morning. Ingrid was still unconscious, and though Felix was awake and as alert as ever, his shoulder, and by extension his arm, was still completely unusable.

“Professor Manuela,” she said as she put on her cloak and prepared to venture out from the warmth of the infirmary, “how is Ingrid?”

“It’ll still take plenty of work to finish with these bones, not to mention the muscle damage,” Manuela answered, barely glancing up from her work. While Ingrid slept, she was casting another healing spell on her broken leg, which was so heavily bruised across her thigh and calf that the black and blue coloration made it almost look frostbitten or gangrenous. Even the hazy green glow of the physician’s healing magic couldn’t fully hide the damage. “She’ll probably be awake later this afternoon, if you’d like to visit then.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Edelgard said.

“Are you planning on going to class this morning?”

“Yes, I was. Should I?”

“It’s up to you. Physically, if you’re well enough to be up and about, you can sit down in a chair and take notes. Your heart is another story. Anyway, if you are, then you’d better hurry down to the dining hall while you still have time before class.”

Edelgard nodded. “Thank you, Professor.”

She headed for the dining hall and ate what little she could stomach. Every bit of food she choked down curdled in her stomach, but she forced herself through it. She knew full well how much she needed to eat to keep herself nourished, regardless of how she felt or how little of an appetite she had.

“I’ve never seen someone tear through overcooked scrambled eggs so viciously,” Claude commented, seemingly appearing out of nowhere before her as a testament to how dazed she was. “I think Dorothea’s on cooking duty today.”

Edelgard looked to her plate of eggs that were, now that she looked at them, very much overcooked, then looked around and noticed how empty the dining hall was. No wonder eating had felt so difficult. It seemed she’d mistaken Dorothea’s incredible lack of culinary talent for her own melancholy. She looked up at Claude.

“Hi, Edelgard,” he said. He looked terrible. Dark gray shadows ringed his eyes; his carefully-tousled bird’s-nest of black hair was more of a rat’s-nest. Edelgard half expected him to keel over in front of her.

“Hello, Claude.”

He crouched down and leaned in across the table. _“Look at this,”_ he whispered, pulling out a notebook from within his coat and opening it up to a dog-eared page that he held out in front of Edelgard.

One page held a list of codes Claude had copied from one of the stolen pages of the notebook:
    
    
    07    M3    C    III   12    13    V     09    24    I     08    08    BQ CR DI EJ KW MT OS PX UZ GH
    08    M3    C    VIII  08    08    I     06    21    III   11    22    DV GL FT OX EZ CH MR KN BQ PW 
    09    M3    C    V     21    13    III   04    18    IV    19    17    DV GL FT OX EZ CH MR KN BQ PW 
    10    M3    C    VI    03    01    I     04    16    VII   03    12    BQ CR DI EJ KW MT OS PX UZ GH
    11    M3    C    I     19    05    VII   10    04    IV    22    03    EJ OY IV AQ KW FX MT PS LU BD
    12    M3    C    VI    11    07    V     05    01    I     05    23    DV GL FT OX EZ CH MR KN BQ PW 
    13    M3    C    V     08    06    I     06    18    IV    16    01    DV GL FT OX EZ CH MR KN BQ PW 
    14    M3    C    II    02    03    V     06    26    I     19    09    BQ CR DI EJ KW MT OS PX UZ GH
    15    M3    C    I     23    02    IV    09    10    II    26    06    EJ OY IV AQ KW FX MT PS LU BD
    16    M3    C    IV    07    08    I     22    23    VI    21    13    DV GL FT OX EZ CH MR KN BQ PW 
    17    M3    C    VIII  24    05    V     18    01    II    14    03    BQ CR DI EJ KW MT OS PX UZ GH

The other had a few translated messages:

> _incursions may have resulted in transfers of consciousness between fodlan alpha and fodlan beta_
> 
> _breach of research facility epsilon in fodlan beta likely related but more observations must be made before taking action_
> 
> _research shows trans-timeline transference of matter completely impossible but cis-timeline transference yielding positive results_
> 
> _further refinement of teleportation system will allow recovery of materiel from antediluvian epoch_

“These are the coded messages you copied down in Tomas’ study,” Claude said, his voice low as it could be, an excited gleam in his jade eyes as though somebody hadn’t died today. “Well… _some_ of them, at least. I’ve been working the machine all night, figuring out how to decode them, and I’ve finally gotten it!”

“Claude, one of my friends died yesterday,” she told him as flatly as she could, looking around the dining hall to discern if she was being watched. She remembered full well that Dimitri was suspicious of Claude (and by extension, Those Who Slither in the Dark probably were as well), and if word got to him that she was consorting with him, it might damage her standing in his eyes. “Is now the best time?”

“Oh, come on. You fought a war.” He shoved the book in her face. “Look at what it says here about ‘transfers of consciousness.’ What happened to you and Hilda sounds like a known phenomenon to them. They’re aware of the other world and it sounds like they’re trying to exploit that connection.” Every single word grated against her ears like the screeching sound of nails against a chalkboard. “But what I’d like to know is what this ‘antediluvian epoch’ they’re talking about is. Whatever it is, it sounds like—”

She was sure of it. Someone, somewhere, was watching her. She knew what it felt like, at least, for Dedue’s eyes to be on her. Did Claude have any idea how _foolish_ he was being? Was he so sleep-deprived that he couldn’t think straight?

Edelgard took a fistful of his collar and dragged him over the table, nearly upending her plate into her lap. _“Claude,”_ she hissed through gritted teeth, _“while it’s true that I’ve become quite accustomed to death, I lost somebody I knew for six years today. This can wait.”_

He pried her fingers off of his collar and backed away. “Alright, let’s talk tomorrow. Oh, but one more thing—”

She stood up and stormed out. “Goodbye, Claude.”

She made her way to the Blue Lions classroom. As she’d expected, Captain Jeralt stood at the head of the class where Byleth usually stood.

The class was unusually small today. Sylvain was slumped over his desk, glum. Annette was scribbling spirals in her notebook with a sort of halfhearted, yet oddly manic energy. Ignatz had his nose in a book but didn’t seem particularly interested in its contents. Only Raphael was behaving with any sort of normalcy. Quite a few students were truant—discounting Felix and Ingrid, who were still recuperating from their injuries, Dimitri, Dedue, Glenn, and Bernadetta had not shown up for class. Bernadetta’s absence wasn’t much of a surprise, and lately Glenn had been seeming to come and go as he pleased like a cat (now that Solon had been outed, Edelgard wondered if he and Rodrigue would stick around the monastery much longer), but for both Dimitri and Dedue to be absent was worrying.

“This gonna be everyone today?” Jeralt asked, eyeing the sparsely populated classroom with a raise of his brow. He fumbled with one of Byleth’s cue cards. “Okay, let’s see… my little girl left me her notes for today’s lecture right here… It says, ‘talk about the Battle of Conand Tower, IE 354,’ and that’s it. Well, I don’t know anything about that,” he said, setting the card aside, “so how about you little brats just ask me whatever questions you have about mercenary life? Or I can answer questions about what it’s like to be captain of the Knights of Seiros.”

Raphael raised his hand.

“Yeah?”

“What was your daily workout regimen like?”

Jeralt laughed. “Sounds like you’ve got a one-track mind, kid.”

“You’ve gotta keep yourself active during tough times,” Raphael replied. “Even if it feels impossible. Stick to your routines and your training and you’ll feel better before you know it—that’s how I got through when I lost my folks.”

Ignatz tried to look smaller than usual.

“Alright, thanks for the advice. I’ll tell Byleth that after class today.” Jeralt cleared his throat. “So, when you’re a knight or a mercenary, you’re off traveling a lot, right? So you don’t have as many opportunities to stick to a regular routine as you might think. That said, I try to make sure I get in a couple dozen sit-ups, push-ups, and bicep curls with my and a partner’s knapsack before lunch. As for when I’m here… you ever heard of the salmon ladder?”

Raphael leaned forward, so excited he was nearly salivating—over something other than food, for once. “No, what’s that?”

“I’ll show you after class. It’s a technique that exercises just about every muscle in your core and arms at once, but there’s a real trick to it that’s more about flexibility than raw strength. I’m surprised Byleth hasn’t already shown it to you; she’s always been great at it. Alright, next?”

Pedagogical skills certainly didn’t run in Jeralt’s side of the family; Byleth’s knack for teaching, apparently, either came from her mother or was a unique mutation… or perhaps Sothis was feeding her all the answers.

Class dragged on until someone knocked forcefully on the door to the classroom, interrupting a meandering story Jeralt had been telling about his work with the Blade Breakers. He stopped in his tracks. “Door’s open!” he called out.

The door creaked open and Rodrigue stepped through, powdery snow lightening his dark cloak and putting aged streaks of silver into his dark hair. “Excuse me, Captain Jeralt,” he said, offering him a friendly smile, “I would like to borrow Princess Edelgard for a few minutes, if you don’t mind.”

Edelgard felt her quill pen snap between her fingers.

Jeralt shook his head. “I’m sorry, Lord Fraldarius,” he said, “but class is in session. Can you wait an hour or so?”

“I’m afraid it concerns His Highness, Prince Dimitri,” Rodrigue answered. “He’s in quite a state, and I fear he won’t listen to anybody but his step-sister.”

“Huh. Alright. Well, I’ll go with you, then. As of right now, your prince is my student, too.”

If Rodrigue felt particularly irked to not have his chance to be alone with Edelgard, he didn’t show it. “Of course, Captain. I am sorry to trouble you.”

“No, it’s no trouble. My kid isn’t the best at telling other people how to run her lectures, anyhow.” Jeralt shrugged on his coat. “Class dismissed,” he said to the few Blue Lions in attendance. “For your homework, uh… whatever textbook you’ve been reading, read the next chapter.” He passed by Edelgard, shot her a concealed wink, and flashed her a dagger hidden up his sleeve.

Edelgard got up and followed, thankful to have an ally like Jeralt but still fighting to quell her fear.

“What exactly is wrong with Dimitri?” she asked Rodrigue.

“I need to speak with him, but he simply won’t calm down,” he replied, offering a weary shrug. “Even poor Dedue cannot reach him. He’s making quite a mess of things. If I barge in on him as he is now, I fear he might tear my head off.”

“That would be a shame,” Edelgard said, enjoying the mental image of a feral Dimitri ripping him limb from limb.

“But I hear he cares quite a lot about you,” he told her, “and so I think you might be able to calm him down.”

“Is it important that you talk to him now?”

“Very.” Rodrigue guided her and Jeralt to the training hall, and as they drew nearer, the muffled sound of enraged, bestial bellows from within grew louder and louder.

Dedue and Gilbert stood at the door, as immovable as part of the wall itself, though they permitted themselves to bow for Rodrigue. “Lord Fraldarius. Princess Edelgard. Captain Jeralt,” Gilbert said. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” Rodrigue said in return. “I see our young lord is still causing a scene?”

Gilbert nodded sadly. “That, I fear, is putting it lightly.”

“I think he will exhaust himself soon,” Dedue said, and Edelgard wondered how much anger was behind his stoic facade.

“Well, then, it seems the problem will solve itself,” Jeralt said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Princess Edelgard and I—”

“I’ll talk to him,” Edelgard said. Dangerous as it was, this could be her chance to make sure that Dimitri was well and truly poisoned against Those Who Slither in the Dark—and right under Thales’ nose, to boot! This could be an excellent coup provided that Dimitri didn’t inadvertently crush her skull in a fit of pique.

Dedue nodded and stepped aside.

“I will follow you in, Lady Edelgard,” Gilbert said. “If there is nothing you can do to assuage His Highness’ madness, I would rather I be injured than you.”

Edelgard and Gilbert found Dimitri in the training hall half-naked, clad in only a pair of sweat-drenched trousers, surrounded by a recreation of the massacre in Remire writ with straw dummies savagely ripped open and hacked to pieces in lieu of burnt corpses. The floor was littered with bladeless hilts, hiltless blades, swords whose blades had been broken in half and shattered into fragments, lances and spears that had been snapped like twigs, headless axes. Half of a lance was clutched in Dimitri’s fist, its steel blade chipped and warped. The training hall’s wooden panel walls were covered in splintered gashes, as though an enormous beast had raked its claws across them.

Dimitri gripped the remainder of his lance so tightly that his knuckles turned as white as his hair, which hung in sweat-drenched and matted clumps from his head; the blue veins under his skin stood out on his forearm like rivers on a map, and with a monstrous roar, he drove his lance into a straw-filled burlap sack over and over again, piercing its skin and tearing out its golden-yellow innards. His cold blue eyes were wide and wild and drool dribbled down his chin as though he were a rabid wolf.

Edelgard gave him a wide berth, but dared to inch into his line of sight until he noticed her. Gilbert kept a watchful eye on both of them.

Dimitri threw his half-lance at her; she ducked and let it bury itself in the wall behind her. “Dimitri,” she said, holding out her hands, “it’s me.”

“Leave,” he growled. “Rats. Rats, every last one of them. Slithering in the dark, carrying diseases and filth from their nests into the daylight. I’ve surrounded myself with rats. Are you a rat as well, Edelgard?”

“I can say with complete certainty that I am not a rat,” Edelgard said.

“Come no further!” Dimitri’s gaze flitted across the floor, looking for even one more intact weapon for him to tear apart. “Or I’ll snap your neck with my bare hands.”

“I’m not here to do you any harm,” she said to him. “I’m here to see you don’t bring the roof down on yourself in a fit of pique.”

A mirthless laugh escaped his lips. “Would that be such a terrible thing? I was blind to the evil lurking under Remire. I was tearing through the woods like a beast while my friends and subjects needed me. I am exactly the boar Felix says I am. And now the dead have increased in number, and a new phantom whispers its regrets in my ear. To die right now would be a kindness.”

“If you’re asking me to kill you, I won’t.”

“No. I would be so lucky.”

“Dimitri…” Edelgard ventured closer, daring him to make a move against her. “Is this what you want? There’s no shame in wallowing for a bit and waiting for the storm in your heart to pass. But when that moment is over, what will you do? You can flagellate yourself to salve your wounded conscience all you like. You can bury yourself under the weight of your guilt and wait for it to press the air out of your lungs. You can tear yourself apart with grief. You have the freedom to choose where you want to go from here. If you have curled up in a corner and lost the will to carry on, then that is your right. But tell me, Dimitri, does the path you are on now lead to justice for the dead, or oblivion for you?”

“What do you know?” Dimitri stood taller, his bowed shoulders rising and straightening. The scars covering his body, ghostly white against pale skin, almost seemed to glow silver from the sweat glistening on his skin. He loomed over her, his eyes as cold and hard as ice. “What do you know of loss? Of pain?” he asked as he strode toward her. With every word, his voice grew shakier and louder, threatening to break itself apart.

He attacked her, taking half a lance from the ground. Edelgard was swift enough to pick up a bladeless length of a lance’s haft and parry his blow, digging in her heels as he forced her backward.

_“Prince Dimitri!”_ Gilbert cried out, baring his axe.

“Stay back,” Edelgard said to him. “I’ll handle this.” Dimitri was on his last legs, stamina-wise; she couldn’t even feel the power of either of his Crests burning the air around him. She could outlast him as long as she evaded his attacks.

“You… you still have a father. You still have five brothers and five sisters. And you have _never_ suffered the pain of losing them,” Dimitri snarled, banging his half of a lance against hers. “Are you heartless? Or are you simply naive? Either way, what right do you have to speak to me like this, Edelgard?”

“Dimitri, you know that I would never ask you a question without purpose,” she said to him, pushing his weapon aside and leaving his chest exposed. His reaction time was pathetic; she could easily land a hit and push him back. “Only you can truly understand your own sadness. But is this the kind of sadness that will paralyze you, or drive you forward? I cannot stand by your side if you refuse to move.”

Dimitri kept glaring at her. His nostrils flared with each controlled, deliberate breath as he picked himself up. “Forward? Where is forward? What right do I have to continue forward?”

“All living things have the right to struggle for life—no, the _obligation,”_ Edelgard answered. “No matter how low you sink, there is always a path forward.”

He lunged at her; she sidestepped his attack and forced him back with a short, controlled burst of flame. “And what path forward is there for Ashe?” he asked, continuing his assault. The flat of his blade rang against her collarbone before she could parry the blow. “How low has _he_ sunk? What path is there for my father, our mother, the children who died pleading for salvation? You know nothing of the dead, only the logic of the living. I lived for their lingering regrets, for their vengeance, but all I have done was increase their number.”

“You did not increase their number, Dimitri,” Edelgard said, cracking the haft of her lance against his knuckles and forcing him to drop his weapon. Her shoulder throbbed where Dimitri had hit her. He threw a clumsy punch with the last of his strength; she caught it and forced him down to his knees, placing both hands firmly against his shoulders. The sweat coating his skin was cold, but underneath it was a feverish warmth. His hands curled firmly and forcefully around her wrist, threatening to crush her bones into powder if she didn’t let go. “Your failure is not your burden alone to bear. Myself, Sylvain, Professor Byleth… we tried to save Ashe, but our mistakes and missteps failed to prevent his death as well. But we must not let our mistakes weigh us down. Acknowledge them and take what you have learned to move on. That is a privilege only the living possess.”

Dimitri’s grip loosened.

“Besides, we know who is truly to blame for Ashe’s death. Solon and his ilk—the mysterious organization responsible for the tragedy in Remire. Will you indulge in your misplaced guilt until it consumes you? Or will you seek true justice? Whether or not you stand still here, the future will rise to meet you regardless. I will be waiting for you,” she said, withdrawing her hands, “when that day comes.”

He let go of her, his head bowed, his chest heaving. Fresh tears fell from his eyes. For a long time—what felt like an eternity—all he did was weep in front of her. “Edelgard…” he sobbed, “how can you be so cold? Ashe is dead and yet here you stand, telling me all the answers… acting like such a pillar of strength…”

“It is when we reach our lowest point that we must stand our tallest.” She rested her hand atop his head, letting her fingers curl into his disheveled and matted white hair, and brought her voice down to a whisper. “Dimitri, listen to me. As long as you act as a vessel for other people’s ideals, you will only know more of this pain as people die senselessly for causes you don’t even understand, let alone believe in. Ask yourself what _your_ vision for the world is, choose your allies from among those who share your vision, and strike down your true enemy.”

Dimitri lifted his head. His eyes were softer now, thawed, wracked with pain. His lip was quivering. “Edelgard…”

“I promised you that I would stand by your side. And here I am. For you. For our mother. For Ashe. As long as you move forward.”

He looked around, took stock of his surroundings as though he’d never seen them before, and let out a sad little laugh. “Heh. I… I suppose the Kingdom’s coffers will have to be emptied to replace all of these weapons. Thank you, Edelgard. I hope I did not frighten you.”

“It takes more than a temper tantrum to frighten me. Now perhaps you should clean yourself off. A hot bath could do you some good.”

A weak smile crossed Dimitri’s face as he closed his eyes and slumped over. “Thank you. And take care of yourself, too. Being strong for everybody else is not easy.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be just fine.”

She left the training hall, finding Rodrigue waiting expectantly for her outside. “Is he calmed down?” he asked her, a hungry little smile on his face.

“He’s all yours,” Edelgard said. It would be selfish and short-sighted of her to hope that Dimitri killed him on the spot, but hopefully she had encouraged Dimitri to further his distance from his sinister allies.

As she left, she felt as weary and exhausted as she had last night, even though the sun still cast golden rays of morning light across the glittering snow. Her shoulder was sore again—the same shoulder she’d hallucinated losing in Remire, as though the universe was dead set on taking it from her.

* * *

Edelgard had projected strength and firmness in front of Manuela and Dimitri, but there was one place in the monastery where that strength felt completely inappropriate, and that was Byleth’s room.

When she knocked on the door, she hadn’t expected an answer at first, but after a few seconds of rustling around, the door had creaked open and revealed the face of her professor. She had seen Byleth’s spirit broken once before, and the sight had been heartbreaking. Seeing the same face again—cheeks tear-streaked, eyes red-rimmed, lips chewed to a chapped mess, dark ocean-blue hair a disheveled bird’s-nest—almost brought her to her knees.

Byleth was still wearing the underclothes she wore to bed; the rest of her clothes, including the worn gray jacket she always wore, hung over the back of her chair. She hid her barely-clothed body under the sheets from her bed, draped over her shoulders and held around her body like a priest’s vestments.

“Hi, Edelgard,” she said, her voice husky.

“Professor…” Edelgard said. She couldn’t remember if she’d even said a word to her after they’d been dragged out of the underground facility. This was the first they’d spoken since Ashe had died. To her shame, she found herself ruminating on what she had said to Byleth the first time she had seen her like this—after Jeralt’s death.

_You’ve been crying. So even_ you _cry sometimes._

Turning callous in the face of grief had simply become natural to her, but as soon as she’d finished saying her piece to Byleth back then, she’d felt sick. She’d wanted to drive her dagger into her chest and scoop out what little remained of her heart.

“You’re a mess, my teacher.”

“I know.”

“Have you slept?”

“No.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Alois brought me breakfast.”

Edelgard peered over Byleth’s shoulder and saw a plate with a few slices of buttered toast resting on her desk. One was half-eaten. It was heartening to see that at least she’d eaten _something._ “May I come in?” she asked.

Byleth looked away, thought for a moment, and nodded, opening the door wider and stepping away to make a path.

“Captain Jeralt taught your class today,” Edelgard said, stepping inside and taking a seat on the chair as Byleth returned to bed.

“Hmm? How was he?” Byleth asked, sitting atop her bed and wrapping the rest of her blankets around herself.

“He isn’t anywhere near as talented at teaching as you are,” Edelgard said. “But Raphael kept him busy with questions about his exercise regimen.”

The tiniest fragment of a smile struggled its way onto Byleth’s face. “How is the class?”

“Sad, but they’ll all pull through. Even the deepest sorrow passes, eventually. Oh, but Dimitri has been so angry that he broke every weapon in the training hall.”

“Tell him he’s on stable duty for the rest of the term.”

Edelgard found herself struggling to hold back a laugh. “Yes, Professor. How are you feeling?”

“Drained,” Byleth said, as though it wasn’t obvious from her demeanor and the way she’d so childishly swaddled herself in blankets, and Edelgard knew exactly what she meant. She held her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

“So am I. I think that’s how we all feel.”

“Ashe is gone.”

“I know.”

“It doesn’t feel like he should be.”

“I know. That’s how it always is. The world feels like a pale imitation of itself when someone you care for has been taken from it. Like the set dressing in an opera. All flat, painted wood.”

“How do you know?” Byleth asked. The way she said it, she didn’t sound accusing or pouting, just flat.

“When I say I come from the future, that isn’t entirely true. The future I came from has a different past altogether. In my future’s past, in my world… my brothers and sisters all passed away,” Edelgard admitted. “I know how you feel. All you want is for the world to feel rich and full again. But it won’t. Not without _them.”_

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright, Professor. I can tell you with certainty that the pain fades. This will pass. You may be asked to stand up again and push yourself forward before it does, but one day, it _will._ And your students will be here for you all the while.”

Sothis appeared beside Byleth, sitting cross-legged a few inches above the bed. She looked just as weary and worn as Byleth. It was strange seeing such a childlike face wear such mature expression. “The arrogant one is right,” she sighed.

Edelgard ignored Sothis’ choice of epithet for her. She supposed it was fitting.

“Your tears will pass,” Sothis told Byleth, “and soon you will be able to stand on your feet once again. Until then, we are here for you, and we can help you stand if you must before you feel ready.”

Byleth smiled a bit—just a bit—reached out, and pantomimed patting Sothis on the head. Her hand went right through her translucent forest-green hair.

“Excuse me?!” Sothis huffed, pulling herself away from Byleth and flailing about. Edelgard felt an extremely uncomfortable chill run through her body as the phantom child’s arm intersected with her torso. “I am not some dog or cat you may pat on the head for your own comfort!”

Edelgard hastily backed away from the two of them to rid herself of that awful chill. “Professor,” she asked. “Excuse me, but may I come closer?”

Byleth looked at her and nodded.

She came closer, then carefully reached over Sothis and laid her hand just above Byleth’s shoulder. She wanted to hug her. She wanted to hold her tightly and kiss her and shower her with all the affection she would need to feel warm again, to feel worthy of love again. But she limited herself to the simplest of comforting gestures, a hand lying gently on her shoulder, warm skin separated by only a thin layer of cloth. “May I do this for you?”

Byleth nodded again, and Edelgard set her hand down and rubbed her shoulder. This, she thought, feeling her warm body beneath the blanket wrapped around her, was how it should have been in her world. This was what she should have done. And now she could finally do it.

The world was wrong, but here and now, she could make just a small piece of it right, at least for a little while.

“Since you are here, I have a question for you,” Sothis said to Edelgard. “My mind has been greatly troubled ever since what has transpired. As time travelers, have you and your friend noticed any temporal… oddities? Perhaps ones like what occurred in Remire, which I myself might have missed?”

“Well… every time Byleth uses your power to turn back time,” Edelgard said, “I find myself briefly returned to my future. I assume the same happens to Hilda.”

“That must be why you and the other girl seem to pass out whenever Byleth uses that power,” Sothis mused. “Quite a conundrum for us. From now on, when you use my power, Byleth, you will need to take that into account. What else?”

Edelgard began to explain the story of the arm and the dagger she had found in Zanado, the strange case of the missing desk, and the feeling she had had in Remire as though she had been torn between two contradictory worlds. Though she struggled to find the right words to describe such odd events, Sothis hung on her every word, and as she spoke, the child’s eyes grew wider and wider.

“You… _what?!”_ she exclaimed. “Edelgard von Hresvelg, you fool! Were I corporeal, I would… I would…” She balled her fists and trembled with fury. “I would give you such a _spanking!”_

Taken aback, Edelgard found herself rising to her feet and stumbling backward, keeping a wide berth from Sothis’ spectral form. “You would… what?”

“Do you realize what you _did?_ By destroying the dagger’s present self with its future self and erasing its past before it could be sent into the past from the future, you created a time paradox! You violated one of the cardinal rules of time and space—that events have beginnings, middles, and ends, in _that_ order! _This,”_ Sothis shouted, so angry that flecks of incorporeal spittle were flying from her mouth, “is why mortals like you have _no business_ messing with time! I would not be surprised,” she added, jabbing her finger at Edelgard’s chest, “if _that_ is what caused that infernal machine to fly out of control and…”

The realization struck Edelgard like spear driven into her gut.

“…kill Ashe,” she finished dumbly. Those sharp, accusing words were enough to shatter everything left in her that was strong. The feeling left her legs and she collapsed onto her knees. “Professor, I… I… I take full responsibility for… for…”

The words didn’t come. Tears streamed down her cheeks; her shoulders quaked and quivered. She fought against the lump in her throat. “Professor, I take full responsibility for the death of Ashe Ubert,” she choked out. “I… have failed you as a student in the most egregious and fundamental way. I…”

“Oh, cease your whining, you arrogant child!” Sothis continued to berate her. “You act as though you have never been scolded before. I am not accusing you of murdering your friend. That is ridiculous! How could you have known? I am merely impressing on you the importance of not rushing into these temporally complex situations with such a limited mortal perspective!”

“That’s enough, Sothis,” Byleth said, raising her voice for the first time.

Sothis fell silent. “Yes… I suppose. She is _your_ student, after all.”

Edelgard couldn’t see through her veil of tears, but she could hear Byleth get up out of bed and kneel beside her, and could feel her rest a warm, firm hand against her back, right between her shoulderblades. Her chest heaved and ached and her still-bruised ribs begged for mercy.

“And to think,” she said to Byleth once her tears had dried, “I came here to offer _you_ comfort.”

* * *

There was a funeral service for Ashe that following Sunday in the cathedral. As his body had never been recovered—there had been nothing left _to_ recover—there was no coffin, and the headstone installed in the cemetery stood over an unoccupied plot of land.

It was the thought that counted, Raphael had said.

Ingrid had suggested the idea of visiting Ashe’s hometown in Gaspard county to break the news to his younger brother and sister. Through the two-day journey from Garreg Mach with the rest of the class (minus Glenn, who Edelgard suspected had flown the coop), Edelgard kept a watchful eye on her, but she projected an air of strength.

If anyone had taken Raphael’s tips for coping with loss to heart, it had been Ingrid. Though she couldn’t train with a broken leg and arm, once her concussion had healed she’d thrown herself into her studies and stuck to her own routine as best she could—though, instead of training in lances and riding, she’d dabbled in less physical pursuits, swapping out her lance for a tome of faith magic (she had little aptitude for it, but she was trying—sometimes _too_ hard).

Ashe’s hometown had become a sad little village. The empty castle of House Gaspard loomed in the distance, bereft of its lord, and loomed wearily over simple houses and fallow fields. There were many elderly men and women and many children, but noticeably few young adults—Lonato’s doomed rebellion had drawn many of its ranks from this town and returned few of them. Thinking of all the new orphans the Church of Seiros had created by first encouraging and then violently suppressing the rebellion made Edelgard’s jaw clench. And, of course, Those Who Slither in the Dark and the tendrils they had let seep into the Western Church had been to blame as well.

Edelgard tried not to have any romantic illusions about generous nobles providing for their poor and impoverished subjects, but she had to admit that Lonato had been a special case indeed, and Ashe had been well suited to follow in his footsteps.

Loss permeated the village. The loss of Lord Lonato’s son Christophe, who had been as beloved by the townspeople as his father; the loss of Lonato himself, the village’s patron and benefactor, who had always been generous through the harshest winters; and now the loss of Lonato’s eldest adopted son, though news had yet to reach anybody in the village. Somehow, the village itself, the wood of the houses, the stones of the roads, the very air itself, just _knew_ before any of its denizens did.

Ashe’s younger siblings Jasper and Laura lived in Lonato’s mansion on the edge of town closest to the castle, looked after by the late lord’s servants. The grounds of the mansion were well-kept, though there was a sense of resignation and doom about it; the servants still on retainer seemed to all wonder if whatever lord took over this place would be quite so kind as the heads of House Gaspard had been and it showed in their work.

The Blue Lions met the remainders of Ashe’s family in the mansion’s parlor. They were both several years younger than he had been, no more than fourteen by Edelgard’s reckoning, and were fraternal twins, all but identical in most respects. Unlike Ashe, both had sandy blonde hair, Jasper wearing it short and Laura wearing it long and in simple pleats, though both shared his green-apple eyes and pale, freckled complexion as well as his earnest, animated demeanor.

The twins had both grown taller than Ashe already, and filled out more, and were just beginning to diverge in appearance from each other in their adolescence. While Ashe had been short and scrawny before sprouting like a weed around eighteen or nineteen (who ever heard of a growth spurt that late? Then again, a few of Edelgard’s other friends, like Bernadetta, had been no different), Jasper was already showing the beginnings of a broader chest and a handsome jawline, nourished by the past seven years under Lonato’s care, and in a few years Laura would start to resemble a beautiful young woman.

Edelgard had met these two only a few times in her world, and never to deliver such dire news to them. Seeing them here was another stark reminder that in this world, Ashe would never see his younger brother and sister grow up.

The children’s awe upon meeting Dimitri and their excitement at seeing the rest of the Blue Lions—apparently, Ashe had written to them quite frequently and had shared with them only the most flattering details about his classmates—faded quickly when they realized that Ashe wasn’t there with them.

“Is he sick?” Jasper asked, leaning forward in his chair, his hands gripping the armrests. His voice cracked. “Is it pneumonia? The weather’s been unseasonably cold lately.”

“Is he hurt?” Laura asked, mirroring her twin brother’s movements. One of the mansion’s servants brought her tea, but she waved him away. “He’s okay, isn’t he?”

The rest of the Blue Lions had taken their seats in the parlor, but Dimitri, Byleth, and Edelgard stood on ceremony, even after the servants had rushed to bring extra chairs in. Dimitri hung his head solemnly, looming over the others, his hands folded in front of him.

“I—don’t know how to say this,” he said, the words catching in his throat.

Nevertheless, he said it.

_“No!”_ Jasper cried out, leaping to his feet. “You’re lying! Why would you say something like that, Your Highness?” Laura stood up and grabbed him by the shoulders to steady him, or perhaps to hold him back. His body language was unreadable; Edelgard could see part of him yearning to lunge forward and strike Dimitri out of anger and part of him pushing him to run away like a frightened animal. He couldn’t have been more different from his late brother.

“It’s true,” Byleth said. “We were on an assignment. There was an explosion. He didn’t survive.” Reductive, but true, essentially. Her terse tone of voice may have sounded cold, but Edelgard knew it was just a facade to keep herself composed. She’d done an admirable job holding together these past few days, but even she had limits.

“No! That’s not true!” Tears glistened in the boy’s eyes and rolled down his cheeks, dripping off his chin. “Prince Dimitri, tell me it’s not true!”

“Professor Byleth… and all of us,” Edelgard said to Jasper, “express our deepest condolences. He died ensuring that we would live.”

“Shut up!” He broke free of his sister’s grip. “What kind of a crappy professor are you if you can’t keep your students alive?” he said to Byleth. “Ashe always said you were a genius in his letters. Well, if you’re so _smart,_ then why is he _dead?”_

With those venomous words hanging in the air, he turned tail and scurried deeper into the mansion, vanishing into the foyer. The echoes of his footsteps up the stairs and into the upstairs hallways faded to nothing.

Laura took a few halfhearted steps in his direction, then turned back to face the class. She looked up at Dimitri, her eyes misty. “It’s true, isn’t it, Your Highness?” she sniffled, her voice small and weak.

“I’m sorry, Laura,” he said to her. “I wish I had better news for you. Ashe always spoke—” He fought her way through a lump in his throat. “He always spoke so fondly about you and your brother. I wish we could have met under better circumstances.”

Ingrid stood up, propping herself up on a wooden crutch, and limped toward her. “I’m so sorry… I never quite know what to say at times like these, but… we are here for you.”

Annette aimlessly rummaged in the bag at her side. “If it helps,” she offered, “I packed some sweets. Maybe they’ll help you feel better.”

As the rest of the students consoled Ashe’s younger sister, Byleth quietly withdrew from the room. Concerned, Edelgard and Dimitri followed her. As reserved as a person Byleth was, it was unusual for her to flee from large groups like this.

They found Byleth outside in the mansion’s snowy courtyard, leaning despondently against the outer wall and staring up at the gray sky. She’d bundled herself up in the silvery-gray wolf’s pelt Dimitri had given her; with the bitter wind blowing through the courtyard’s skeletal trees, Edelgard wished she’d remembered to take hers on the way out.

“Professor,” Dimitri said, “I am sorry for Jasper’s disrespectful conduct. He is… too young to know better.”

If Edelgard were a pettier person, she might have reminded Dimitri that he’d thrown far worse of a tantrum last week.

Byleth sighed. “I feel like a fraud,” she said, the bluntness of her declaration taking both Edelgard and Dimitri aback.

“Professor, you are nothing of the sort,” Dimitri said.

Edelgard nodded in agreement. Someone other than her might have felt betrayed to find out that her dear professor and darling wife’s legendary tactical mind and her unfailing ability to keep everyone in her class and under her command safe was not, in fact, the result of genius as much as it was supernatural trial-and-error. But for Edelgard herself, it only deepened the well of sympathy she had for Byleth. She had the power to correct all of her mistakes, and she used that to preserve the lives of those closest to her—and in two worlds so far, she had failed only once. How many times, before and after that singular failure, had Byleth watched her students die? Her father?

Edelgard thought back to every close brush with death she had ever had on the battlefield, from the very first time she had met Byleth all those years ago to the final battle in the flaming ruins of Fhirdiad, and wondered on how many of those occasions Byleth had seen her die, and she multiplied that for each of her fellow Black Eagles. Most people weathered the deaths of their loved ones just once each, but Byleth had done so many times. Perhaps she had forgotten the usual gravity of death, only for this stark reminder to hit her like a slap in the face—that for the rest of the world, for all the other mere mortals, death was final in every way. Perhaps that was why it had hurt her most of all.

“I’m supposed to be a genius teacher, but I’m just making everything up as I go along. Until now, I’ve just been… lucky that I made the right decisions,” Byleth said, carefully choosing a euphemism for Sothis’ powers. “If I make another wrong decision and can’t fix it, one of you might die next.”

Edelgard felt humbled by her confession. It was because of her condition as a time traveler as much as it was because of Those Who Slither’s experiments that Byleth could no longer rely on Sothis’ power to keep her students safe. Because of those two factors—partly because of _her_ —her professor felt more pressure than ever to make the right decisions—unfailingly, unerringly.

That pressure was one she knew all too well. On the eve of her war against the Church of Seiros, her war against all of Fódlan, she had felt a similarly paralyzing doubt take hold of her mind. The weight of her burden—of knowing that her decision to start that war, one simple order spoken to her men, would unleash a tidal wave of blood and fire across the continent, sweeping up generals, soldiers, civilians—had been crushing. But Byleth had been there for her to carry that burden—to give her the strength to make those hard choices and bear the full weight of those consequences.

Dimitri spoke up. “Professor, that makes you a _human,_ not a fraud. As Rodrigue has always told me, with great power comes great responsibility. In a month, I will be crowned king of Faerghus. My decisions from that point on could mean life or death for people across the kingdom. So I know exactly how you feel. Whether you’re a teacher or a king, you mustn’t let your mistakes weigh you down. Acknowledge them and take what you have learned to move on.”

He smiled at Edelgard, and she smiled back, recognizing her own words in his mouth (but he said them much more kindly and with much less of an authoritative air than she had). It seemed his allegiance was to her now, completely and utterly.

“You’ve been a wonderful teacher so far, Professor,” Edelgard added. “Gronder Field was no fluke by any means. You bring out the best in every one of us and we are proud to have you as a teacher. You need not be perfect as long as you strive to do your best.”

Byleth smiled. “Thank you, Dimitri, Edelgard. I feel I’ve learned as much from you as you have from me.”

“I think that is how it should be,” Edelgard said. “At any rate, we are here to help you bear the weight of your choices—good and ill alike.”

“As students,” Dimitri chimed in, “we can do no less.”

Byleth shrugged. “I think the bare minimum is doing your homework on time, Dimitri,” she said to him with a wry little smile fighting past her dour mood.

His cheeks turned bright red. “Professor, I—I am sorry; I have just been so busy as of late…”

_“Excuse me, Prince Dimitri, Your Highness,”_ a gruff, weathered voice cracked through the cold air of the premature winter. The voice belonged to a man who had crossed the courtyard while they had been conversing, a black box of lacquered wood cradled in his arms. He was old, wizened, his skin suntanned, but he was dressed well enough that he was obviously not from the village but rather one of House Gaspard’s servants. His hands, reddened and cracked, clutched the black box. “My name is Maynard Duran, and I am… _was_ Lord Lonato’s gardener. I have a gift for you, Your Highness, if you would kindly accept it.”

Dimitri furrowed his snowy brow and looked down at the box, bemused. “A gift? What is it?”

Edelgard found herself immediately suspicious of the man. What was this? What could be in the box? Was this some sort of plot by Those Who Slither?

“I haven’t a clue, Your Highness,” Maynard said. “This old box has been in my family for nearly four hundred years. We were told to keep it until the year 1180 and then deliver it to the crown prince of Faerghus—which is, well, _you,_ Your Highness—no earlier than the last week of the Red Wolf Moon. I’d already been planning on traveling to Garreg Mach to meet you before you arrived here.”

Sothis materialized at Byleth’s side, drawn out from her slumber by the curious box. “Four hundred years? Byleth, tell the princeling to open it at once!” she insisted.

Dimitri took the box from Maynard and examined the wax seal that kept it closed. “This seal,” he noted, “is Loog’s personal seal. Your family had an artifact from the King of Lions as an heirloom?”

Maynard simply shrugged.

“This belongs in a museum!”

“Well, if we’d put it there then, you wouldn’t have it now. My grandfather, and his grandfather, and _his_ grandfather, twenty generations back, had quite clear instructions… and quite _stern_ instructions, too. There was something about an angry spirit and a deadly curse should it be opened by the wrong person at the wrong time…”

“I suppose.” Dimitri took a dagger and ran it all across the edge of the box’s lid to break the wax holding it shut, wincing as he did so as though he’d wounded himself by defiling it. He cracked open the box to reveal a pile of ancient, well-yellowed envelopes all sealed with wax inside. He cut apart the seal on one of them and unfolded the old, yellowed paper. “‘To my old friends, the Blue Lions class of Imperial Year 1180,’” he read, his brow increasingly furrowing, “‘if all goes as planned, you will receive this letter, hopefully, soon after what happened in Remire.’” His pace slowed with each word as the letter’s contents became odder and odder. “‘First, let me assure you that…’”

Edelgard shared Sothis’ intrigue. ‘Old friends?’ How could an ancient box that had remained sealed for four hundred years have belonged to an ‘old friend’ of this class? Time travel must have been involved—someone who knew the class well must have somehow ended up in the past—

It couldn’t be. Was it even _possible?_

Sothis gasped.

Dimitri continued reading. “‘I am alive and well. As I write this, it is the year 782. I have been living happily in the Eighth Century of the Imperial Era…’”

Byleth looked over his shoulder as he read. “That’s Ashe’s handwriting,” she pointed out, interrupting him. And of course, out of everyone here, _she_ would know Ashe’s handwriting when she saw it; she’d graded more than enough of his papers.

“So it is!” Sothis said, peering over her shoulder. “So it is! That is indeed the poor boy’s handwriting!”

Maynard’s brow furrowed. “Huh? That doesn’t make a lick of sense. Master Ashe is…”

Edelgard felt a slight smile that dared to be _hopeful_ worm its way onto her face. It was utterly improbable, and yet…

Quickly, Byleth guided her students and the old man into the mansion’s parlor and asked one of the servants to collect Jasper, wherever he was. When all were present, she breathlessly recounted the contents of the letter so far, to their slack-jawed amazement.

Everyone was silent for a long while, until Raphael let out an elated belly laugh. “He’s alive!” he exclaimed, clapping Ignatz gleefully on the shoulder. “Guys, Ashe is alive! Um… I mean… he’s in the past,” he added, his mighty brow furrowing, “but… he’s alive? How does _that_ work?”

Seeing a few skeptical glances, Ingrid spoke up, a hopeful—if disbelieving—smile forming on her face. “Those wax seals on the envelopes are genuine artifacts from the time of Loog and Kyphon,” she said to her classmates, studying the box’s contents, “and the paper is old enough.”

“There’s more to this letter,” Dimitri said, clearing his throat. He unfolded the letter all the way and separated the ancient, well-browned paper into several pages.

“A _lot_ more,” Sylvain said. “Did Ashe write us his entire autobiography?”

“He _would,”_ Felix snidely commented.

Jasper and Laura circled around to Dimitri’s side and glanced at the letter’s contents. “That’s Ashe’s handwriting,” Jasper agreed, his voice hoarse, as Laura’s embrace around him grew tighter and firmer and she looked on. “He always dots his i’s like that.”

Dimitri took a deep breath and began to read the letter aloud.

> _To my old friends, the Blue Lions class of Imperial Year 1180,_
> 
> _If all goes as planned, you will receive this letter, hopefully, soon after what happened in Remire. First, let me assure you that I am alive and well. As I write this, it is the year 782. I have been living happily in the Eighth Century of the Imperial Era for nearly fifty years now._
> 
> _When I fell through the luminous vortex at Remire, I found myself at Zanado; when I managed to make it back to Garreg Mach, I was shocked to find out that I had been thrown into the past— the year 735 to be exact, just twelve years before Faerghus would secede from the Adrestian Empire. It took me a while before I realized I was still alive at all and not a phantom trapped in some sort of purgatory! _
> 
> _On an interesting note, did you know that the then-archbishop of the Church of Seiros, Lady Hestia, looked almost exactly like Lady Rhea? That face must run in the family!_
> 
> _But I digress. Dimitri, Felix, Ingrid, you three especially will be amazed at what happened to me next. At the Officer’s Academy, I managed to become a knight’s squire and became acquainted with Loog and Kyphon themselves—imagine, meeting those living legends before they were even legends to begin with! Some years after my arrival, I became a full-fledged knight under the banner of Fraldarius and served at Kyphon’s side, where somehow, I became well known for my cooking skills. Before I knew it, the War of the Eagle and Lion had begun, and there I stood with them—with the King of Lions Loog Dmitri Blaiddyd and his inseparable companion and chief strategist Kyphon Aries Fraldarius. There I stood, simple Pan the tactician._
> 
> _It was your guidance and training, Professor Byleth, not just my knowledge of history, that let me excel in this role. And Dimitri, Dedue, and Edelgard, as well—whenever I found myself tasked with a problem that history had not yet solved for me, I found myself thinking of the Blue Lions’ strategists and leaders and asking myself what they_ _would do in my stead—what you would do in my stead, that is. And all the rest of you, all of my other friends in our class as well—Ingrid, Raphael, Ignatz, Sylvain, Glenn, Annette, Mercedes, Bernadetta—all of you helped push me forward, even though none of you could be at my side in person. I was strengthened by the time we shared together._
> 
> _It has been a long time since Faerghus won its independence. As the history books say, Pan the tactician retreated into the mists of history with no heirs and no legacy; in accordance with the history I knew, I settled in Gaspard county under the name Leon Duran in the village where I grew up (which was quite smaller four hundred years ago) and raised a family there. I have had five children with my late wife Isabel, three of which (Lonato, Ingrid, and Christophe) have gone out into the world to make their own paths and two of which (Bernard and Annette) have stayed to take over the family trade. (We run a tavern, though Ingrid—of course—wanted to be a knight. Some things never change!)_
> 
> _By the way, that tavern no longer exists in my time. I wonder what my descendants are doing now. Did any of them remain in Gaspard territory, as I hope? Sometimes I wonder if any of them knew me while I was growing up. Thinking too hard about it still gives me a headache._
> 
> _As for myself, I am getting on in years, having recently celebrated my sixty-fourth birthday, and the burdens of a war- and adventure-filled life are fast catching up with me. I’ve therefore decided to leave this letter with my family under instructions to deliver it to Prince Dimitri three hundred ninety-eight years from now and retire to Duscur so I can see those fields of flowers I have heard so much._
> 
> _My dear friends, it pains me to think about you sometimes, and I know many of you must miss me terribly right now. I must confess that from my perspective, it is as though you were all dead and I was the survivor, and in the beginning that thought caused me great and terrible pain—so much that sometimes I wished I had died so that I would not feel such staggering loss._
> 
> _But do not mourn me. My life did not end where our paths ceased to cross. In the many years since I was a student, I have been blessed with great health and good fortune. I was even given the opportunity to live the legends I had always been enamored by. As long as I have lived and as tired as I have become, I hope to live on much longer, Goddess willing._
> 
> _I have placed a dozen other letters in this box—one for each of the Blue Lions, and of course, our professor, one for Jasper, and one for Laura. Please hand those letters to their intended recipients. I have much more to say to them—words I have spent fifty long years crafting, so that I would say to you all exactly how I feel. I can only hope and pray that these letters will find you across the vast gulf of time between us._
> 
> _Goodbye, my friends. I want you all to take care of yourselves and each other. Be well, live long, follow your dreams, and be happy._
> 
> _Sincerely,_
> 
> _Ashe Ubert_

From the beginning of the letter to its end, Dimitri’s voice had slowly reduced itself to a hoarse whisper, and now tears shimmered in his eyes and traced glistening paths down his cheek. He fell silent, set the ancient pages aside, and buried his face in his hands. Dedue rested a comforting hand on his shuddering shoulder, but said nothing. As stoic as he was, there was pain in his eyes.

“He _did,”_ Felix said, though he sounded much less snide now.

“Saint fucking Indech,” Sylvain muttered, awestruck but certainly not dumbstruck, “if it wasn’t Ashe writing it, I wouldn’t believe a word of it.”

Annette sniffled and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “Did you hear that, Ingrid?” she asked, her voice a strangled squeak. “He named his daughters after us.”

Ingrid had no response, because long before Dimitri had finished reading the letter she had started sobbing onto Edelgard’s shoulder and seemed unlikely to stop anytime soon. Edelgard held her steady and let her cry.

Raphael patted Bernadetta on the head. “Hey, Bernadetta! Did you hear that? He named one of his sons after you!”

She recoiled in fear—either from him, from the idea that Ashe would have done something like that, or both. “What? No! He must have—he must have known someone named Bernard during the war! Why would he name a kid after Bernie? That’s—that’s ridiculous!”

Sothis hovered over Byleth’s shoulder. “It is clear,” she said to Byleth, “that you all meant quite a lot to him. You mortals can truly be incredible sometimes. I am amazed by how such short-lived experiences can fix themselves in your memories.”

Felix held his hand over his eyes (Edelgard suspected so that no one could see if he was crying). When Dimitri handed him his letter from the box, he stuffed it into his satchel as though it were some illicit good.

Edelgard was handed her letter from Ashe last. The envelope was worn and old, its yellow-brown edges almost as soft and fuzzy as cotton, and she found herself struck by the fear that it might all crumble to dust in her hands. As much as it weighed like real paper, had the texture of real paper, and the wax seal emblazoned with the lion and the Crest of Blaiddyd caught the light like real wax, it still seemed like something out of a dream, a shared hallucination that would vanish if she so much as blinked.

Like her peers, though, she found herself without the wherewithal to open the letter and read the last words Ashe would ever say to her right then and there, so she slipped the envelope gently into her jacket pocket and hoped it would still be there later.

Maynard, the poor old man whose family had spent the past four centuries hoarding this message, clapped his hands elatedly. He seemed all but ready to dance a jig. “Good Goddess almighty!” he exclaimed. “I’m a descendant of Pan the Tactician!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ONE PERSON in the comments of the last chapter figured out EXACTLY what was going to happen in this chapter and I was so, so, so, so happy about that. I've been planning this for months and I'm so glad there were enough clues for at least one person to predict it!


	16. The White Heron

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Byleth nominates a dancer for the White Heron Cup, Bernadetta makes a new friend, and Edelgard helps Ingrid prepare herself for the winter ball.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, after the last two chapters, you've all more than earned some breathers. Take it easy. Have fun. Nothing bad's gonna happen for a while now. Have some tea.
> 
> And thanks for reading.

Archbishop Rhea stood before the gathered Blue Lions in their classroom, her hands clasped together as though in prayer, her head sadly bowed. “My children, I am deeply and truly sorry for the terrible losses and hardship you have endured.” Her gaze lingered on the empty desk where Ashe had usually sat, which stood in the room like an open wound yet to be bandaged. “I know how heavily grief weighs upon one’s heart. Know that I am praying for your minds and hearts to find peace.” Her voice had a warm, somber tinge to it; something that made it seem fragile and weary beyond the eerie ageless smoothness of her cheeks and brow.

Byleth had taken a seat at the front of the class next to Dimitri and Dedue to give space to Rhea for her address. Rhea’s gaze shifted from the empty desk to her and stayed there, studying her. At this distance, Edelgard might have just imagined the longing, the hunger, in the archbishop’s eyes.

“The Ethereal Moon is upon us. Nine hundred and ninety-five years ago this month, this monastery’s construction was completed, and the occasion is typically marked by a grand winter’s ball and an inter-house dancing competition called the White Heron Cup,” Rhea continued, addressing the class. “Since this is a time of mourning for you all especially, I shall not expect any of you to participate if you do not wish to. Likewise, Professor Byleth, it is entirely up to you whether you wish to nominate and train a student as a representative of the Blue Lions in the White Heron Cup.”

Bernadetta slumped back in her chair and let out a deep, relieved sigh. Tragedy or no tragedy, she wouldn’t have enjoyed the ball anyway and was likely eternally thankful to have been given an out.

“This is a decision for you to make,” Rhea told Byleth. “Confer with your students and inform me when you have decided on your course of action.” With that, she left the classroom and Byleth stood up to take her place.

Byleth cleared her throat. It was her first day teaching again after the incident at Remire; though her mood had much improved after the revelation in Ashe’s hometown, Dimitri and Dedue had both pressured her into taking some extra time off to recuperate. “So,” she said, “you heard the Archbishop. It’s up to you if you want to go to the ball. I hear it’ll be fun.”

“Yeah!” Raphael chimed in. “It’ll be tons of fun! And that’s just what Ashe would want us to do, right?”

“Yeah,” Ignatz said, sounding less enthused.

“The dancing is a different story,” Byleth added. “I, um… don’t know how to dance. At all. So I’d be a really poor teacher. So… not being expected to compete is probably a relief.”

She’d said, more or less, the same thing in Edelgard’s world, except without the last sentence. Instead of teaching one of the Black Eagles to dance in the White Heron Cup, she’d ended up taking lessons from Edelgard, who, of course, had swept the competition. It had been a wonderful month; for the first time, Edelgard had felt truly connected to another person. And then Kronya had murdered Jeralt and everything had started to fall apart…

“Aw, don’t give up so easily, Professor,” Annette said. “You can do it! We all believe in you, right, guys?”

Edelgard raised her hand. “Excuse me, Professor?”

“Yes, Edelgard?”

“I am quite a capable dancer myself and I’d be happy to represent the Blue Lions. Or, if you would like to nominate someone else as house representative, I could teach them in your stead,” she said. After all, if she could teach Dimitri, she could teach anybody.

Byleth’s face brightened. “That’s nice of you. Now, as for who to nominate…”

Bernadetta folded her arms over her chest and tucked her hands into her armpits as though to make absolutely certain that she wouldn’t raise her hand and volunteer by mistake. “Please, anyone but Bernie,” she muttered.

“Professor, I beg of you,” Dimitri said, shaking his head as Byleth’s eyes met his, “please do not choose me as our house representative.”

“I’d be happy to,” Sylvain offered. “I’ll get out there, show off my moves, and drive the ladies wild!”

“Don’t make me waste my time with this shit,” Felix muttered, crossing his arms.

“I’d love to volunteer!” Annette chimed in. “I’ll try as hard as anyone’s ever tried! You can count on it!”

“Please don’t say it’s me,” Ingrid said, shaking her head.

“I’m not going to choose anyone who doesn’t want to do it,” Byleth assured her less-enthusiastic students.

“I can do it,” Raphael said. “Everyone’s gonna think my moves are hilarious!”

Edelgard wasn’t sure she wanted to see Raphael’s ‘hilarious’ dance moves, or Sylvain’s attempts at ‘driving the ladies wild.’ Thankfully, Annette seemed quite willing—

The door to the classroom threw itself open and Glenn Fraldarius, who’d been absent for well over a week, strolled in as nonchalantly as possible, a good-humored grin on his face. All heads turned in his direction. The levity in the room completely vanished.

“Hey, guys,” Glenn said, ignoring the murderous glare Felix was shooting him. “Sorry I’ve been so late—I’ve been really busy with stuff. What’d I miss?”

Everyone just stared. Byleth crossed her arms. “Glenn, you’ve been missing for a week. The Knights have been looking for you. Where were you?”

“I was with Dad. Urgent Fraldarius business—sorry, Felix, you weren’t invited. Anyway, I could’ve sworn I’d left a note.” Glenn brushed the snow off his shoulders and shook it out of his hair. “Geez, what’s with all of you? You look like someone died.”

Ingrid stared at him, revolted, jaw agape. If looks could kill, Felix would have just committed fratricide. Even Raphael looked horrified.

“Dude, not cool,” Sylvain said.

Glenn sat down next to Ingrid. He looked around, seemingly oblivious to the mean looks everyone was giving him. “So, what are we talking about?”

“Um… we’re talking about choosing a representative for the White Heron Cup,” Annette said, nervously twiddling her thumbs.

“Oh! That’s nice! I nominate Felix!”

Felix shook his head vehemently and sank even deeper into his chair.

“Oh, come on, Feelie, you’ll be great at it!” Glenn stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Hey, where’s Ashe? Y’know, that scrawny little weak one?”

“Glenn,” Byleth said testily.

Edelgard was shocked. What in blazes was he doing? Were Those Who Slither in the Dark just all but throwing aside their masks now?

“Oh… did _he_ bite it?” He let out a mirthless laugh. “Poor kid. He was just too sweet for this world. I always knew it’d eat him alive.”

“Shut up, Glenn,” Byleth commanded, her voice as stern and tone as blunt as though she were standing on the battlefield. The cold, merciless look in her eyes and the stern set of her jaw reminded her students quite effectively that she had earned the nickname of ‘the Ashen Demon’ as a mercenary. “Everyone, get out your intermediate tactical primers and turn to page sixty-nine.”

Annette raised her hand. “Professor, what about the White Heron…”

“I’ll choose someone after class. Page sixty-nine.”

There was a flurry from the student body as everyone scrambled for their books. A testament to the tense and shocked mood of the classroom, Sylvain didn’t even chuckle at the page number as much as he wanted to do.

Edelgard had to admit, it was nice to hear Byleth’s voice, calm, cool, and authoritative, echo off the stone walls of the classroom once again. But it was hard to focus on the lesson when she kept finding her attention drawn to Glenn. What was wrong with him? What were he and Thales plotting? She couldn’t help but wonder if such brazen behavior spoke to a new, more terrible plot brewing—worse, perhaps, than Remire.

Class ended, and while Byleth remained at her desk to prepare for her ten o’clock seminar, the rest of the Blue Lions filed out onto the lawn. The tense and silent mood followed them out into the open air and hung over them, a dark cloud to match the gray skies above.

“So how _did_ our poor little silver knight die?” Glenn asked, casually stretching his arms out and curling his hands behind his head. “Arrow to the eye? Knife to the gut? Sucking chest wound? Was it slow? Was it fast? Did he have any time for last words,” he asked, licking his lips, “or was he—”

Ingrid whirled around as best she could with her leg still bandaged and a crutch still keeping her upright, and with a swing of her uninjured arm she turned Glenn’s handsome face into a fountain of blood. He dropped like a stone and hit the ground with a soft, heavy thump and the sound of several shocked outcries

Dimitri and Edelgard grabbed Ingrid by the shoulders to steady her as she reeled backward. “I—I just meant to slap him,” she mumbled, knuckles stained red as she watched Glenn lie motionless on the floor, blood bubbling up from between his lips as it gushed from his nostrils down his chin, bright and cherry-red against his pale face and the snowy grass.

The doors to the classroom swung open; Felix shoved the three of them aside, dropped to his knees in front of Glenn, and punched him in the face again, painting his own knuckles just as Byleth strode out onto the lawn.

Byleth’s eyes were wide with shock for a split second before she composed herself. “What happened?” she barked.

“I’m sorry, Professor,” Ingrid said, dazed. “I—”

“I beat the shit out of him, Professor,” Felix said, his voice cold yet shaking with carefully-restrained rage. His unstained hand flew to his injured shoulder and gingerly pressed against it as he stood over Glenn’s unconscious body. “What does it _look_ like?”

“Wait,” Annette said, “but—”

“I kicked his fucking ass,” Felix said, raising his voice to cover up Annette’s squeaks. “Is there a problem?”

Byleth gave him a piercing, scrutinizing look, as though she could see into his very soul. It was a look Edelgard had come to know very well. Her eyes always seemed so much colder and grayer when she did that.

Glenn moaned and cracked his eyes open. “Fe… lix…” he gasped.

“I don’t know what the fuck you are,” Felix said to him, “but you’re not my brother.”

“One of you take Glenn to the infirmary,” Byleth said to the other students. “Felix, come with me. We need to talk.”

It was, at the very least, an interesting start to the season’ festivities.

* * *

Lunch for the day was a rich onion gratin soup that Edelgard found a perfect balm for the blisteringly cold wind and prickling snow flurries sweeping through the monastery: leeks, shallots, and onions cooked to a rich golden brown in a savory red wine and beef broth, topped with a crisp crust of sourdough bread and baked grated cheese. It was one of her favorites, especially here in the mountains where the winters were almost as cold as they were in Faerghus—especially here at Garreg Mach, specifically. Even the chefs at the Imperial Palace couldn’t make it quite the same as the monastery’s cooks, namely because none of the monastery’s cooks could make it quite the same as each other to begin with. High-class chefs were simply missing the essential _élan_ that the students at Garreg Mach, an eclectic mix of commoners and nobles with varying tastes and skills, possessed in spades.

As long as Dorothea or Annette (who was much more at home with an oven than a stove) wasn’t on kitchen duty, this soup was Edelgard’s favorite winter dish. She sipped hers in silence and solitude, finding herself in a moment of perfect contentment as the warmth of the meal settled in her stomach and slowly bled across her body.

But, of course, all good things had to come to an end.

Hilda slammed her palms on the table in front of her, sending ripples across the surface of her bowl. For the first time, Edelgard noticed that she could just barely see hints of toned, well-defined muscle through her sleeves. “Edelgard, we have a problem,” she said, pale in complexion, her brow furrowed with concern.

Edelgard steeled herself. “What’s wrong?” she asked, fearing the worst. What had Hilda done? Some temporal folly, like what had happened with the two daggers? Were Those Who Slither in the Dark onto her and Claude? Were they in danger?

“You know how Dimitri’s been cleaning the stables every day? Well, he’s—he’s been talking to Marianne because she always spends a lot of time there with Dorte and—”

“Slow down.”

“Dimitri and Marianne are talking to each other.”

“And?”

Hilda took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and exhaled through her nose, her nostrils flaring. “Dimitri and Marianne are _talking_ to each other,” she repeated, leaving a half-second pause between each word.

“I fail to see why that’s your problem. Or _our_ problem, for that matter.”

“Don’t you remember what happened to Marianne in _our_ world?”

“Of course I do,” Edelgard said, irked that Hilda was wasting her time while she was trying to eat.

“Well? What are you going to _do_ about it?” Hilda asked.

Edelgard took a sip of her soup with agonizing slowness, savoring the taste as she squelched the broth through her teeth in a very unprincesslike way, just to spite her.

“Edelgard…”

Edelgard savored her meal.

Hilda put her hands on her hips. “El, I’m _serious!”_

Edelgard swallowed. “Pardon me. This soup is _very_ good. Anyway, why is it any of your business who Marianne makes friends with?”

“El, if this keeps up, she’s gonna enroll in your class! Just like last time!”

“Oh. I see.” She set down her spoon. “Again, why is this _my_ problem?”

“Because I don’t want her to leave the Golden Deer! I couldn’t stop her last time, but we can stop her this time!”

“What if it’s what she wants? Don’t you care about that?”

“How did you feel when you found out that Professor Byleth was teaching the Blue Lions?” Hilda asked.

Edelgard took another spoonful of her soup to keep herself occupied. Devastated. Heartbroken. Betrayed. Forlorn. But she wouldn’t dare say that to Hilda.

“Devastated, huh? Heartbroken? Betrayed? Forlorn?” Hilda guessed. “Well, that’s how _I_ felt when Marianne came up to me and gushed about how, uh… _radiant_ you were, or whatever, because I _knew_ that you were up to no good and I _knew_ she’d be getting herself involved in that and I _knew_ that if she followed you I’d never—” Evidently realizing that her voice was cracking, she forced the rest of her words back down her throat.

“You ‘knew’ I was up to no good?” Edelgard asked, eyeing her suspiciously. “What exactly did you know?” Had Hilda been spying on her all along in their own world? Had she been aware of Edelgard’s plots and deceptions from the beginning? Had she known about the Flame Emperor, about Those Who Slither?

“I’m a _really_ good judge of character. One look at you and I could tell you were plotting something wicked.”

“As opposed to Claude?”

“Well, he _schemes,_ but never wickedly. Anyway, that’s not the point!” Hilda said. “You _stole_ my girlfriend from me!”

“I did nothing of the sort. I would have happily let _you_ join me as well if you had asked. She made her choice and you made yours.”

“Well—” Taken aback by Edelgard’s cool and dispassionate response, she swallowed a lump in her throat. “Well, I don’t want her with Dimitri. He’s violent and crazy; he might hurt her. And if we don’t find a way to turn him against the No-Eyed People…”

“I’ve made significant progress on that front,” Edelgard said.

Hilda’s disposition became a little sunnier. “You have?”

“Well, after what happened in Remire, of course his opinion regarding them has soured considerably. And who was it who swooped in and offered him a pillar of strength to cling to?” Edelgard smirked. “Me.”

Hilda’s lip curled in disgust. “You’re more of a vulture than an eagle, Edelgard.” She sighed and glanced off into the distance. “Just… let _me_ have Marianne this time. You have no idea how much I’ve missed her,” she added, sounding hurt.

“What do you want me to do? Forbid him from talking to her? I’m not his mother. Just enjoy your time with her while you can. It’s entirely possible that nothing will come of their little talks in the stables. Or better yet, tell her to avoid him yourself.”

“Oh, alright,” Hilda said, her shoulders slumping.

Edelgard went back to eating.

“Is it the white hair?” Hilda asked, playing nervously with one of her pink locks. “Should I get a wig or something? Is she _into_ that?”

Edelgard nearly spat out her food and had to struggle not to choke on her own spit. “No, Hilda,” she wheezed, clearing her throat. “No, she is not.”

She sighed. “Well, thanks for nothing, I guess,” she said, and she walked away.

Relieved, Edelgard set her mind to finish her lunch uninterrupted, but made little progress with her soup before—

“Edelgard,” Felix said, standing where Hilda had stood not even a minute ago. His frosty gaze bore into hers as she looked up at him. He bore his usual scowl and carried himself tightly, like a compressed spring.

“Felix?” she asked. “Do I seem somehow eminently more approachable when I’m eating?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Well,” she sighed, setting her spoon down to rest in her soup, “what do you want to talk to me about?”

Felix looked away. “I’m representing our class in the White Heron Cup,” he mumbled, as though he didn’t want anyone to overhear him.

“Oh,” Edelgard said. She supposed she would rather have to teach Felix than Sylvain or Raphael, but she’d been hoping for Annette.

“That’s how I feel,” he said. “The Professor decided it was appropriate punishment for my behavior this morning. If we don’t win the competition, I’ll be on laundry duty all next month. You can teach me, right?”

“Of course,” she said. “Meet me in the training hall after dinner.”

Competition would be tough this year. As in her world, the Golden Deer were likely to choose Lorenz as their representative, who made it a point to excel in everything a noble should excel in. In the Black Eagles, the best dancer was, without a doubt, Dorothea due to her adolescent career as a diva in the Mittelfrank Opera Company; she would likely be the representative unless Ferdinand insisted on taking the spotlight and showing off the ‘legendary footwork’ of House Aegir (he probably would). And here was Felix—stiff, cold, and unenthusiastic. Edelgard had her work cut out for her, to say the least.

But she had taught Byleth how to dance, and she’d been rather stiff at first as well, and she had taught Dimitri to dance, although her memories of those lessons were hazy at best. She could do this.

* * *

“Wrong foot, Felix,” she scolded her unwilling pupil. “Step forward with the left foot, _then_ with your right foot so that the right foot is parallel to the left foot.”

Felix broke away from her, pausing to brush a few stray locks of his long, tied-back dark hair out of his face. “I lead with whichever foot serves me best.”

“Yes, and as I’ve said half a dozen times already, when you dance the waltz, you lead with your left. Your partner follows with her right.”

“This is stupid. I’d rather be practicing my swordplay.”

“If you make a fool out of yourself at the White Heron Cup, you’ll—”

“I know. I’ll be forced to wash the boar’s underwear for a month.” Felix rolled his eyes, crossing his arms. “Don’t remind me.”

“Maybe you _should_ be reminded,” Edelgard retorted. Being a harsh teacher on its own was getting her nowhere. Perhaps lighting a competitive fire under him would galvanize him to improve. Byleth was counting on her to bring glory to the Blue Lions, and she wouldn’t let Felix’s attitude get in the way of that come hell or high water. “Were you aware that I taught Dimitri how to dance when we were little?”

“So _you’re_ that girl he kept going on about back then.”

“That’s right, I am. It would be a shame if I could somehow teach _him_ to do the waltz and not _you.”_

Felix scowled at her, then relented. “Okay. Fine. I’ll get it right this time.”

Edelgard took his hands in hers and led him through the motions again. He wasn’t incapable by any means, merely unwilling. And tense. Tense all over, like coiled springs, his muscles compressed, sinews taut.

“Felix, you need to loosen up. Be flexible. Dancing is about fluidity. You can’t be so stiff.”

“Hmph. I’m doing the motions right, aren’t I?”

“This is the same problem Dimitri had. He couldn’t loosen up.”

Felix’s frown dug itself deeper into his face. “Don’t compare me to him.”

“Stop inviting my comparisons, then.”

“I liked you better when you were lazy.”

“Sorry; I hate to disappoint.” Edelgard hid a wince as Felix stepped on her foot; whether by accident or on purpose, she didn’t know. Felix wasn’t very good at this, but he also tended to be a rather deliberate person, so it could go either way.

They stopped. Felix rubbed his shoulder and winced.

“Is that still giving you trouble?” Edelgard asked him. Though she rarely questioned Byleth’s judgment, she had to admit that there was a chance that dance training could keep his shoulder from healing properly or worsen its condition.

“It’s fine,” he insisted. “I just need one or two more trips to the infirmary and it’ll be good as new.”

“You could say it hurts more than it does and not have to put up with this embarrassment,” she said.

“What kind of coward do you take me for? I’m not going to whine about my arm just to get out of some stupid contest. Now come on. Show me the moves again. I’ll get them right this time.”

She led him through the steps of the waltz again. “Your shoulders should move smoothly, parallel with the floor, not up and down. And turn your head in the direction of the turn.”

“Sure. Fine.”

“So, about Dimitri… why do you call him a boar, anyway?”

“Because that’s what he is,” he said. “He’s a wild animal, nothing more. Not a leader, not the head of a house, not a prince. Everyone else knows it too, not just me. But I’m the only one who knows how ridiculous it is.”

“What’s ridiculous about it?”

“In Faerghus, loyalty to the king is everything. Everyone acts like it’s such a great honor to do whatever he wants, no matter how bad of an idea it is. All this shit about knights and chivalry just leads to people throwing their lives away for people who don’t deserve them. And acting like it’s _heroic.”_ Felix scoffed. “The boar doesn’t deserve a single follower, but once he’s crowned, he’ll say ‘jump,’ and they’ll all say, ‘how high?’ Faerghus is a nation of sheep.”

“Is that what you believe?” Edelgard asked. “You’ve shown yourself to be quite fierce in combat. And you certainly leaped at the chance to savagely beat your older brother. Aren’t you just as much of a wild beast as him?”

With a snarl, Felix threw a punch at her; she was lucky to dodge it. Just as she’d thought, he was much more limber and relaxed when he was fighting. _That_ was the fluidity and grace she wanted to see from him as a dancer. If she could only get him to channel what he already knew about fighting into dancing…

“Point taken,” she said. She stepped away to catch her breath.

“When I was fifteen, I was a squire for a knight,” Felix said, likewise stepping back to give his still-weak arm a rest. “I helped him quell a rebellion in western Faerghus. The boar ‘helped,’ too.”

“That must have been soon after he was found.”

“Yeah. He barely even knew his own name and they _still_ let him out there. I was worried he’d be helpless on the battlefield…” His expression darkened, brow furrowing as though recounting a painful memory. “But he wasn’t. I remember the way he killed his victims. How he watched them suffer. And his face… like it had all the world’s evil packed into it. He might look human, but deep down, he’s a wild boar, goring people on his tusks and crushing their skulls under his hooves and loving every minute of it.”

“Then I’ll retract my statement,” Edelgard said. “But I must say that the fluidity and grace you exhibit when you try to punch someone in the face is exactly what I want to see in your footwork.” She offered him her hands. “Again. And this time, dance like you’re fighting.”

Felix let out an amused snort. “Ridiculous.”

“Does it sound that silly? Dancing requires fluid movements, discipline, flexibility, and grace—all of which can prove immensely beneficial to your swordplay.” Edelgard remembered saying the same thing to Byleth once. “Instead of seeing this as a distraction from your training, see it as a supplement. Move with grace and inherent skill, not just in combat, but in dancing, walking, running, even eating or sleeping, and your ability to fight will improve as well.”

“Fine,” Felix said, and the two of them returned to practicing. He was more pliable now, more willing to listen to her directions, and slowly but surely, he was actually managing to improve a little bit. His attitude and demeanor still needed plenty of work, but physically, there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that she could forge him into a skilled dancer.

“By the way,” Edelgard said as she ran him through a few marginally more successful practices of the waltz steps, “what you said this morning about Glenn…”

“What about it?”

“About him not being your brother. You’ve said things like that before, as I recall. Do you think this Glenn is an impostor like Tomas?”

“I never took you for being so paranoid,” he said, dismissing her claims with a shake of his head. “Sounds like you have to stop reading stupid adventure stories. Ever heard of a metaphor, Your Highness?”

“Wouldn’t it explain his sudden shift in personality?”

“Sudden? He was missing for two years. And what explains _your_ sudden shift in personality?”

“The Goddess spoke to me and told me to get off my lazy ass and get to work,” Edelgard said. There wasn’t much else she could say, but of all the things she wanted this conversation to result in, being mistaken for one of Those Who Slither’s wicked changelings was not one of them. “But I don’t think any divine force would inspire your brother to be such a creep.”

“No. But two years of torture would. Anyway, that thing isn’t my brother anymore—just another boar. Maybe that’s all he ever really was. I just wish I wasn’t the only person in all of Faerghus who can see that.”

“If he _is_ an impostor, though, he might feel threatened if he thinks you know.”

A sardonic, bitter smile crossed his face, the lantern light fluttering in his brandy-brown eyes and accentuating the scowl on his face. It was the first time Edelgard had ever seen him smile, and there wasn’t even the barest hint of mirth to it. “Then let him feel threatened. If he’s an impostor, I’ll put him back in the grave. I’ve trained all my life to be better than Glenn. I can beat a cheap imitation.”

“After a month of dance lessons,” she replied, “I’ll feel better about your assurances.”

Felix laughed at her. “I can’t tell whether you’re full of yourself or just full of shit, Your Highness.”

“Well, as long as you can’t tell,” Edelgard said, smiling through his insult and burying her sudden urge to re-injure his shoulder.

This month was going to be _fun._

The two of them left the training hall. The sky was already pitch-black outside, and the path leading to the dormitories was lined with lanterns casting warm light on the cold snow. Felix had nothing more to say to her on the way back, which she was thankful for.

As they passed the courtyard, Edelgard paused, her ears catching the sound of a faint whisper from behind the evergreen topiary walls and the skeletal, frost-bristled fingers of pruned rosebushes. Fortunately, she didn’t need to tell Felix to be quiet. She inched just a little closer just as a slap rang across the cool night air.

 _“Foolishness, Glenn,”_ Rodrigue’s voice slipped through the verdant curtain, harsh in its anger yet quiet as a whisper. _“You have been forgetting yourself. Any more of your attitude and everything we have worked for will fall apart.”_

_“As if it hasn’t already. Dimitri hates us. And So—”_

Another slap rang out. Edelgard glanced at Felix and saw his face half-hidden in shadow, half-illuminated by the faint light of the nearest lantern; his scowl tightened and eyes narrowed.

 _“Silence. You have caused as much trouble in your own way as_ he _has. Behave yourself from now on. It won’t be long now—”_

_“But Dimitri—”_

_“Dimitri is the son I never had… and always shall be. He will remember who his family is, I assure you.”_

_“Those marks on your neck say otherwise, daddy.”_

A third slap rang out. _“Watch your tongue,_ boy, _or I’ll give you marks of your own. You are too far beneath me to entertain such doubts. Everything is proceeding as planned. Play your role_ properly _until after the coronation… and I promise that after that day, you will be able to do as you please.”_

Edelgard glanced again at Felix, but he had already walked away and was vanishing into the darkness ahead of her, forcing himself to ignore the faux family drama that had been playing out before him.

_“Yes… Father. But still, Felix knows about us.”_

_“And whose fault is_ that, _you muck-brained little gremlin?”_

_“Let me kill him. I can make it look like an accident—”_

_“We have taken enough from our little white lion for now. Leave everything in my hands now, or else I will see to it you never see the sunlight again. Events are unfolding beyond the scope of your knowledge. For now, prepare yourself for the ball… and make sure to treat that lovely fiancee of yours to a night she will never forget.”_

The sound of footsteps came closer, and Edelgard slipped away into the night.

* * *

That Sunday morning, after an exhausting week of tutoring Felix, Edelgard found herself in the monastery’s greenhouse scratching between the ears of a particularly affectionate Varleyion tomcat with mottled, smoky brown and gray fur as he flopped on his back and bared the fluffy white fur of his belly to her. The greenhouse was always warm, which made it one of the preferred places for cats to laze around in during the winter, provided they were swift and sneaky enough to slip inside with the greenhouse keeper or one of the horticulturally inclined students.

The air was thick, warm, and wet, contrasting strongly with the cold, thin air outside, and the sun beat down on the emerald-tinted glass panes that comprised the walls and ceiling. Plants of all shapes and sizes surrounded her—beautiful flowers; tomato crops sagging against wire cages with their luscious red fruits hanging from their branches; fragrant green herbs, mint and rosemary and basil, sprouting from the soil in clusters. The greenhouse teemed with life.

The cat rolled over and tensed up, alert, as the door to the greenhouse opened and Dedue stepped inside. He quietly approached a secluded corner of the greenhouse and set to tending to a crop of long, thin, angrily blood-red peppers that Edelgard recognized from his soups and stews.

Eventually, sensing no threat from Dedue, the cat flopped back onto his side and allowed Edelgard to continue scratching him. She raked her fingernails gently down his flank, steeling herself to resist the temptation to run her fingers through his fluffy, yet forbidden belly fur.

As Dedue tended to his peppers and Edelgard to her cat, the door to the greenhouse creaked open yet again. The top of a disheveled mop of violet hair could just barely be seen over a thicket of bountiful tomato plants.

 _“Alright, Bernie, you’ve got this,”_ Bernadetta whispered to herself as she crept in. _“No one’s ever in the greenhouse at this time of—oh, no, Dedue’s here! Calm down… maybe if you move really, really slowly, he won’t notice…”_

“Hello, Bernadetta,” Dedue said, not moving from his spot or even glancing over his shoulder.

Bernadetta let out a yelp and froze in place.

“You have a habit of speaking to yourself. You would make a poor spy. I understand if you find me frightening, but do not mind me.”

Heartened, if only a little, Bernadetta deeper into the greenhouse. _“Hmm… Where was it?”_ she muttered under her breath, her eyes roving back and forth as she aimlessly studied the greenhouse’s contents. _“Oh, come on… he told you once; you couldn’t have forgotten already… stupid Bernie…_ Oh! H-Hi, Edelgard,” she stammered. “Ooh, i—is that a Varleyion?”

“Yes,” Edelgard said, giving the satisfied cat a thorough pampering. “Would you like to pet this one? He’s quite friendly.”

“Um… s-sure. Thank you.” Bernadetta crept closer and crouched down at the cat’s side, gently rubbing a finger up and down the bridge of his nose. The cat purred louder and rubbed his cheek against the side of her finger. “You know, uh, my great-great-great grandfather bred this breed. These cats are kinda like my cousins, I guess.” A rare smile had blossomed on her face. “I had a cat just like this one at Varley Manor. She’s kinda the only thing I miss about that place.”

“So, what brings you here this morning?” Edelgard asked her.

“Oh, um—nothing!”

“If you lost something in here, maybe I could help you find it.”

“Oh, no, i-it’s nothing, I didn’t… I mean… um…” Bernadetta took a deep breath. “Did, um… did Ashe ever tell you where he kept his little herb garden? He had, uh, lemongrass and chives and a few other things he thought might be mistaken for weeds and…”

“I know where it is,” Dedue said, pulling away from his peppers with a laden wicker basket hanging from the crook of his elbow.

“Oh! Um… g-great,” Bernadetta said. “I guess, uh… I guess he doesn’t need me to look after them, then. Dunno why he told me to do that in his letter…”

“If you would like to look after them, I would be thankful,” Dedue said. “I am too often busy with my own plants… and the affairs of His Highness.” He led her deeper into the greenhouse; as the cat had tired of Edelgard’s attention and slunk away from her, Edelgard followed.

Tucked away in the corner, a small collection of ceramic pots and herbs of various shapes and sizes—Long stalks of chives and lemongrass, fragrant dill and mint, and purple wild marjoram flowers—hid itself behind taller crops, strategically placed to steal sunlight wherever it could. Clustered among the herbs were little oddly-shaped mushrooms.

“Oh, here they are! Thank you,” Bernadetta said. “All the times Ashe showed me this and I guess I… forgot.”

“It is nothing,” Dedue said. “Excuse me.” He sidled around Bernadetta with a gentleness and grace that belied his stature and physique and rummaged around in the little herb garden, collecting a few stalks of lemongrass and marjoram and most of the mushrooms. “I did not know you were interested in gardening.”

“Well, um… a-a bit, yes,” Bernadetta said, stumbling a bit over her words. “I—I like flowers a lot, but I think exotic plants are more interesting, like… um… oh, never mind.”

“Insectivorous plants?” Edelgard offered, noticing that Bernadetta seemed to be on the cusp of making a friend.

Bernadetta looked mortified.

“Insectivorous plants,” Dedue repeated. “Fascinating. Even some plants will do anything to survive. I, too, find such plants interesting.”

“You, uh… you do?”

“Yes,” Dedue said. “Take these mushrooms. Many kinds of mushrooms will kill you painfully and quickly if you take the smallest bite. However, these are edible and delicious. Imagine the first man to eat a mushroom, not knowing whether it would kill him. I can only respect him.”

“I’m imagining the second man,” Bernadetta admitted. “Maybe he saw that the first man lived, and ate one because he thought it was safe, but it turned out to be poisonous…”

“Yes. That is the risk.” Dedue nodded. “He must have felt betrayed, though no betrayal was intended by the first man. But slowly and surely, through the sacrifices of men like him, we learned which mushrooms were edible and which were not.”

He stood up, satisfied with his harvest, and held up one of the honeycomb-shaped caps he had plucked from the soil. “What is most fascinating about mushrooms is that this stalk is an insignificant portion. In a forest, its roots can extend for miles and miles. The extent of its growth is vast. You can pluck every fungus you see, chop down every tree, and rip out every plant, and the fungal network will remain unscathed.” He set the cap back down in his basket with its peers. “You cannot kill a mushroom in a way that matters.”

“Okay,” Bernadetta said.

Edelgard wondered if he was speaking about more than simply mushrooms. Were his mushrooms the Agarthans, hiding themselves underground and occasionally sending up tendrils like Kronya and Solon? Or did he, the last survivor of the people of Duscur, wish that his people had had that resilience and, like a fungus, had remained invisible beneath the forest floor of Fódlan’s cultural landscape?

“Mushrooms grow among the dead,” she pointed out. “As forests decay, they take root.”

“So they do, Lady Edelgard,” Dedue said. “The end of others is their beginning. Bernadetta, thank you. If you take care of Ashe’s garden, I will be in your debt.”

“Oh, um… I… I guess?” Bernadetta said. “I, um… I-I’ll think about it!” she cried out before darting away.

Dedue stared off in the direction she’d vanished into, his stoic face showing the slightest hint of being nonplussed. “Did I frighten her, Lady Edelgard?” he asked.

“No, she’s just like that,” Edelgard assured him. “It’ll take a while, and you’ll have to be gentle, but I think she might like you.”

She left the greenhouse in high spirits and noticed Byleth, Ingrid, and Annette standing together and conversing in front of the frozen-over pond. She could just pick out their voices drifting on the cold air.

 _“I think it’s great that your dad wants you to go to the ball, Professor!”_ Annette chirped, gesticulating enthusiastically.

 _“Everyone says it’s going to be fun,”_ Byleth admitted, _“but I don’t know anything about these things. I don’t know how to dress or dance or…”_

_“Oh, you’ll still have fun!”_

_“I’m in the same boat as you, Professor,”_ Ingrid said. _“I’ve never been good with makeup or dresses or any of those frivolities. But I’ve got no choice but to go, since I’ll be expected to dance with Glenn…”_

 _“I’ll help you both!”_ Annette said. _“I’m great with makeup and picking out dresses and stuff!”_

Byleth shook her head. _“I don’t want you to put in too much work—”_

Edelgard approached them as they conversed. “Then why don’t I help?” she asked. “I’m not particularly wild about clothing, but I’m somewhat proud of my aesthetic eye.”

“Yeah, that’s great!” Annette said, a twinkle in her eyes and a broad smile across her face. “You can help us all with our hair—Mercie always talked about how much you knew about that! And what about your friend Hilda? She’s super good with clothes and makeup and accessories, too, isn’t she?” She turned to Byleth and Ingrid. “With the three of us together, you two are gonna be the prettiest girls at the ball!”

Ingrid sighed wearily. Balls and dances and lovely dresses seemed completely out of her wheelhouse by choice and not by circumstance, but Edelgard knew just as well as she did that as a noblewoman, and an engaged one at that, she had certain obligations. “Alright. I’ll… try it, I suppose.”

Annette cheered. “Way to go, Ingrid!” she cried out, pumping her fists in the air. “Let’s head to town right away! This is gonna be so much fun!”

* * *

For the dressmaker in town, business was most certainly booming, though Edelgard could only feel sympathy for her. Having to put up with spoiled nobles looking to debut new looks in front of their peers and commoners who needed to look their best and only had what they could scrape together as payment and everything in between for the next three weeks was not an enviable position at all.

“So, what are you going to wear to the ball, Edelgard?” Hilda asked her, studying one of the dresses hanging off a simple wooden mannequin approximating the shape of a woman’s torso.

Edelgard tried to remember what she’d worn to the ball in her world. It had been so long ago… and if she were being honest, she mostly only remembered the parts that had had Byleth in them. “I’m just going to wear my ceremonial dress uniform,” she said. “We’re not here to find a dress for _me,_ Hilda.”

“Boring,” Hilda scoffed, rolling her eyes. “This is your one chance all year to really show off just how gorgeous you can be to all the guys! Besides, isn’t Ferdinand expecting you to wear a nice ballgown or something?”

“Ooh, look at this one!” Annette chirped, directing Edelgard’s attention to a lilac-colored dress with layers upon layers of pale purple silk and white lace in elegant patterns. “That’ll match your eyes perfectly, Edelgard!”

“Will it?” Edelgard pretended to look it over. Someone like Annette or Dorothea would be able to describe every single detail of the dress, from the puffiness of its sleeves to the embroidery on its hem to the thread count of the fabric, but she had no eye for such frivolous things. She had about as much interest in this specific dress as she had in dresses in general, or perhaps even less. The neckline was far too low and it had an open back, and the lacy bits weren’t too appealing either. The color did indeed match her eyes, but she suspected it would make her skin look too pale. She would never wear something like that. “I’m sorry, but I prefer high-collared outfits,” she said.

“And hide all that gorgeous skin?” Annette looked horrified.

“I’m afraid you might find yourself disappointed,” Edelgard said, but Hilda grabbed her and unrolled her sleeve.

“She’s right,” Hilda said. “You don’t want to hide _this!”_

Edelgard reminded herself for the umpteenth time that she didn’t have any scars in this world. She was still struggling to change the way she thought about some parts of her body, especially which parts she could comfortably show off.

“But I think _that_ one’s meant for someone a little more… chesty,” Hilda added, nudging Edelgard in the side.

As embarrassed as she was, she nodded. “I agree.”

“Well, there’s no harm in trying it on!” Annette said. “I think it looks pretty.”

Edelgard sighed. Hilda and Annette, especially Annette, were going to keep pestering her until she tried _something_ on. “Fine,” she said, looking at the lilac-colored dress. “I’ll try that on.”

Byleth flipped through a book of fabric swatches. “Is there anything in gray?” she wondered aloud. “Or black?”

Sothis, hovering at her side and peering over her shoulder at the book, put her hands on her hips and pouted. “Listen to yourself! Gray or black? You have already attended a funeral! If I were dressing myself for a fancy event, I would choose something that brings out the color of my eyes.” She paused for a moment, deep in thought. “Er… What color are my eyes, precisely?” she asked Byleth. “I do not recall ever having seen my reflection, since I do not appear in mirrors.”

“Professor, you’d look great in a nice powder blue,” Annette suggested.

“I think a deeper blue would be better, actually,” Edelgard said. “It would make the blue of your eyes and hair seem more vibrant.”

Byleth grunted in assent. “Hmm. Are eyes really that important?”

They are the windows to the soul, Professor,” Edelgard replied.

The curtain that partitioned the changing room from the gallery slid open and the dressmaker led Ingrid through in a pale pastel green dress held in place with pins. A slit ran up the dress to her thigh, showing a sliver of her long, bare leg with every step, and the cut of the top perfectly accentuated her shoulders and collarbone. The dressmaker had done an excellent job working around her one arm that was still healing and the splint on her other leg. She stood like a piece of furniture, stiff, motionless. Her mouth was drawn in a tight, slight, thin-lipped, stoic, close-your-eyes-and-think-of-Faerghus frown.

“You look stunning in that!” Hilda told her.

She looked dead inside.

“I think something darker might work better,” Edelgard said. “Perhaps with the pastel as an accent. As the main color, it makes you look pallid.”

After Edelgard had tried on the dress Annette had pointed out (as expected, it made her look pale, and she wanted nothing more than to pluck off all the lacy bits), Ingrid threw herself back into the search for the proper ballgown with the grim determination of a knight leaping into an unwinnable battle. She tried a few more dresses. Sometimes she smiled when presenting herself to her peers, but it was always a fake smile. Edelgard knew exactly what a fake smile looked like, even if Annette was perhaps too enthusiastic to pick up on it. And no matter how well the dressmaker pinned the dresses to fit the shape of her body, nothing looked like it fit her.

The next time Ingrid ventured behind the curtain, Edelgard followed her in. “Nothing to your liking here, is there?” she asked.

Ingrid shook her head as the dressmaker helped her out of the pinned-together dress, gently easing her bandaged arm through the sleeve. “No, I’m… I’m sorry I’m making this so difficult. I guess this was a bad idea.” Once she’d been stripped down to nothing but her undergarments, she held her free arm over her chest and tried not to shiver.

“I have another style I would like to try,” the dressmaker spoke up. “You will like this one, dear. I guarantee it! It’ll accentuate those lovely child-bearing hips of yours—”

“Excuse me,” Edelgard interrupted, mortified on Ingrid’s behalf by the dressmaker’s choice of vocabulary. “I mean absolutely no disrespect, but may Ingrid and I have some privacy for a few minutes, please?”

“Yes, Your Highness,” the dressmaker said, bowing out to attend to the other customers.

“Thank you,” Ingrid said once she and Edelgard were alone. Edelgard could tell quite easily how much the dressmaker had been bothering her. “This just isn’t working. I know you and Hilda and Annette are putting a lot of work into me, but nothing feels right about it.”

“I see.”

Ingrid smiled weakly. “At least you look nice in yours.”

“Do I?” Edelgard laughed and pinched at the gathered fabric around her shoulder. “I don’t think it suits me at all, neither in style nor in color.”

“No, it’s cute.”

“Well, I don’t think I’ve ever _wanted_ to look cute.”

“Me neither.” Ingrid’s smile showed a few more teeth. “It isn’t fair. The boys can get away with wearing their ceremonial jackets and a pair of black trousers, while we have to choose between all these garish colors and all these obnoxious styles.”

“I agree. Perhaps just once, all of the boys should be forced to pick out the perfect ballgowns and all the girls should wear nice suits.”

Ingrid threw back her head and laughed. “I have a feeling some of the boys might like that a bit too much.”

“And some of the girls,” Edelgard added. “Honestly, I don’t have much trouble wrapping my head around the idea that you don’t like dresses. You’ve always struck me as quite the tomboy.”

Ingrid chuckled. “You’ve got that right. When I was younger, you could usually find me covered in dirt with bugs in my hair and a big smile on my face. I’d always be more at home with a pair of trousers than a skirt. And right now, all these dresses seem to be doing is reminding me of…” She trailed off.

“Of what?”

“Of—” Her voice caught in her throat. “Of Glenn,” she admitted. “Of being a wife, and a mother, and all these things I’m not ready for yet.”

The pause between Glenn’s name and everything else spoke volumes. Ingrid was afraid. Afraid of what Glenn had become, or rather what she’d _thought_ he had become. Afraid of the man she was meant to marry and the life they were meant to share. Afraid of what he might do to her, or what she might be forced to do to him—or forced _not_ to do to him. Edelgard rested a hand on her bare shoulder. Her skin was cold and clammy with nervous sweat.

“Have you read your letter from Ashe yet?” she asked Edelgard, changing the subject.

“No, I haven’t,” Edelgard said. Whenever she held that ancient letter in her hand, it seemed to remind her of her position in this world—an outsider, an impostor—and of the role she had played, accidental though it was, in his death. And on top of that, knowing what she knew about Pan the Tactician in her world, to think of Ashe made her ask herself all sorts of disturbing questions about the course his adventures had taken him on.

“I haven’t, either. Knowing that those are the last words he’ll ever say to me… it’s like when you read a book and you reach the last chapter, and you’re not ready to read it because that would mean finishing the story and saying goodbye to all its characters.” Ingrid sighed. “Besides, I know what he’d tell me. He’d tell me to go forth and fight for my dreams with all my heart. He’d tell me to become as great a knight as him, no matter what it took. And all this stuff about dresses and balls and my fiance just reminds me how quickly the jaws of this trap are closing in on me and how little of a choice I have. I won’t have time to be a knight before the world chooses my place in it for me.”

Edelgard nodded and patted her gently on her shoulder. “I understand. It’s painful to know that your fate has been decided for you. To follow your own path and not the path everyone else has laid for you, you’ll have to turn your back on other people’s desires and choose what you want. All of those decisions will be painful to some degree,” she said, knowing how much it hurt to cut down enemies who could have so easily turned out to be allies, “but that’s the price of living your own life.”

Ingrid smiled, but uneasily, and shook her head.

“Just look at Ignatz, for example. His dream is to be a painter, but following that path will set him against the wishes of his parents. Whether he wants to live for himself or others is up to him and him alone, but he must make that choice knowing that it is a choice between hurting others and hurting himself.” Edelgard’s hand slipped down Ingrid’s arm and curled around her trembling hand, folding her warm skin in on itself and steadying her. “Ask yourself who you would rather hurt, Ingrid.”

“You want me to be selfish.”

Edelgard took her in her arms. She felt her fingertips, not by choice or by design, slip across the contour of her back, tingling against her bare skin, and found herself studying her face. For what little interest she had in makeup or dresses or looking the part of a marriageable noblewoman, she was effortlessly gorgeous. A woman like her, with such a well-shaped face, such gorgeous golden hair, such bright eyes like ripe green apples, didn’t need anything but herself to be beautiful.

For the first time, Edelgard felt flustered to be in such close quarters with her. Trying to beat down the heat that had risen in her face and pooled in her gut, she swallowed nervously and steadied herself. “I want you to know that you _can_ be. You can choose not to be controlled by the whims of others.”

The dressmaker poked her head back into the dressing room, prompting Edelgard to pull away from Ingrid, to her relief. “Excuse me, Your Highness. I have another dress for Lady Ingrid. May I come in?”

“Actually, I have an idea,” Edelgard said. “Excuse me,” she said to the dressmaker, “but can I speak to you in private?”

They spoke in private, consulted the tailor next door, and made a new plan. Both dressmaker and tailor balked a bit at it, but Edelgard had her weight as a princess to throw around and plenty of money to compensate them for their time and extraordinary effort.

The next dress Ingrid showed off to Annette, Hilda, and Byleth was not a dress at all, but rather a quite a few parts from a modified ceremonial dress uniform for a male student. Slim black trousers, a belt for an ornamental saber, a seafoam green blouse, and a forest green waistcoat all embroidered with gold thread clung sleekly with the aid of a dozen fabric pins to her lanky, athletic form, presenting a masculine air while preserving the feminine curve of her hips and chest, and a sharp, smartly-styled black dress jacket with gold epaulets and tassels completed the ensemble. Ingrid struck a bold, authoritative figure; she could have been mistaken for the head of the Blue Lions over Dimitri in such an outfit, if only she had the confidence to match.

“I don’t know about this,” Ingrid said as Edelgard accompanied her out of the changing room and showed her to the others… and to the mirror. “I’m not—”

Her protests evaporated when she caught sight of herself. “Oh,” she said, and not in a disappointed way. There was a little smile trying to tug at the edge of her lip in spite of her nerves, and suddenly, she carried herself with renewed confidence.

“Edelgard,” Hilda sighed, “do you turn _everyone_ you meet into an iconoclast?”

“I like it,” Byleth said.

“It is quite unique, I will give it that,” Sothis commented.

“It looks really cute!” Annette said. “Different, but… cute!”

“Yeah,” Hilda chimed in. “Just like you!”

Ingrid looked herself up and down in the mirror. “I’m going to wear this to the ball,” she decided, and there was a light in her eyes and a purposeful firmness to her jawline that hadn’t been there before.

“That’s great, Ingrid!” Annette cheered. She held up an adorable frilly periwinkle ballgown. “I’m gonna wear this!” She looked over at Byleth, who seemed transfixed by Ingrid’s choice of clothing, although it hadn’t been much of Ingrid’s choice. “Now it’s your turn, Professor!”

Byleth, still fixated on Ingrid, cocked her head like an inquisitive puppy and stroked her chin thoughtfully for a few seconds. “I want that,” she decided.

With some cajoling from Hilda, Edelgard finally deigned to pick a dress for herself in earnest (she settled on a red ballgown, of course, with a high neckline and long sleeves because old habits died hard) and waited for Hilda to decide between pink or burgundy, low neckline or lower neckline, which style of corset—Goddess in heaven, Edelgard had suffered through _sermons_ that weren’t as interminable as this.

Once she and everyone else had made their decisions, had the rest of their measurements taken, and paid the dressmaker a bit in advance for putting up with them all day, Ingrid let out a relieved sigh, her shoulders slumping forward from exhaustion. “It’s finally over,” she said. “Let’s finish up here and go home.”

“Yeah! Once we get back to the dorms, we can work on hair and makeup!” Annette said, still as energetic despite the hours that had passed as she had been when she’d first set foot in here.

Ingrid suddenly looked as though she hadn’t slept in a week.

“Maybe next Sunday,” Edelgard said.

As the five of them headed back to the monastery, Edelgard took Ingrid aside.

“You’re not going to pay for that outfit for me,” Ingrid said, so confidently that Edelgard could tell that she’d thought she knew exactly what she’d been about to say.

“Okay, I won’t,” Edelgard said. “I want to talk to you. About… the ball. And Glenn.”

The way Ingrid looked away from her said enough about her feelings toward him.

“Don’t spend any more time with him than you must,” Edelgard told her. “And if you feel uncomfortable around him… I would be quite happy to steal you away for a while.”

“Steal me away?” Ingrid mustered a nervous laugh. “Edelgard, what are you talking about?”

“All I mean is that if he gives you another excuse to break his nose, I’ll make sure neither of you does anything you’ll regret. I don’t think I could stomach dancing with Ferdinand all night, but I might be able to manage with you.”

“You’d dance with me?” Ingrid asked incredulously with a confused wrinkle of her brow, as though she’d never heard of such a thing.

“Into the wee hours of the morning, if that was what it took,” Edelgard told her. “I find there’s something quite appealing about the idea of a knight and a princess sharing a dance together.”

With the amber light of the setting sun spilling onto her face, her smile looked all the more warmer for it. “Thank you, Edelgard,” Ingrid said. “I’ve been afraid I wouldn’t have any fun at the ball.”

“I’ll see to it you will, no matter who or what stands in my way,” Edelgard said, offering her a firm and understanding smile.


	17. A Warm Embrace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard takes Felix to the White Heron Cup and has an unforgettable night at the winter ball.

Edelgard hadn’t imagined that she would ever feel _anxious_ about a dancing competition, but even after just a week of lessons, she found herself feeling more and more nervous. To lose the White Heron Cup would not be anything of consequence, but it would reflect poorly on her, as the nominated student’s instructor, and on Byleth, as the one who had chosen the Blue Lions’ representative. It would be a blot against her pride. In the grand scheme of things, compared to so many other issues she could concern herself with—Thales was up to something, Cornelia was supposedly on her way back to the monastery to pick up her lost daughter (who, to the Knights of Seiros’ dismay, was as talkative awake as she’d been in a coma), Solon and the Death Knight were still at large—the White Heron Cup was nothing, but for some reason that only made her feel _more_ concerned about its outcome.

Perhaps she would have felt more at ease if she was less concerned about the competition. From the Golden Deer house under Professor Manuela’s tutelage was Lorenz Hellman Gloucester, though he hardly needed any sort of training. From the Black Eagles under Professor Hanneman’s tutelage was Ferdinand von Aegir, whose ‘legendary Aegir footwork’ was not quite as legendary as he thought. Both were far more experienced and far more enthusiastic than Felix Hugo Fraldarius, whom Edelgard had finally taught not to _scowl_ while dancing.

Felix was fit. He was limber, agile, fleet-footed; catlike in more than just his demeanor. Physically, he had everything he needed to win the competition. His attitude, inexperience, and the way he carried himself, though, made him a dark horse in this competition if ever there was one. Ferdinand and Lorenz, if nothing else, could muster charming smiles on command. To beat them, Felix would have to be better than the best.

He wasn’t. Not by a long shot.

She stood back and watched him practice his moves by himself, smoothly tracing the gentle circular path of his steps with an invisible partner. From a distance, he looked graceful. Certainly graceful enough to be mistaken for a skilled dancer.

“Bring your arms in and hold your partner close, Felix,” she called out to him. “You can’t waltz with someone if you’re keeping her at arm’s length.”

Felix gestured incredulously to the thin air he’d been dancing with.

“This is how the competition will be held. Being able to _imagine_ your partner is a mark of skill.”

“This is ridiculous.”

Edelgard sighed and walked up to him. “Ridiculous as it may be, that’s how it’s done. Here, let me remind you. This is the open position.”

With more than a few firm nudges, they took their positions. “Your left arm goes around my waist, like so,” she said. “And my right hand goes on your shoulder, like so.” She felt his arm curl firmly around her waist and reciprocated by placing her hand firmly on his shoulder. She walked him through the steps. “Lead with your right arm. Now, the waltz steps, one, two, three… open out… promenade—put your weight on the balls of your feet—yes, like that—and close. Remember this feeling, the position of your arms, the firmness of your grip.”

“This is a stupid way to run a dancing competition,” Felix said, his eyes darting off to the side so he wouldn’t have to look directly at his instructor as she ran him through the steps again.

“I know,” Edelgard said. “The house representatives should compete in pairs, two from each house. It’s just another way people do things that doesn’t make sense.” She broke away from him. “Keep practicing. Think of it as a form of shadow-boxing.”

As she watched him continue his practice, an unwelcome visitor crept into the training hall. “And here I was thinking you’d have your work cut out for you, Your Princessly Grace,” Claude said, sidling up next to her. “Not your first choice, I take it?”

“I’ll have you know he is bursting with potential,” Edelgard replied.

Felix rolled his ankle and stumbled a bit, but quickly righted himself and went on.

“Ah, yes, bursting,” Claude said, a wry little grin on his face. “So, Edelgard… I’ve heard some rumors that before Ashe died, he left letters for all his classmates to open in the event of his death.”

“Where would you have heard something like that?”

“Have you opened yours yet?”

“Perhaps,” Edelgard said. She hadn’t. The thought of what secrets might lie within still bothered her. And even if the contents were benign, what business did she have reading whatever advice he might have decided to impart to her? He hadn’t even _known_ her.

“You haven’t, have you? If you had, you’d have told me what’s in it. We’re the Time Squad, after all,” he said with a sly little wink. “Alright, how about this? You let me borrow the letter… and I _won’t_ sneak into your bedroom in the dead of night and read it.”

“Bold of you to assume I sleep.”

“Oh, and I’ll show you the new coded message I’ve intercepted.”

Edelgard’s pulse quickened. “What?”

“Oh? _Now_ you’re listening. Why don’t you have your student call it a day? If you think missing a few hours of practice will put him at that severe of a disadvantage, I’ll slip a little… special something into Lorenz and Ferdinand’s drinks the day before the contest.”

“That won’t be necessary,” she said. “Felix,” she called out, “that’s enough for today. We’ll pick up from where we left off tomorrow.”

“About time,” Felix grumbled, and he headed toward the back of the training hall to pick up a wooden sword to practice with. Within seconds, he was in his element, dueling shadows and enemies conjured by his imagination.

Edelgard followed Claude across the academy grounds to the dormitories, coming to a stop at her bedroom. She retrieved the letter from Ashe and brought it with her to Claude’s room. As usual, Claude kept his room in a sort of extremely well-organized mess. The bed was heaped high with layers upon layers of rumpled sheets and blankets and haphazard piles of books; beakers and vials filled with mysterious liquids stood in little disorganized clusters on his dresser. Somehow, despite the chaos, Claude seemed to know exactly where everything was. On his desk was the main attraction—Solon’s encryption machine.

The encryption machine lay open, its lid propped up to reveal a metal surface with eight numbered dials and twenty-six little steel pedals and twenty-six beads of glass embedded within it. Coiled black wires looped around one of its sides. Claude looked down on it and fiddled a bit with one of the dials. “This machine,” he said, once Edelgard had firmly closed the door behind her, “is one of the weirdest ones I’ve ever seen. I’d love to crack it open and see what makes it tick, but it’s so complex that I don’t think anyone outside of the No-Eyed People could put it back together right. Here, let me show you how it works.”

He sat down at his desk, took a little slip of paper, and consulted one of his notebooks, selecting and turning three of the numbered dials and changing the configuration of the loops of black wire protruding from the side of the machine. He pressed down on one of the lettered keys and one of the glass beads lit up with an amber glow. He wrote down a single letter, then pressed another key. Another one of the glass beads lit up, and he wrote down another letter. It was slow going.

“Am I supposed to sit back and watch?” Edelgard asked, crossing her arms.

“What, that’s not fun?”

She glanced over his shoulder. With every key he pressed, corresponding with a letter from the string of gibberish printed on the tiny slip of paper, the glass bead corresponding to another letter lit up, and he wrote it down. The orientation of the dials and position of the wires, it seemed, determined which letter stood for another in the cipher. Gradually, a message was beginning to take shape in Claude’s notebook.

“I’m guessing there are thirty-one separate configurations for this machine,” he said, “and they use a different one each day. That’s why each message has a date on it. Well… probably not the _only_ reason. I’ve got numbers seven through seventeen—not exactly comprehensive, but better than nothing.”

“Where are you finding these messages?” she asked him. She wondered, would he have been foolish enough to ransack Glenn or Rodrigue’s quarters?

“Carrier pigeons and messenger owls,” he said. “I was in the roost the other day—no special reason, just looking after my wyvern—and saw one of the pigeons with a little piece of paper wrapped around its ankle. That’s probably how the No-Eyed People are communicating with their operatives within and without Garreg Mach.”

It was strange, Edelgard thought, that Those Who Slither in the Dark were capable of creating such bizarre and complicated technology as this machine and the vortex underneath Remire, and yet had to send messages via pigeon post like everyone else.

“Anyway, here’s the message,” Claude said, lifting up the notebook he’d copied the decrypted message into so that he and Edelgard could both read it.

_7.12.1180 team in position extraction date set for twenty seven ethereal moon_

“So,” he said, “we can expect _something_ to happen at the end of the month. Saint Cichol’s Day, too. Bummer.”

“Dimitri’s coronation is at the end of the month,” Edelgard noted. “They’re putting some sort of plan in motion around that time.”

“If only they could fit more words onto these little slips of paper,” Claude said. “Then again, short and cryptic is probably good operational security for these guys.” He set the notebook down and closed it, then shut the lid of the encryption machine.

“Keep intercepting as many of these messages as you can,” she told him. “Our window of opportunity for finding something, _anything,_ to tie Those Who Slither in the Dark to the Tragedy of Duscur is growing smaller.”

“Trust me, I’m on top of it,” he said, scratching his chin. “We might be able to get something out of that beast-tamer the Knights of Seiros are keeping captive, but I hear she’s as talkative awake as she is asleep. So, how about that letter?”

Edelgard took the ancient envelope and broke the wax seal, then removed the letter from within it carefully, gingerly, with all the precision of a model-maker piecing together a ship in a bottle. She unfolded it and set it down on the desk.

It read:

> _Dear Edelgard,_
> 
> _In retrospect, I didn’t realize how little I’d known about you until years after we parted ways. Sure, Felix and Sylvain had a lot to say about the pampered princess who’d suddenly decided to put in a little elbow grease behind your back (sorry), but it was only in hindsight that I began to think it was odd. That you changed so suddenly, that you became so giving and so eerily attuned to the needs of others, just like Professor Byleth—someone who always seems to know the right answer. Your attitude was always so strange; as though you already knew everything about us and always knew exactly what to say to us when we needed it. Families take so many forms, as I learned from Lonato and Byleth, and you joined ours so effortlessly that it was like magic. Safe to say, sometimes I thought you really were sent by the Goddess, or at least you were not of this world in some other way!_
> 
> _If that is true, then yours surely must be a terribly lonely life. You can’t shoulder so many other people’s burdens just because you think only you can. Don’t you have any dreams of your own? Protect them. They are more important than everyone else’s problems. Will you spend your whole life serving the world at the cost of your own happiness? Perish the thought—and take it from me, the Undesiring Tactician himself, that sooner or later you will need to stop giving and settle down._
> 
> _Yours Sincerely,_
> 
> _Ashe_

Claude looked down at the letter, dumbfounded. He and Edelgard remained silent for a while, each of them waiting for the other to finish reading.

Finally, he spoke.

“Oh,” he said, disappointed.

Edelgard folded the sheet of paper back up and slipped it back into its envelope. His letter truly had been meant for her.

That night, she read the letter to herself again, and the next morning, she sent out a letter of her own to Volkhard von Arundel.

She had gotten Ashe’s message loud and clear. Maybe if Claude had read it a few more times, he would have gotten it, too.

* * *

The month wore on, and in the blink of an eye, Felix had become as good a dancer as he could be. The White Heron Cup was held just days before Saint Cichol’s Day on the night before the winter ball in the reception hall, a rarely-used part of the monastery that was only cleared of dust for this event, the winter ball, orientation, and graduation. The magnificent chandeliers had been relighted, every single nook and cranny had been cleared of dust and cobwebs, and the walls gleamed as though papered over with gold leaf. It was an oasis of opulence in the monastery. The student body and faculty gathered in a loose semicircle around the dance floor; the judges stood up front, and beside them, an eight-piece band tuned their instruments.

Sir Alois Rangeld stepped forward, breaking ranks with his fellow judges, and cleared his throat. With a formal outfit in lieu of the armor most people usually saw him in, he looked rather small (though not compared to his peers). “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “thank you for gathering here on the eve of the highly anticipated ball to bear witness to the academy-wide dance competition! Welcome to the White Heron Cup!”

Cheers erupted from the audience.

“The competition will be judged by… me! Your humble servant, Alois Rangeld! It’s so good to see all your smiling faces here on this beautiful evening. Ah, the White Heron Cup…” he sighed, waxing nostalgic while his fellow judges Manuela and Shamir glared at him to get on with the introductions. “It reminds me of how I met my wife. I was at a village’s harvest festival some time ago. There was a full moon bathing everything in its cool glow. She appeared out of nowhere, dancing gracefully in the moonlight, as lovely as the fairest fairy that ever fared!”

“That story sounds fake,” Felix muttered.

“I think it’s a wonderful story,” Annette said.

“We soon fell in love and tied the knot,” Alois continued, speaking a little faster once he’d looked over his shoulder and spied Shamir drawing a finger across her throat. “Now we have a daughter, who’s as bright and beautiful as a sunny morning. And so, whenever I see people dancing, I think of my wife, and my heart… does a little waltz.”

A few of the students cooed _“Awww”_ in a little chorus, but most of the audience just shuffled around, bored. Edelgard thought about Alois’ wife, which called to mind _her_ wife, and a twinge of nostalgia dueled with the anxiety already twisting in her gut. Homesickness in a very literal sense, not for a place but for a person. She glanced at Byleth and wished she hadn’t; she was beautiful in that way only _she_ could be, and to look upon her brought forth a surge of guilt. Six years ago on this very day, Edelgard had stepped forward to compete, looking back at Byleth for encouragement (that she didn’t need, of course, because she could have danced circles around Lorenz and Sylvain even on a bad day) just to see the proud little twinkle in her eye.

“Anyway,” Alois said, “introducing my two fellow judges. First, the acclaimed former songstress of the Mittelfrank Opera Company, the fabulous Miss Manuela Casagranda!”

She stepped forward and took a deep bow, giving everyone in the audience a good look at her ample cleavage. In the gathered crowd, Professor Hanneman clasped a hand over his mouth and tut-tutted into it. _“Good heavens, woman,”_ he muttered under his breath.

Bolstered by the applause she got (mostly from the male students), Manuela took another bow. “Yes, yes, thank you. Oh, and it should go without saying, but I swear to show no bias to my own house.”

“And last but not least,” Alois said as Manuela stepped back and Shamir stepped forward, “the glamorous assassin who does all of _her_ dancing in the dead of night… my fellow Knight of Seiros, Shamir Nevrand!”

Shamir said nothing but blew a lock of her dark hair out of her face.

“The three of us swear on our honor to judge the following proceedings with utmost impartiality and fairness! And with that, will the representatives of each house please make their way to the stage?”

Cheers, jeers, well-wishes, and everything in between followed Felix, Lorenz, and Ferdinand as they stepped forward to face the judges, all dressed in their finest dress uniforms. The rest of the faculty and student body crowded around in a semicircle, their eyes firmly planted on their house’s representatives. Edelgard stood with the rest of the Blue Lions, her arms firmly folded over her chest.

“He will do better than I, at least,” Dimitri said, shaking his head.

Annette shook her fist in the air. “You got this, Felix! We all believe in you!”

Felix glanced over his shoulder at her and rolled his eyes.

“Thank you for your enthusiasm,” Alois said to the students. “Now, from this point on,” he added, lowering his voice to a stage whisper, “I must ask that the audience to refrain from cheering for or heckling any representatives, and save your applause for the end. Now, contestants, are you ready to dance? And is the band ready to play?”

In the corner of the reception hall, the string quintet and woodwind trio brought up their instruments and prepared to play their first notes.

“Very well…” He stepped back to join the rest of his fellow judges. “Begin!”

The band began to play the gentle, majestic notes of “On the Beautiful Blue Airmid,” beginning with shimmering violins and subdued staccato notes from the oboe and clarinet, and after a lively flourish of the ensemble, the double bass began to play the three-step beat of the waltz beneath a lush, slow, rolling melody.

The three students danced with invisible partners, tracing the steps of the waltz by themselves. Edelgard couldn’t help but worry—without a partner like her, she couldn’t count on anyone but Felix himself to correct even the slightest misstep.

 _“Relax,”_ Annette whispered to her, patting her on the shoulder. _“Just close your eyes and enjoy the music. He’ll be fine.”_

Edelgard took a deep breath to quell her nerves. It wouldn’t make a difference if she watched or not, but her eyes were glued on Felix. She couldn’t convince herself to do anything else but watch him like a hawk.

It felt like an eternity, but after ten minutes the waltz reached its climax and the three dancers came to a stop.

Alois broke the ensuing silence with a delighted clap of his hands. “Splendid!” he boomed, letting out a gregarious laugh. “All three of you were fantastic! Now, let’s hear what the judges have to say…”

Manuela stepped forward. “Oh, my. Let’s see. I suppose I have no choice but to vote for… the Black Eagles’ house representative, Ferdinand von Aegir. I must say I was surprised by your… inventive style.”

Ferdinand gave her a deep bow. “You humble me, Professor. My waltz footwork has been passed down the Aegir family for generations. Thank you for your vote.”

Edelgard forced herself to breathe. To win, both of the next two judges would have to vote for Felix. Was such a thing possible? Maybe she could hope for a tie at best…

Shamir stepped forward. “I vote for the Blue Lions’ house rep. Felix Fraldarius.”

Lorenz gasped. Murmurs rippled through the audience. Felix’s jaw dropped.

“The way you carried yourself was striking,” she added.

Felix crossed his arms.

 _“Say ‘thank you,’”_ Edelgard hissed at him through gritted teeth, her fingernails cutting crescents into her palms from how hard she clenched her fists.

As though her whisper had somehow reached his ears despite the distance between them, Felix offered Shamir a curt nod. “Thank you.”

“Great feedback, both of you!” Alois told his peers, beaming with an ear-to-ear grin. “Well then, let’s see… factoring my own humble opinion…”

He would vote for Lorenz. Edelgard was sure of it. (Frankly, she was surprised Manuela, at the very least, _hadn’t,_ professed lack of bias aside.) That was the best outcome she could hope for—a three-way tie between the three houses would be preferable to losing.

Alois scratched his scruffy chin for a bit.

“While we’re young,” Shamir muttered, crossing her arms and shifting her weight from one leg to another.

“Yes,” he said, “we have a winner! And I will announce who it is… right now! Without any delay! Without… a single… second… more…”

“Get on with it,” Hanneman grumbled.

“Yes, get on with it!” Sothis shouted, making as much noise as she wanted since only three people in the audience could hear her.

“The winner… of this year’s… White… Heron… Cup… is…!”

“Make up your mind already,” Jeralt said.

Alois wiped sweat from his brow. “The winner is… the Blue Lion House!”

In the silence that followed, one could hear a feather land on one of the chandeliers. Lorenz’s jaw all but fell to the floor.

“Nonsense,” Felix said.

“Well,” Dorothea muttered from within the crowd, “he does have a sort of… dark and stormy appeal.”

“That one’s brooding demeanor may have won him one or two votes,” Sothis said to Byleth. “Somehow, you chose a winner.”

“Once more, please give a big round of applause for all three of our talented participants!” Alois shouted out over the susurrus, clapping his hands. Manuela and Shamir joined in, and then the applause spread through the whole audience as Ferdinand and Lorenz turned to face the crowd and took their bows. The crowd surged forward and enveloped the dancers.

 _“To think I would suffer such a defeat at dancing,”_ Lorenz could be heard saying over the chatter of his fellow Golden Deer students. _“My father is liable to disinherit me.”_

 _“I_ told _Professor Manuela she ought to have picked me,”_ Arcturus grumbled.

 _“I had feared this might happen,”_ Ferdinand said. _“I am almost sorry I volunteered in the first place. You were right, Dorothea—the representative ought to have been_ you.”

 _“Rest assured that were_ I _the judge, I would have voted for you,”_ Hubert told him.

For the first time all night, Felix cracked a smile, as though inwardly delighted by the suffering and lamentations of his enemies.

“Excellent work, Felix,” Edelgard said to him. “And here I was thinking your attitude would be a detriment. It seems to have become your greatest strength.”

The smile on Felix’s face vanished. “Hmph. I won’t have to wash the boar’s underwear. That’s all that matters to me.”

Dimitri furrowed his brow. “What’s this about my underwear?”

The Blue Lions headed out of the reception hall in as neat and orderly a line as they could muster, given the excitement hanging in the air. Edelgard had just barely stepped out of the door when it hit her like a hammer splitting her skull open. Another splitting, head-exploding headache; the world around her wavered and fractured. For a moment, she saw the ceiling of her bedroom at the Imperial Palace, and then it was gone; she found herself slumped backward into Ingrid’s arms.

“Careful there,” Ingrid told her, steadying her. “You and the Professor must have tripped on something.”

Edelgard regained her balance.

“Or maybe an inner-ear issue?”

“Probably,” she said. “Or perhaps Mercedes’ brain worms.” Edelgard took a deep breath.

It had been a minor fainting spell compared to the others, but it meant the same thing—somewhere out there, Those Who Slither in the Dark were continuing their experiments.

* * *

With the White Heron Cup over and done with, the Blue Lions met in their classroom to discuss the next pressing matter—tomorrow’s ball. Everyone’s faces were flushed with a warm, exuberant glow and an apprehensive, yet excited energy seemed to gather around the entire class like steam in a sauna.

“This is the only ball of the year,” Dimitri said, letting out a weary sigh, “and I can see why. Everyone is absurdly excited.”

“Your Highness, you sound so detached. We are all encourage to enjoy the ball tomorrow,” Dedue said, though Edelgard doubted he himself was going to. He’d made some remarks earlier in the week about not wishing to frighten anyone with his presence.

“Right you are.” Dimitri let out another sigh. “What a burden.”

Felix nodded. “Huh. I never thought we’d see eye to eye, but I agree. I’d rather be swinging my blade than wasting my time with some girl at a ball.”

“But Felix!” Annette cried out, scandalized. “You just won the White Heron Cup! Girls are gonna be lining up to dance with you!”

“What a bother,” he replied, his natural scowl returning to his face.

“Oh, don’t worry, Felix,” Glenn assured him, patting him on the shoulder, then flinching in preparation for a blow that never came. “I’ll just put my hair up in a topknot and wait for all the girls to mistake me for you! Assuming the old ball and chain doesn’t mind,” he added with a sideways glance at Ingrid.

“Felix, Your Highness, you’re joking, right?” Sylvain asked. “This is our chance to dance with all of the ladies of the academy to our hearts’ content. You wanna throw away the best day of the whole year for _sword practice?”_

Ignatz hunched his shoulders and bowed his head, deep in thought. “You can ask… anyone to the dance, right? Ugh, what do I do?”

Sylvain laid an arm across his back. “Don’t you worry, Iggy. I’ll do you a favor and give you a crash course in chatting up girls. By tomorrow night, you’ll be an expert! So, who’s caught your eye? Anyone in particular?”

“You guys can have all the girls you want,” Raphael said. “It’s the feast I’m interested in! Right, Ingrid? I heard it’s gonna be all-you-can-eat!”

“If it’s all _you_ can eat,” Felix said, “they must be making enough to feed an army.”

“Ooh, this’ll be so much fun!” Annette said. “I’d say it warrants at least a tiny bit of makeup, right, Ingrid? And you, too, Professor! You both promised!”

Ingrid scratched her head. “Right… well… yes, I promised.”

“Then it’s settled! Professor, Edelgard, let’s all meet up in Ingrid’s room tomorrow morning! Oh, I’m so excited! And tell Hilda to come over with her perfumes! Bernie, do you wanna come, too?”

Bernadetta, who’d been doing her best to hide in the crowd, vehemently shook her head. “No! Absolutely n—I-I mean, I don’t intend to go to the ball, either… you wouldn’t catch me dancing any sooner than you’d catch a fish swimming through the sky!”

“Ashe knew a story about that,” Ingrid said, sighing. “The Ballad of the Wind Fish…”

Dimitri stepped back from the group, eyes downcast, deep in thought. “My friends, I have been thinking. Our time is quickly coming to an end. There are only… two more months, is it, before we all graduate and go our separate ways? And I am to be crowned king very soon. It won’t be long now before we’re all dukes and counts and margraves and so on and so forth…” His eyes met Ignatz’s and he seemed to realize that there were commoners in the room as well. “And distinguished knights, of course. There is no telling where life will take us after we leave here. What say you all to returning here at some time in the future?”

“A fine notion, Your Highness,” Dedue said to him. “Perhaps five years from now?”

“Oh!” Byleth’s eyes lit up. “That’s when the monastery turns one thousand, right? The Millennial Fair?”

“The Millennium Festival,” Dimitri said, smiling at her. “I hear the celebration will make tomorrow’s ball seem like a child’s birthday party. Nobles and commoners alike, princes and princesses, knights, merchants, and others from all across Fódlan will be there. It will be the perfect excuse for all of us to return here. Wherever we are in five years’ time, whoever we have become… we can still all celebrate our reunion here, can we not?”

“A chance to see you all again? I wouldn’t miss it for the world!” Annette said. “And if… If Mercie is still around, I’ll drag her down here with me!”

“And of course, Professor, I would love for you two to join us here as well.”

“I’m sure the Professor will still be here in five years,” Ignatz said. “But you’ll have taught so many other classes and so many other students by then, you might have forgotten about us!”

Byleth shook her head. “I could never forget about any of you. I’ll be here.”

“And you, Edelgard?” Dimitri asked.

Edelgard felt his cool blue eyes turn on her as she pondered the question. The Millennium Festival. Of course. She’d had the same idea in her world. Five years from now, Fódlan would be engulfed in war. Five years from now, fire would sweep across the land and blood would water the soil. Five years from now, she wouldn’t be here. She didn’t know how long it would take to find a way back to her own world, but the thought that she might still be trapped in this one for five years or more made her blood run cold. Five years away from her empire, five years away from her _wife—_ she’d surely go mad if she had to endure that. Ultimately, this wasn’t an arrangement she could in good conscience assent to. But then again, hadn’t she already made even more drastic decisions regarding the course of her counterpart’s life here? And she had done plenty of unconscionable things in her life. What was this petty little promise compared to the role she had played as the Flame Emperor?

In the absence of an answer, the smile on Dimitri’s face began to curl downward.

“Of course,” Edelgard told him. “Of course I’ll be here.”

“Good,” he said, satisfied. “Then it’s settled. Even if the Millennium Festival should be… canceled, I promise to return here. Even if I have to drag myself through hell.”

The class fell silent, no longer abuzz with excitement. Dimitri’s last words had put out the fires of their hearts as effectively as any bucket of water could.

“Okay,” Byleth said. “Let’s all get a good night’s sleep and prepare for the ball. I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

The rest of the students headed back to their dorms, with Dimitri, Byleth, and Edelgard as the last to leave, walking out onto the well-trampled snowy lawn.

“It _was_ quite an exhilarating evening, wasn’t it?” he asked them, his breath leaving his mouth in little puffs of smoke. “I’d never imagined that Felix could dance like that. He was so… _cool._ I suppose I have you to thank for that, Edelgard.”

“He wasn’t the most enthusiastic student,” Edelgard said, wrapping herself up in her cloak, “but he certainly was diligent and motivated. I’m relieved that _that_ was enough to see him through. Frankly, I’m still in awe that he won.”

The three of them stopped in their tracks; the air seemed to have suddenly become twice as cold. Thales seemed to congeal out of the darkness like a lump of curdled milk, standing before Dimitri.

“Ah,” he said with a little bow, “Your Highness. I had hoped I’d be able to catch you tonight.”

Dimitri curled his fists so tightly that the cold leather of his gloves squeaked. “Rodrigue,” he spat.

“Your son won the White Heron Cup,” Byleth told him. She spoke like a handshake.

“I know. I was watching from the back of the reception hall,” Thales said. “Now, Dimitri, have you given any thought to your coronation? You and I are to leave for Fhirdiad the day after tomorrow’s ball. I hope you are prepared.”

Dimitri took a deep breath to calm his nerves, then glanced at Byleth and Edelgard. “I am prepared, Rodrigue.”

“Very well then. I will collect you in the morning… so take care you do not dance the night away.” There was a wry, mocking twitch of Thales’ lips as his gaze drifted toward Edelgard, and with his eyes upon her she suddenly felt like a butterfly pinned to a cork board. “Though the journey will likely be long and uneventful, with plenty of time for resting.”

“I should be going to bed,” Dimitri said. “Tomorrow will be a big day.”

“Yes, of course. I will take my leave of you. Sleep well, my prince.” Thales slipped back into the darkness, the snow crunching under his boots.

When Thales had vanished, Dimitri let out a sigh, his shoulders slumping forward, as though meeting him had drained him of his vitality. “Ah… yes… my coronation,” he muttered, shaking his head. “We have all been so preoccupied with Remire and Tomas’ betrayal and Ashe’s… passing. I nearly forgot that I invited you two to attend. It is okay if you cannot join me,” he hastily added. “I know this is sudden.”

Byleth thought for a moment. “Does this mean you’re graduating early?”

“Huh? Oh, no, no, I…”

“So you’re dropping out of the academy.”

“Heavens no, of course—” Dimitri shook his head in vehement denial. “The coronation is just… getting the formalities out of the way. It will be more of a matter of paperwork than anything else. I will come back with you.”

“Good. You still have to clean the stables for the rest of the term,” she said.

“Yes, Professor,” he replied. “I would be remiss to leave you all so suddenly… and I would hate to miss out on even a single day of your teaching.”

Byleth shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “I’d be happy to come with you.”

Dimitri smiled. “You do not know how happy you have made me. And what about you, Edelgard? Do you still think you could join us?”

Edelgard found herself torn yet again. If Thales was going to be accompanying Dimitri to Fhirdiad, then this whole thing stank of a trap. But if she refused to go to the coronation—though she had already promised she would—she wouldn’t be able to stop him from sinking his claws into Dimitri again. This could easily be a plot by Thales to eliminate his greatest obstacles—Byleth and Edelgard, the only two people Dimitri trusted more than Those Who Slither in the Dark—in one fell swoop, but how could Edelgard allow herself to take her eyes off Dimitri?

“I might have to bring Hubert with me,” she said. “No, he would likely insist. After what happened in Remire, he would probably go mad if I left without him.”

“He is welcome to join you,” he answered. “Whatever you need, I would happily provide.”

“I’ll tell him to pack his bags, then,” she said, and a warm smile blossomed on Dimitri’s face.

“Thank you, Edelgard. You don’t know how much it means to me that… I will not be alone up there,” he said. “Now, let us all go to bed. I will see you both at tomorrow’s ball.”

He struck out for the dormitories, his footsteps marking his trail into the darkness that swallowed him up just as it had swallowed up Thales.

“Didn’t Dimitri used to like Rodrigue?” Byleth asked.

“Hmm… that is indeed strange,” Sothis said, coalescing out of thin air at her side. “Something has come between them.”

“I wonder what,” Edelgard said.

* * *

The ball was a splendid affair. The warmth of dozens of people—students, teachers, knights, visiting alumni—pressed into the reception hall filled the air with a thick and heady tingle of excitement. Ferdinand von Aegir was a gentle and attentive dance partner, if nothing else, and struck a dashing figure in his red-and-black dress uniform as he led Edelgard in slow circles to the beat of the band’s music—the Blue Airmid waltz again, of course, because one simply could _not_ dance to anything else at such a formal affair. His hand gently, yet firmly led her on as her eyes roved around the hall. Dimitri had found his dance partner, having somehow convinced Marianne to accompany him to the ball in spite of her meekness (or perhaps Hilda had convinced her, and was currently stewing at her seat as she watched her love fall into the clutches of yet another wielder of the Crest of Flames), and his long blue cape swirled around the two of them as he hesitantly, carefully took his clumsy steps across the dance floor. Just like last time, Claude had managed to drag Byleth out onto the dance floor, offering her the first of what would be many, many, _many_ dances. No lack of skill would keep poor Byleth from being swarmed with requests tonight; teachers and students alike were just too smitten with her. And of course, Felix, the winner of the White Heron Cup, had to beat off the ladies with a proverbial stick; everybody wanted to behold his graceful footwork and smoldering glower (Sylvain was supplicating to be their second choice).

Ingrid sat at one of the tables, tearing into a plate of hors-d’oeuvres that Edelgard was sure had been meant for everyone at the table with the savagery and ferocity of a starving bear while Glenn could only sit and stare. She looked quite handsome in her costume for the ball, cutting a sharp figure in stark contrast to all the flowing ballgowns and ruffles and lace adorning her fellow girls; her golden hair had been done up in a tight, braided bun by Edelgard’s nimble fingers (on Hilda’s suggestion), and even from a distance Edelgard could see the glow that even a light application of makeup had added to her face. She was radiant to behold, and Edelgard felt a swell of pride in her heart.

“Perhaps now would be an opportune moment to switch partners, dear,” Ferdinand said as the band prepared to strike up another waltz tune. “I see you can hardly keep your eyes off of Lady Galatea.”

“Is that so?” Edelgard asked, noticing that she had indeed been staring at her quite frequently over the course of the past ten minutes. “I do apologize.”

“Oh, no, no need for that! I was just thinking it was time to drag Hubert onto the dance floor. He is not even eating or talking, merely sulking in the corner next to that pitcher of coffee!” He broke away from her and strode off the dance floor. “Hubert!” he called out to a startled Hubert standing in the corner with a mug of muddy coffee in his hands. “Mark my words, you shall have this next dance, come hell or high water!”

Edelgard’s stomach growled; she hadn’t had so much as a morsel to eat, save for a few pastries Annette had had on hand, since breakfast that morning due to all the work she had put into getting herself, Ingrid, and Byleth ready for the ball. She took an empty seat at the table with Ingrid, Glenn, and two handsome blond men she later learned were Ingrid’s older brothers. “Excuse me,” she said as she sat down, “may I have this seat?”

“Can we really say no if you’ve already taken it?” Glenn grumbled. “So, Princess Edelgard, are you responsible for this?” he asked, gesturing to his betrothed.

Edelgard snatched up one of the dwindling pastry-wrapped figs and all but swallowed it in one bite. “Responsible for what, exactly?” she asked. “Her appetite? I’ll admit we didn’t have time for lunch. I’m starved as well.”

“Oh, no, Ingrid’s always like this,” one of Ingrid’s brothers said. “We ate before we got here.”

Ingrid stared at him with horror, her cheeks bulging like a chipmunk’s. She hastily swallowed her food and dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “I’m sorry, Agnar. I wasn’t thinking; I didn’t mean to be selfish.”

“It’s alright,” the other brother said, picking up the last fig roll. “Pretty sure they’re gonna replace this plate once we’re done with it. That’s the best thing about this place; at home, we’re always tightening our belts—”

Agnar nudged him in the side. _“Kennet,”_ he hissed, gesturing to Edelgard, _“that’s the Adrestian Emperor’s ninth daughter!”_

“Oh!” Kennet set the roll back down on the plate and nudged it toward her. “So, uh, Your Highness… are you rich? And are you single?”

Ingrid cringed. She looked like she had half a mind to start burrowing through the floor like a mole.

“There is indeed only one of me,” Edelgard said, taking his peace offering, “but I’m afraid I am spoken for.”

“As I was saying,” Glenn said, gesturing again to her, “Edelgard, are you responsible for this?”

“Hilda and I did her hair,” Edelgard said. She ate the last fig roll. “Annette did the makeup. Oh, do you mean the outfit? Do you not approve?”

“I think it looks stunning,” Agnar said.

“Yes,” Kennet said, “it’s incredibly knightly.”

Outnumbered, Glenn seemed to deflate. “It’s fine,” he said, though he’d clearly intended to start something over it.

Ingrid sank deeper into her seat, mortified, but fortunately for her, the main course came to her rescue—herb crusted rack of lamb, its exterior crisp and golden and its interior a lovely medium-rare pink, the meat so tender it was all but falling off the bone, served with roasted brussels sprouts and cranberries, a tangy arugula salad, a steaming baked potato, and a glass of red wine. She attacked her meal with the shockingly-methodical ferocity she was known for, striking at it with knife and fork like a skilled knight striking at a demonic beast with a lance. Not so much as a morsel of food landed anywhere but in her mouth, no matter how quickly she ate. It wasn’t so different from how Byleth ate, as a matter of fact, though Byleth typically ate much faster unless Edelgard was there to urge her to savor it.

As her thoughts turned to Byleth, Edelgard found herself preoccupied with thoughts of her wedding. They hadn’t used this reception hall for it—the weather had been gorgeous and it had been the height of summer, so all the eating and dancing had been done outside—but the festivities had been remarkably like this one. The band had even played the Blue Airmid, because _of course_ they did; _every_ band played the Blue Airmid. Edelgard had danced with just about everyone in the Black Eagles Strike Force, except for Jeritza, who’d intimidated the cook into serving dessert early and could not be separated from his peach sorbet, and Lysithea, who’d still been wheelchair-bound in the aftermath of her Crest-removal procedures. But she had danced the longest and most passionately with Byleth, reveling the most in the warmth of her body. With the night falling and the sky turning black and many of the guests beginning to retire, she had rested her weary head on her wife’s pillowy bosom, letting the steady thump of her heartbeat fill her ear as the two of them dispensed with any sort of elegant waltz forms and reduced themselves to simply swaying in place as they held each other in their arms.

She watched Byleth trade partners, one student after another. There was no way, even if she was lucky enough to squeeze through the crowd queued up to dance with Garreg Mach’s new favorite professor, that she could dance like that with Byleth tonight. It simply couldn’t be done. That woman was not her wife. This was a woman who had yet to find her heartbeat. That intimacy in this world was forbidden to her.

As Ingrid cleaned her plate—almost in a _literal_ sense; her plate was so spotless that it almost looked clean enough to serve another meal to someone else on, save for the bones—Edelgard stood up and offered her hand to her. “Lady Ingrid of House Galatea, may I have this dance?”

Ingrid looked up at her. “Now?” she asked.

Glenn stood up. _“Now?”_

Edelgard glared sharply at him. _Having fun playing the part of a controlling husband, are you, Kronya?_ she wanted to ask him. “Why not?” she asked Ingrid.

With a smile on her face, Ingrid stood up and took her hand, rising above her. “As long as you’re willing to lead, Your Highness; I’m no good at dancing at all.”

The band began to play its next piece. The composition of the dance floor had changed considerably. Hilda had finally stolen Marianne back, and the two of them twirled gently across the floor in a slow swirl of pink and baby blue; Dimitri, embarrassed by his clumsiness, had rejoined Sylvain at his table and gone to halfheartedly picking at food he couldn’t taste anyway; Claude had found a new dance partner in Petra and Byleth in her fellow professor Manuela after a string of students; Annette had finally coaxed Felix onto the dance floor.

“I never thought you’d need to rescue me from myself,” Ingrid said, curling her arm around Edelgard’s waist and taking her other hand in hers. “I’m sorry. I made quite an ass of myself, didn’t I?”

“No, don’t worry. Siblings are as siblings do,” Edelgard answered, the trite little aphorism slipping glibly off her tongue and leaving something bitter and sour in its wake.

“I guess you should know, with the ten you’ve got,” Ingrid replied. “This isn’t so bad,” she mused as Edelgard gently guided her through the steps of the waltz. “You’re certainly less strict of an instructor now than you were with Felix.”

“The competition is over, Ingrid,” Edelgard told her, returning her smile with one of her own. “Here, nobody cares how well you dance…” She glanced over Ingrid’s shoulder and caught sight of Hubert stumbling over Ferdinand’s feet. “…Or how poorly.”

“So dressing up for this was unnecessary.”

“I wouldn’t say _that,”_ she said, looking up into Ingrid’s eyes. Even the subtlest application of mascara made them stand out so much more from the rest of her face. And her skin was smoother, her cheeks rosier, her lips redder and glistening in the light; if she’d been beautiful before, she was angelic now. “I’ll admit I’m not one for makeup and so on, either,” she added—why did her chest feel so tight all of a sudden?—“but every so often, I understand the appeal of looking one’s best.”

Ingrid’s cheeks turned even redder.

“One of these days, I’ll have to paint that face of yours,” Edelgard told her.

She laughed. “How many times are you going to threaten me with that?” she asked, a twinkle in her green eyes. “I can’t sit still that long when there’s work to be done.”

“Well, if you don’t pose for me, I’ll have to work off of memory alone,” Edelgard retorted, “and you’re more beautiful than I can imagine.”

Ingrid’s grip on her loosened, as though she were about to pull away. “Edelgard, what’s gotten into you? You’re talking to me like you’re trying to court me,” she told her with a disarming laugh, glancing away from her. She looked positively adorable, flustered like that.

 _“Court_ you?” Edelgard repeated, scandalized. A nest of cold snakes coiled in the pit of her stomach. Of all the wild accusations—she was a _married_ woman; she couldn’t be _courting_ other people, at least not with her wife’s consent! “I’m—simply admiring my handiwork.”

“Alright, then.”

They danced for a while more. A long while more. If Edelgard closed her eyes, she could feel perfectly content, guiding her dance partner’s stiff and awkward movements with gentle and firm hands the same way she’d done four months ago, the same way she’d done six years ago, the same way she’d danced with her love whenever they had danced. The scent of Ingrid’s perfume filled her nostrils. Lavender—Hilda’s suggestion. Ingrid had balked at first, and when Hilda had pressed her about what she’d rather smell like, she’d offered sword polishing oil, and it had taken nearly an hour to talk her down to something more conventional. She pressed herself closer. A warmth she’d missed for so long. A warmth she’d coveted for so long. She leaned in. In her outstretched hand, she threaded her fingers tighter around Ingrid’s. Her cheek found a patch of bare skin, warm, soft, firm; a stray wisp of golden hair, rendered full and lustrous by Edelgard’s own rosemary and lavender oil conditioning regimen, tickled the tip of her nose.

“Uh, Edelgard? What are you doing?” Ingrid sharply asked her, pulling herself away from her.

With a start, Edelgard pulled her head up and came back to her senses. “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t think I was so tired,” she said.

“Maybe we should stop.”

“Just a bit more,” she said without thinking, tightening her grip even as her partner’s loosened. “At least until the song is over.” She pressed herself closer again, prickling heat washing over her skin, a cloying warmth pooling inside her, her fingertips and lips tingling.

“Look, I—I get it,” Ingrid said, stumbling a bit over her words as she stumbled over her feet. “People in Adrestia have loose morals. Your fiance has his… lover, and clearly you’re looking for, uh… yours. But we don’t do things like that in Faerghus. Whether I like it or not, I have to be faithful to Glenn, and as for us… unless you’ve been keeping a really big secret from me, we’re both women.”

Edelgard felt as though her heart had stopped. It kept beating anyway, of course, but at the moment, she felt as though every sign of life in her body had been snuffed out in an instant. The soft glow of Ingrid’s eyes had turned hard and the smile had long since faded from her face. She looked as though she’d been betrayed. Edelgard looked away from those accusing eyes and let her gaze fall upon Byleth—and their eyes met, too, and for an instant—she may have been imagining it—she felt the same piercing, harsh sensation, as though a dagger had been plunged into her chest.

She let go of Ingrid and backed away. “Excuse me,” she said, realization finally dawning on her of what she had been doing. “I need to freshen up.”

And with a slow and steady gait, deliberate and controlled to hide how much she wanted to dash out of the ballroom, she stepped off the dance floor and made for the exit, not even pausing to grab her cloak on the way out.

* * *

The cold wind and gentle snowfall struck her as soon as she stepped outside, needles prickling her exposed skin and lighting on the lustrous red silk of her ballgown. One of her most hated memories settled in her mind, gnawing at her thoughts like rats in the walls. Part of her was at Remire again, six years ago, gazing in horror at the devastation and realizing that she— _she,_ who was just as disgusted by the monstrous evil parading in front of her as the rest of her classmates—was hopelessly implicated in it. As soon as she and Hubert had had a chance to slip away from the chaos, she’d hastily donned the armor and mask of her alter ego and appeared before Byleth to make a desperate plea, to proclaim her innocence and ask her to join forces with her.

Byleth had said yes, against all reason and against all sensibility, and so Edelgard had dismissed her answer out of hand. Lies. She had _felt_ the hostility roiling off of her teacher like heat from an oven. And so the Flame Emperor had departed, seized with a deep and terrible self-loathing and the certainty that she had betrayed and thus forever poisoned her relationship with the greatest woman who had ever walked into her life.

It hadn’t been until that fateful moment in the Holy Tomb when Byleth had defended her from Rhea’s wrath that Edelgard had realized that despite all the betrayals, the woman she loved cared enough about her to trust her.

But _this—_ this was one betrayal too far. She could imagine herself standing before her wife—all the excuses spilling off her tongue: that she’d been lonely, that she’d been desperate, that Ingrid had been so beautiful and she had been so weak in her heart—and feel herself withering under that same hot fury. Even if she kept this a secret for the rest of her life, even if she never spoke of this to anyone, she would remember that piercing gaze.

It was stupid. It was irrational. But it was an irrational dagger plunged into her stupid heart.

She’d endured five years without Byleth before. Five years searching for her fruitlessly, five years consumed with guilt, five years throwing herself into her war to dull the pain of her heartbreak, five years daring to believe they would meet again. But in those five years, she had never been so weak as to give her heart to another. She had found succor in her friends, her fellow Black Eagles, in Dorothea’s embrace and Ferdinand’s strained optimism and escapes to the greenhouse with Bernadetta, in Mercedes’ gentle motherly care, in Hubert’s cool and rational assurances, but they had been _friends,_ and that had been _five years,_ not a mere four months. And she and Byleth hadn’t been _married_ then! Edelgard didn’t have very many old-fashioned ideas about marriage, but at the very least, she was a romantic, and to pledge one’s heart to another was something to be taken seriously.

Was it really so unbearable being apart from Byleth the second time that she’d had to fall for someone else so quickly?

 _“Your Highness! Is that you over there?”_ Jeralt’s voice rang out in the cold night air and dispelled the vicious cycle of painful memories and self-abasement Edelgard’s mind had become caught within. He was making his rounds through the monastery, lantern in hand, his rusty brown hair silvered with snow, and picked up his pace to catch up with her. “What in blazes are you doing out here?”

“I-I n-needed some f-fresh air,” Edelgard said to him, stammering through the chattering of her teeth as she came to realize how much she was shivering. Her dress was thin and offered her no protection against the elements. She looked around herself, clasping her hands on her biceps and pinning her arms tightly to her chest to conserve her warmth, and realized how far she had traveled from the reception hall in her fugue state.

“Well, you didn’t have to come all this way just for a breath of fresh air.” Jeralt unclasped his cloak from his shoulders and tossed it over her, letting her wrap herself up in it. He held up his lantern, shining the light in her face, and squinted at her. “You alright? Your eyes are a bit red.”

Edelgard finished draping herself in the cape and took a deep breath to compose herself. “I’m fine, Captain. But thank you for your concern. I think I might retire early this evening—I might have had too much wine.”

“It happens,” he said with a shrug. “Well, let’s get you someplace warm.”

As Jeralt led her across the monastery to the dormitories, she gripped the cloak more tightly. It was itself almost as cold as the air around it, but it was better than nothing. Still shivering, her breath pouring in white clouds from her mouth, she held out her hand and conjured a small flame in her open palm to keep herself warm.

“I’m surprised you’re not at the ball yourself,” she said to him. “I didn’t think you were on duty tonight.”

“Change of plans,” he said. “That beast-tamer we captured in Remire—Hapi, I think?—escaped from the room we were holding her in, so I and a couple other knights are on the lookout. I don’t think she’ll be found so easily, especially in this dark, but we might as well make an effort to look for her. Cornelia’s set to arrive here to pick her up any day now; we need to get some answers from her before then.”

“I won’t keep you long, then,” she said, lengthening her strides to better keep apace with him.

“It’s fine,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Like I said, it’s probably a fool’s errand. Anyway, big fancy balls like those don’t really interest me anyway.”

“I thought you insisted that Byleth attend.”

“Just to see if she likes it. That kid’s surprised me a lot since we came here, with all the new interests she’s been picking up. Oh, and—she showed off that suit you helped her put together for tonight the other day.”

“It looks good on her, doesn’t it?”

“Sure does. Ever since she told me she was going to take my advice and show up, I’d been trying to picture her in a fancy ballgown and it just… never clicked.” A wistful smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “So, uh… whatever’s got you upset—and don’t tell me you’re not upset, because it’s obvious—does it have anything to do with her? If you two don’t have a magical evening tonight is it going to, uh, break time or something, or are you going to pop out of existence?”

In spite of her sour mood and the howling emptiness inside her, Edelgard managed to laugh. “No, no, nothing like that. As I’ve said, my future isn’t this world’s future; my past is different from this world’s past. It would be cruel to have that kind of relationship with her here, knowing that I aim to be reunited with her in my world.”

She thought about Ingrid. It would be cruel to her, too, she supposed. And to Dimitri, and the other friends she’d made among the Blue Lions, including the doppelgangers of friends she’d already made. In fact, come to think of it, there wasn’t a single person here she could think of that she _hadn’t_ been cruel toward.

“I get it.” Jeralt rested his hand on her shoulder. “In your world… have I told you anything about Byleth’s mom?” he asked her.

Edelgard shook her head.

“Alright, then. This way,” he said, doubling back and leading her away from the dormitories to a different part of the monastery. There was a little cemetery off to the side of the bridge crossing the ravine, opposite the cathedral, and emerging from the snowdrifts were a handful of gray headstones. He passed by Ashe’s empty grave and stood before one of the other monuments—the gravestone of Sitri Eisner.

“Sitri’s here,” he said, bowing his head respectfully. Edelgard did the same. “Been here twenty-one years. She died in childbirth. When I met her here in the monastery, it changed my life. You should see the love poems I wrote her—or, on the other hand, maybe you shouldn’t. She was the kindest, smartest, wisest person I’d ever known. Frail, though. Couldn’t leave the monastery. Doomed to be a nun for the rest of her life. It was up to me to tell her about all the amazing things she couldn’t see for herself out there in the great big world beyond these walls—Seriously, I _never_ told you this?”

Edelgard looked upon the headstone, tracing with her eyes the words engraved into it:

_Sitri Eisner_

_1139 - 1159_

_Resting in the warm embrace of cherished memories_

Edelgard had spent plenty of time here with Byleth in her world, visiting the graves of her mother and father. Sitri Eisner had always been a cipher to the both of them—the only ones who had known her were dead. “You haven’t had the chance yet.”

“Six years.” Jeralt shook his head as if disappointed at his counterpart. “Six years and I still haven’t told you and Byleth a damn thing. Guess it’s my fault for keeping it a secret so long in the first place. Cethleann’s tits, though, I must be busy.”

Edelgard said nothing in response.

“Anyway, Sitri was amazing. And to my surprise, she thought the same of me. When I was with her, I felt happier than I’d ever felt in my whole life. And when she… passed, I felt as though someone had cut a hole in me and everything on the inside had poured out. It’s like… you feel hungry all the time, and nothing you eat can fill you up. I’ve missed her all these years. I only ever see her again when I see Byleth smile.” He chuckled softly, a single ray of light in his voice. “Smiles just like her mom—rarely.”

Edelgard swallowed a lump in her throat. “Twenty-one years you’ve carried this loneliness.”

“Yeah.” He slowly nodded.

“And look at me,” she said bitterly, “after only four months without her.”

“Don’t act like four months is such a little thing. Four months for me… that was when it hurt the most. That was when I’d felt as lonely as I was ever going to feel. But you know what, Edelgard? Sitri’s gone for good. Twenty years are gonna become thirty, forty, fifty, however longer I live. Maybe forever. But Byleth— _your_ Byleth—She’s still out there. You’ll find her again. So keep your chin up and be strong.”

Edelgard nodded. “I know,” she said.

“Helps to hear it again sometimes, though. Doesn’t it?”

“Yes. I lost her once before… though she wasn’t my wife then, and I must admit it hurts so much differently now.”

“Funny how much two little words can change things between two people, and between them and the rest of the world. I feel like I didn’t love Sitri half as much until I let her put her ring on my finger. Then she was suddenly the only thing that mattered.”

Edelgard looked down at his hand. There was no trace of a ring.

Jeralt noticed what she was staring at and let out a boisterous laugh. “You expect a mercenary to strut around with a fancy silver ring on his finger? That’s just asking for trouble. I keep it somewhere I’ll never lose it.”

“That’s wise of you,” she said. “I wonder, did you meet Sitri at the Goddess Tower?”

He laughed. “I see you’ve heard those sappy legends, too. Is that where you met my girl?”

“Yes,” she said. “This very night, six years ago from my perspective. It isn’t just the old stories about people finding true love in the shadow of the tower. It was a special place to my parents as well.”

“Oh? The Emperor found his true love there, too?”

“Yes. A few years after graduating from the academy, he was crowned emperor. One day, during a visit here, he snuck into the Goddess Tower on a nostalgic whim and met her—my mother.” She let out a wistful sigh. “She had just enrolled in the academy that very year. They were instantly drawn to each other—love at first sight, you could say. It was the first time either had truly been in love, or so the story goes. Of course, he’d already married for political reasons by that point, and he had many other consorts to give him plenty of heirs as well, but I’ve always chosen to believe that there was genuine love between my father and my mother… as silly as it might be.”

“Huh.” Jeralt nodded. “Maybe there’s some magic to that place, after all. Who do you think Byleth will meet at the tower tonight?”

“That’s up to her. Dimitri, probably.” Edelgard sniffled and wiped her eyes on Jeralt’s cape. “I don’t mind. I don’t have a right to mind. She is her own person in this world.”

“Must still hurt, though.” He patted her on the shoulder. “There was… When I came here and met Sitri, there was another man who I think might have fancied her. Uh… Aelfric, I think? Yeah! That same guy who got spooked by the Death Knight a month or two back. If I ended up in another world and saw him strutting around with her ring on his finger, I’d probably be a little fucked up myself.”

She laughed. “There is… still a problem, though. It seems I’ve…” She searched for the right words. “It seems I’ve fallen for someone else. And it won’t work out—it _can’t_ work out—but the moment I realized what had happened to me, I felt—as though I had betrayed my wife.” Recounting the event made her feel as though another knife had been driven into her heart. “Call me a romantic, but my Byleth and I are part of a whole now, even with all this time and space between us. And I feel as though I’ve just split us in half again. I’ve been so guarded against entangling myself with this world’s Byleth that I didn’t even notice my feelings growing for someone else.”

“I’ve been where you are plenty of times,” he said. “Every once in a while, here and there, I’ve run into women who… Maybe I could love them like I loved Sitri, I’ll think to myself for a day, or maybe a week. But it never works out. Have we really _never_ had this talk in your world?” he asked sharply, incredulous.

“Like I said, you’re a very busy man.”

“I’m dead, aren’t I?” Jeralt asked. Edelgard looked up at him and he rolled his eyes at her. “Give your old man-in-law some credit. You talk to me like you’ve barely talked to me before. And you keep telling me to stay away from the creeps.” There was a grim set to his jaw as his line of sight drifted from Sitri’s tombstone to Ashe’s. “It’s me who dies in your world instead of Ashe, isn’t it?”

Edelgard took a deep breath.

“Before you try to tell me that sounds ridiculous, I’m a hundred something years old,” he added. “You can’t pull the wool over my eyes so easily.”

“You’re right,” she said. “In my world, you die… in a few days, actually.”

“Huh,” he grunted. “Happy fucking Saint Cichol’s day to me, then.”

In spite of herself, Edelgard began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, his grip on her shoulder tightening.

“I’m just surprised a man with your vocabulary could have seduced a nun in the first place,” she choked out, giggling.

Jeralt snorted and choked back a laugh of his own and slapped her on the back, nearly knocking her off her feet. “You’d be surprised how much twenty years on the run from the church can change a man. So… is she doing okay your future? Since I’m… you know.”

“Your death hurts her more than anything else. But she pulls herself together. We… pull ourselves together. No matter how much it hurts.”

“Oh, good. All her life, I’ve been all she’s had. Sometimes it’d keep me up at night… thinking about what might happen if she lost me.”

“Then perhaps you’re in the wrong line of work.”

Jeralt opened his mouth as though to issue some retort, but remained silent. He closed his mouth and looked down at the snow. “Good point.”

“You’re not all she has anymore,” Edelgard told him. “She has other people to support her, even now.”

“Doesn’t need her old man anymore, huh?”

“I just mean you’re not alone anymore.”

He set his hand on her shoulder again. “You aren’t either, kid. C’mon, let’s get you to bed. Tomorrow’s another day, and one way or another, you’ll be one step closer to seeing your wife again. Tell her I said hi.”

“I will,” she said as Jeralt led her away from the graveyard. “Everything you have to say from now on, I’ll make sure she knows.”

“I couldn’t ask for a better daughter-in-law. Take care of yourself out there—you’d better make it back to her alive now.”

“Of course, Captain.”

Jeralt rolled his eyes at her. “Oh, come on.”

“Of course, Jeralt.”

“You can do better than that,” he goaded her.

Edelgard took a deep breath and swallowed a lump in her throat. “Of course… Father,” she mumbled sheepishly. He didn’t respond. “Dad, then?” What did he expect from her? _Daddy?_ _Papa?_

Mercifully, he gave her a slow, satisfied nod.

 _“Lady Edelgard!”_ Hubert’s voice rang out in the darkness. He emerged from the shadows, the snow crunching under his footfalls as he rushed toward her, followed closely by Ferdinand and Byleth, the latter of whom was dressed in her silver wolf’s-pelt cloak and had Edelgard’s red cloak draped heavily over one shoulder; Sothis trailed behind her, floating over the snowy ground. “Lady Edelgard, what in blazes are you doing out here?”

“Y’know, I asked her the same thing,” Jeralt said.

The slightest hint of a relieved smile crossed Byleth’s face. “Thanks for looking after her, Dad,” she said.

“No skin off my nose. She’s a good kid. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to return to my patrol.”

“I’m sorry to have kept you,” Edelgard told him as Byleth handed her cloak to her.

“No problem. You all have a good night,” he said before turning his back on them and returning to his well-trod route, his lantern bobbing with every step as he faded into the night.

Edelgard huddled under her cloak, relishing its warmth. “Professor… you didn’t need to go out looking for me.”

“Ever the fool, you arrogant child! After the way you stormed off the dance floor, how could she _not?”_ Sothis asked. “Even I can tell that you might catch your death out here!”

“Professor Byleth, you may head back to the reception hall if you wish,” Ferdinand said, hooking his arm around Edegard’s. “As I recall, there are still many people there who want you to give them the honor of a dance. We can look after Lady Edelgard from here on out.”

Byleth looked at Edelgard, and part of Edelgard wanted to beg her to stay.

“Please do dance some more,” Sothis pleaded with her. “Had I a body of my own, I would sing and dance until I fell upon the ground!”

She nodded. “I’ll head back to the ball,” she said, prompting from her phantom companion a jubilant cheer. “If you three would like to come back with me…”

“That would be lovely, Professor,” Edelgard said, stifling a yawn at the worst possible moment.

“You are tired, Lady Edelgard,” Hubert said, taking her other arm. “It would do you good to return to your quarters. Besides, are we not still traveling with Prince Dimitri tomorrow morning?”

“We’ll dance some other time,” Byleth said, patting her on the head, and the two of them went their separate ways.

* * *

Hubert and Ferdinand led Edelgard along, flanking her on either side, and helped keep her upright. With every step that took her closer to the dormitories, it seemed her legs got weaker and weaker and her feet ached more and more.

“I am sorry, dear,” Ferdinand said to her, repositioning his arm and wrapping it securely around her waist as though they were still locked in a waltz.

“You and Lady Ingrid certainly did seem to make quite a dashing couple,” Hubert said, “but you know Faerghus… the people there can be quite set in their ways.”

“To be honest,” she told them, the pain in her heart long since faded to a dull and throbbing ache, “I likely broke her heart as much as she broke mine.”

“For better or for worse,” Ferdinand added, winking at Hubert, “one simply cannot help whom one falls in love with.”

The two Jewels of the Empire, Ferdinand and Hubert. It was cute to see them so deeply in love at such young ages—well, young compared to the ones Edelgard knew.

“I do hope you and her can still be friends. And one day, mark my words, Edelgard, you will find yourself a fine lesbian who loves you as much as you love her, and you have my permission as your future husband to do whatever you wish with her.”

“As long as it is not that blasted Hilda Valentine Goneril,” Hubert interjected.

“Yes, of course. As long it is not that blasted Hilda.”

“Thank you, Ferdinand,” she said to him. “You are too sweet sometimes.” True, he was a bit of a dope compared to the Ferdinand she knew best, but perhaps the comforting words of a dope were exactly what she needed right now.

He beamed at her.

“Oh,” he said, “and I nearly forgot—I have yet to congratulate you on your stunning upset at the White Heron Cup last night. At first, I was shocked to have lost, especially to that crude, bitter, brooding—er, but when I found out that you had taught him, it all made sense. Hubert, do you remember when Edelgard taught _you_ to dance?”

“How could I forget? You were as strict as a miniature schoolmarm back then, Your Highness.” Hubert told Edelgard with a smile. “Much like you are now, in fact.”

“I _knew_ that adolescent laziness was simply a phase,” Ferdinand said. “And I am proud of you for overcoming it, especially here of all places.”

The patronizing way he spoke to her would have irked her, usually, but she was weary enough now that she barely even registered it. The other Edelgard probably enjoyed the company of Prime Minister Ferdinand much more than that of her fiance. Who knew—perhaps she was beginning to like her new world and wouldn’t want to go back.

Complications, complications… She’d always known there would be complications… and there would never _stop_ being complications. Nothing could ever go smoothly. That was life for her, she supposed. Perhaps it was a curse, and she had brought that curse to this world. Perhaps in her world, the other Edelgard had ushered in an era of widespread peace and tranquility simply by virtue of _not_ being her.

Edelgard and her two jewels crossed the snowy courtyard. She was beginning to feel thankful that Hubert and Ferdinand were such good crutches. Perhaps once she underwent the Crest-removal procedure in her world, she would suggest that they carry her around like this until she could walk again.

On second thought, why not suggest to the other Edelgard to undergo the procedure while they were trapped in each other’s worlds? She would be delighted to have an excuse to spend a month or two in bed. Why hadn’t Edelgard thought of that until now?

There was a clatter and commotion from within the bushes behind them. _“Lady Edelgard, get down!”_ Hubert shouted out, and Edelgard found that very easy to do considering that dropping to the ground simply involved allowing Ferdinand to fall on top of her.

Her heart pounded, though—she was instantly awake, fear surging through her body and sending electric tingles through her muscles all the way to the tips of her fingers. If someone meant to do them harm, Ferdinand was completely unarmed and she and Hubert only had magic to work with.

A shadow bounded out of the bushes, its shape obscured by a ragged brown cloak and hood as it weaved through a hail of icy daggers conjured by Hubert’s spellcasting. Edelgard pulled herself out from under Ferdinand, conjured a burst of flame, and cast it out at the attacker. It dodged—but the flash of amber light that burst from the fire illuminated it for a split second, revealing beneath the hood a sliver of a shock of scarlet hair.

She knocked Ferdinand away and rose to her feet, readying another fireball.

Hapi lunged at her like a wild animal, stumbling as a jagged lump of ice formed around one foot, and bowled her over, knocking her back down to the ground. Edelgard found herself pinned down, flickering flame in the palm of her hand casting its light on Hapi’s face. Her eyes were wide, glassy, vacant; but they focused on her for just a moment.

 _“Aunt Anselma?”_ she gasped.

Ferdinand grabbed her by the collar and tried to pry her off of Edelgard. “Unhand Lady Edelgard, you beast!” he shouted out. She was immovable, though, and pinned Edelgard down with sheer brute strength, wrapping both arms tightly around her waist and burying her face in her collar. Edelgard braced herself, perhaps, for a blast of dark magic to scald the flesh off her bones or for a knife to slide between her ribs or for sharpened fangs to rip out her throat—

But nothing happened.

Hapi was _hugging_ her, not attacking her.

Ferdinand finally wrenched her free and pulled her aside; Hubert immobilized her with magic, pinning her limbs to the ground with frozen pillars towering out of the snow. He held out his hand over her. “Dare not try anything,” he hissed, “or I shall encase your head in another block of ice.”

“Hubert, it’s fine,” Edelgard said, sitting up with Ferdinand’s unnecessary assistance. “She wasn’t hurting me. She hasn’t hurt any of us.” Somehow, it seemed the beast-tamer meant her no harm. What was it she’d called her? Her mind raced, tingling as though she’d just drunk a gallon of Hubert’s finest coffee.

“Ferdinand, go find Jeralt,” she said, still panting for breath. _“Specifically_ Jeralt. And when you’re done sending him over here, find Claude. _Specifically_ Claude.”

Ferdinand shared an uneasy glance with Hubert, then with Hapi, then with Edelgard. “A-Are you sure? _Claude?”_

“Yes, Ferdinand. Claude. And no one else.”

“Lady Edelgard, is this wise?” Hubert asked. “She was responsible for Remire. We both know the incredible power she wields.”

Edelgard looked down at Hapi, who was straining against her icy prison, writhing in place against the snow in a futile attempt to free herself. Her chest heaved; her eyes darted every which way. She seemed like a frightened animal first and a person second. “She’s afraid.”

“As well she _should_ be.”

“Jeralt,” she repeated to Ferdinand, “and only Jeralt. And then Claude. And _only_ Claude.”

Pallid and disquieted, Ferdinand looked to Hubert, then took off.

“What in the Goddess’ name are you doing, Lady Edelgard?” Hubert asked her as he stood with her in front of their prisoner. “Jeralt? Claude?”

“Do you trust me?” she asked him.

“Yes, of course, with my life—”

“Then continue to do so.”

Hubert bit his lip. “Lady Edelgard… as of late, you frighten me sometimes.”

“Good.” Edelgard drew herself just a little closer to Hapi and crouched down beside her.

“Lady Edelgard—”

“I know what I’m doing, Hubert.” She looked over Hapi. Hapi glanced away from her, turning her head and twisting her body as much as she could. “Who is Aunt Anselma?” she asked.

No answer.

“How do you know my mother?”

“Your mother?” Hubert repeated, incredulous. “Lady Edelgard, how many people named Anselma do you think live in Fódlan? This could easily be a simple coincidence.”

Edelgard tried not to roll her eyes. She wasn’t used to being with a version of Hubert who was so… mentally dull. “She called me Anselma. That means I must look somewhat like her. Ergo, she has mistaken me for my mother.”

“You looked like yourself in Remire,” he countered, “so why did this fiend attack you then and not now?”

“Exactly. Perhaps she wasn’t seeing with her eyes. That horse’s skull might have been difficult to see out of. Perhaps she’d only _smelled_ me before.”

Hapi nodded vigorously.

“You have demonstrated you can speak,” Edelgard said to her, “so why not speak?”

Hapi tried again to wrench herself free.

“You called my mother your aunt. That makes us sisters of a sort, does it not? Tell me, how did my mother know you? How does she know Cornelia?”

“Lady Cornelia will arrive here within a few days,” Hubert said. “If we’ve returned from Fhirdiad before she leaves, we can ask her ourselves.”

Hubert’s words had scarcely left his mouth before Hapi let out a hoarse, quiet, panicked scream and tried with renewed vigor to wrench her arms and legs out of the pillars of ice that had pinned her to the ground.

“Calm down,” Edelgard said, reaching out and laying a hand on her cheek, wiping away cold sweat. It wasn’t too much unlike calming a spooked horse. Eventually, Hapi’s writhing ceased and she went limp, allowing herself to be at Edelgard’s mercy. “Cornelia isn’t here yet. Don’t worry.”

Hapi’s breathing slowly became more relaxed and regular, the heaving of her chest less pronounced.

“Does she hurt you?” Edelgard asked her.

“Lady Edelgard, what are you saying?” Hubert sputtered. “Lady Cornelia is the greatest physician and white mage of our time—”

“All great women have skeletons in their closet, just as great men do,” she replied. “Hapi, please answer me. Does Cornelia hurt you?”

Hapi nodded.

“Does she hurt Mercedes?”

She shook her head.

“Does Mercedes know?”

Another shake.

“Have you tried telling her?”

Another shake.

“Did Cornelia make you do what you did at Remire?”

She nodded.

“Are you afraid of what Cornelia might do to you if she comes to collect you?”

Another nod.

“Good heavens,” Hubert said, looking faint. His jaw hung slack in shock. “By Cethleann’s grace, Lady Edelgard, what have we gotten ourselves into?”

Edelgard leaned in closer, lower, and whispered into Hapi’s ear, _“Is Cornelia connected to a pale man named Thales?”_

Hapi nodded.

Jeralt arrived—alone, thankfully. “Good work, kids,” he said, spying Hapi pinned to the ground. “I’ll take her back to the knights—”

“No,” Edelgard said. “No other knights. You and Claude, find some place to hide her. None of the other knights or students or faculty can know. Especially not Dimitri. We can’t let Cornelia catch on that she’s here by any means. And I need to talk to Hapi once I’ve returned from Fhirdiad.”

“You’re actually getting straight answers out of that girl?”

“Just simple yes-or-no questions.”

Jeralt stroked his bristly beard. “Well, that’s more than Catherine or Shamir have gotten out of her. You’re asking a lot of me, Your Highness,” he said, “but if she’ll only talk to you, then I haven’t got much of a choice.”

“Try to keep her comfortable,” Edelgard said. “Make her less likely to run away this time.” She hiked up her dress and knelt down beside Hapi. “Hubert, melt this ice.”

“Are you sure—” Hubert said.

“Yes, Hubert, I’m sure. I’m always sure.”

With a worried sigh, he un-conjured the pillars of ice and let Hapi collapse to the ground. She immediately latched onto Edelgard again.

Edelgard felt her breath tickle the back of her neck. “It’s okay,” she murmured, patting her on the back. She spoke as though she were speaking to a child, which admittedly she had little experience in, but she assumed it was not entirely dissimilar to how she spoke to cats (and Hapi seemed not so dissimilar from a cat, after all). “Jeralt is a good man. You can trust him. He’s my future father-in-law.” She thought for a moment. “Trust Uncle Jeralt.”

Hapi nodded.

“You have to let me go now.”

She let go of her.

Edelgard stood up, immediately felt dizzy, and lost her balance. Hubert rushed to steady her. “I think,” she said, her eyelids leaden as the rush from the attack wore off, “it might be time for bed, Hubert.”

She hardly remembered being led back to her room.


	18. Rise of the Hurricane King

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard goes on a road trip with Dimitri, Byleth... and Thales.

Edelgard had to remind herself, again and again and again, that Thales was not a threat to her. There was nothing he could do with her—nothing he could do _personally,_ that was. She and Byleth were both under Dimitri’s protection.

Ever since Remire, Thales had been on shaky ground with Dimitri. Evidently, he’d managed to prevent the prince from realizing that he was responsible for that horrible incident (what lie, Edelgard wondered, had she told? Had he insisted that his right hand had not known what his left hand was doing? Perhaps he’d claimed that Solon was a traitor?) since he still had a face attached to his head, but in his current situation he wouldn’t dare harm two of Dimitri’s closest companions without a great deal of plausible deniability—not as long as Dimitri’s rage still simmered within him.

Still, being in such close quarters with him kept Edelgard on edge, kept an ice-cold dagger resting perilously against her naked throat, kept her feeling like a lone mouse in a den of vipers. He was on the back foot, but Edelgard had yet to strike a decisive blow against him—she couldn’t ignore the threat he still posed.

Against her better judgment, she, Byleth, Hubert, Dedue, and Dimitri were sharing a carriage with Thales all the way to Fhirdiad, far in the northern reaches of Fódlan. It would take four days at least—traveling northwest from the northern foothills of the Oghma Mountains through Charon territory, then following the river north across the Tailtean Plains into Blaiddyd territory, where the capital city of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus awaited—compared to the three it had taken to reach Arianrhod from Garreg Mach.

Five days in a carriage with Thales. Five nights under roofs across Faerghus—a travelers’ inns here and there between the manors of Count Walter Yngve Charon and Count Sigmund Ulrik Galatea and the capital itself—with Thales. Five golden opportunities to slit the throats of the troublesome princess and professor who had poisoned his protege against him while they slept; and much, much _more_ than five golden opportunities to stage bandit attacks against them—perhaps ghoulish reenactments of the Tragedy of Duscur which once again would leave only two miraculous survivors.

Perhaps the thought of that tragedy playing out hung over Dimitri’s mind, for he seemed just as on edge as Edelgard. He spoke not a word, and Edelgard worried if it would be possible for him to clench his fists hard enough to break the bones in his hands when she saw how tightly they were bunched up in his lap. He often glanced out the window, as though reassuring himself that the dozen or so kingdom soldiers keeping apace with the carriage outside were still there.

Edelgard sat between Hubert and Byleth at one end of the carriage’s spacious and lavish interior with Thales and Dimitri seated across from the three of them and tried to keep her cool, pressing everything about her that was frightened or felt weak against the back of her skull the way she always did when she met with Thales. Byleth, as well, might have been ill at ease for how often her fingers tapped against the flat of the Sword of the Creator’s blade as she held it across her and Edelgard’s lap. There was not so much as a peep from Sothis, and Edelgard wondered if she was somehow hiding herself from him. A part of her wished she could hide so easily.

“Professor Eisner,” Thales said, his voice smooth and sickeningly innocent. “I’m surprised you would be so paranoid as to keep that weapon on your person.”

“Hmm?” Byleth blinked and looked at him, as though just realizing that he existed. Edelgard wondered if she’d been in some kind of trance communing with her phantom companion.

“I said I don’t understand why you’re keeping that sword on you. Rest assured you are welcome to stow it with the rest of our belongings in the back.”

“I’m a mercenary,” she answered matter-of-factly. “I keep a weapon on me everywhere. That’s how mercenaries work. Just a habit.”

“Fascinating.” Thales stroked his chin. Edelgard had to admit, he cut a far less sinister figure in the guise of Rodrigue Fraldarius than Volkhard von Arundel. The sharp, strong angle of his jaw, light, well-trimmed mustache framing his mouth, and long waves of his dark hair lent him a rather heroic aura compared to Volkhard’s rather severe countenance. “But why not something smaller and easier to carry around? A dagger, perhaps. Or at most a short sword.”

“It’s a relic of the Church,” Byleth replied. “I can’t be careless with it and just leave it somewhere.”

“I see. But if this carriage were to make a sudden jolt to the left—say, if a boulder tumbled down from the mountains and knocked us off the road—and your blade were to skewer Princess Edelgard and her poor vassal?” Thales leaned forward. “Would that not be… exceedingly careless of you?”

“That wouldn’t happen,” she said flatly.

“Well, then.” He leaned back, allowing himself to sink into the cushions of his seat. “It’s an interesting weapon, isn’t it, the Sword of the Creator? I hear it can fell entire armies.”

“I hope it doesn’t have to.”

“Indeed,” Thales said. “What’s it made of? It seems to resemble old bone.”

Byleth tapped on the flat of the blade with her fingernail. “It looks like bone, a bit,” she admitted. “But it feels like good steel.”

“Do you think somebody forged that? Or perhaps, long ago, there lived a race of monsters with bones as hard as steel?” A wry, sinister little smirk wormed its way onto his face. “Do you think there are still monsters like that in the world?”

Byleth pursed her lips thoughtfully. “There are a lot of strange things in the world,” she said.

Thales nodded. “There most certainly are, Professor Eisner. There most certainly are.”

Edelgard could swear he was looking directly at her, the cold blue of his false eyes piercing her, peering into her soul, heart, and mind.

It was going to be a long week.

* * *

That first night, not to her surprise in the least bit, Edelgard had trouble sleeping.

She did all she could do to keep herself and Byleth safe through the night. The two of them shared a room in the inn with Dimitri, with Dedue and Hubert keeping watch just outside the door. The crown prince of Faerghus was to be their shield: no one with murderous intent would enter this room to kill either of them and simply leave him untouched, since doing so would no doubt make him even less trusting of Thales (and they wouldn’t get past Dedue either, who by all accounts was loyal to Dimitri first and the so-called Men in Black second). Besides, Dimitri was, much like Edelgard and Byleth themselves, a light sleeper and should Thales or any of his minions attempt to sneak into the room, all three of them would awaken in an instant to confront them.

Yet even the lightest of sleep eluded her for what felt like hours, and when she finally did feel her mind sink into the ocean of slumber and drown beneath its dark waves, the dreams that met her in the abyss below were anything but pleasant. She woke up an indeterminate amount of time later—but still quite obviously the dead of night—with a plea to her father for help hanging on her lips. Her all-too-common nightmares had forced their way out of her at the dead of night, at her most vulnerable.

She woke up to find a dark shadow looming over her, black against black, and felt the fear gripping her heart squeeze tighter. She found herself paralyzed, and in that moment with her arms and legs sinking into the mattress like lead weights and her lungs frozen, she could see a host of demons and devils traced within the faint outlines of the silhouette before her.

_“Edelgard,”_ Dimitri whispered, and the waking nightmare dispelled itself at the sound of his voice. _“Are you unwell? You seemed to be having a… fit of some sort.”_

Edelgard collected herself. “Yes,” she said. “I mean, no. I’m alright; it was just a nightmare. I have them from time to time.”

He shifted to her side and reached out for her, letting his hands hover just a fraction of a fraction of an inch over her shoulders, close enough that she could just barely feel the warmth of his skin through her nightshirt. He laid his hands upon her as though handling a delicate vase; she knew that with the Crest of Blaiddyd and the Crest of Flames simmering in his veins, he never took chances to handle anyone too roughly. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Like I said, it’s fine. You haven’t been sleeping well, either?”

“No; this voyage has me on edge.” Dimitri shook his head. “But do not worry. It is nothing I am not used to. I just don’t think I will ever truly feel safe in a carriage…”

“I figured as much.” Edelgard grabbed fistfuls of her blankets and pulled them up to her chin, but they were just as cold as the air in the room; she felt the chill in the air prickle her skin and wished she hadn’t left her fur cloak on the rack out in the hall. The Faerghus winter was already eating into her flesh and settling into her bones. Her memories of Fhirdiad were hazy, but she remembered hating the winter there, and she remembered the way the cold felt. “It’s cold,” she commented.

“Just a normal winter night in Faerghus, I’m afraid,” Dimitri said to her, and if it hadn’t been pitch-black she might have been able to see a smile on his face.

She took him by the arm, felt her way closer toward him, and rested her head against his chest. He, at least, was quite warm.

“What were you dreaming about?” he asked her.

“Just a nightmare,” she said. “An acute and sudden fear of improbable things. That’s it.”

“Like what?”

“I dreamed that I was eleven years old, and I and all of my siblings were locked up in a dungeon. We were dying one by one, and as the last lights faded, my father stood on the other side of the bars, powerless to do anything but watch.”

“You’ve been dwelling too much on my past,” he told her. “I’m sorry. I know how much you care, but my pain should not haunt your dreams.”

If only it were so simple, Edelgard wanted to say.

With exceeding gentleness, Dimitri slipped onto the bed and set her down, then laid alongside her, pulling the covers over the both of them. “It is no wonder you’re having nightmares,” he said. “You’re cold. If you don’t mind…”

“It seems you’ve already invited yourself in,” Edelgard said, curling up beside him and letting herself close her eyes. “Very well. I could cast a fire spell, but I fear I might set the inn ablaze, so you’ll have to do.”

“What are brothers for?” he replied, a brighter and lighter tone to his voice.

The airy levity in his voice was infectious; Edelgard felt herself smile. She pulled more of the blankets over herself and settled in for the rest of the night at his side. To be cradled in his warmth felt heartwrenchingly but satisfyingly nostalgic. Perhaps the two of them had done this before, long ago, during a childhood neither of them could remember. If they hadn’t found themselves on opposite sides of the war, perhaps they might have rediscovered each other, and he would not have died with his head torn from his shoulders.

“Excuse me?” Dimitri snapped, tugging the blankets back. “I am not so fond of the cold that I can go without bedsheets, Edelgard.”

“I’m from Enbarr; I’ll wither and die in this cold,” Edelgard retorted, yanking the blankets away from him again.

He yanked them back. “You cannot do this to the future king of Faerghus—”

“Key word: _future._ You are not king yet, Your _Highness,”_ she said, continuing the tug-of-war. “And need I remind you that I am your older sister by six ye—six months?”

“Must you continue to conquer?” he asked, pulling the bedsheets out of her grasp and yanking them back over to his side.

“Must you continue to reconquer?” she retorted, tightening her grip and pulling with all her might. “I won’t stop. There is nothing I wouldn’t sacrifice to cut a path to a warm bed.”

“Enough of this madness. I am going back to my bed,” Dimitri said sharply.

Cowed, Edelgard gave him back his half of the bedsheets. “No, you can stay,” she said. Unlike the last time they’d fought over territory, they both laughed and went back to bed, and Edelgard slept peacefully until sunrise.

* * *

The next day went much like the first. The carriage traveled through Charon territory, its passengers generally quiet except for sparse snippets of awkward small talk here and there. Charon was one of the most prominent of Faerghus’ noble houses, though one wouldn’t have known it from passing through the towns and farmland. Count Walter Charon welcomed the travelers into his manor as the sun vanished under the horizon, happy to receive the prince, his vassal, and the lord regent, surprised to see a princess of Adrestia and her vassal along with them, and bemused to see Byleth among them.

They ate well that night. Count Charon’s cooks served delicious roast pheasant for dinner, baked and broiled to perfection and drizzled with a rich balsamic berry sauce. The count stared expectantly, almost reverently, at Dimitri as he ate. Edelgard had never recalled seeing a nobleman stare at her father, or _her_ for that matter, like that (nobles typically feared rather than loved her, which was fine by her as long as they did as she demanded); the Faerghus attitude toward lords and kings truly was different. Like Felix had said, they loved their leaders, whether they deserved it or not.

“So, er, Your Highness—Prince Dimitri,” Count Charon said called out across the dining room table, stumbling a bit over his words as he addressed his liege, “Do you enjoy the food, my liege? What do you think of it?”

Dimitri set down the forkful of pheasant he’d been about to place in his mouth. “It’s, er… I suppose… The meat is quite moist compared to how crisp and crunchy the skin is.”

“I am glad to hear it. Dare I say, you looked as though you weren’t enjoying it. The flavors, though—what do you think of the flavors?”

“Um…” He looked down at his plate, looked to Dedue, looked at his plate again, looked over at the count, and then looked down at his plate again. Edelgard cast a glance around the room and swore she could spy the head chef cowering just behind the door to the dining room, desperate to hear the future king praise his cooking. Dimitri was the least equipped person to describe how food tasted. Texture, yes, but the only things he could taste were Dedue’s spiciest dishes, and those gave him nightmarish indigestion. Eating wasn’t much of a pleasurable activity for him on its own. “Well…”

“Excuse me,” Edelgard spoke up, daintily wiping a bit of berry sauce from her lips with her napkin, “far be it for me to offer my opinion in His Highness’ stead, Count Charon, but the tart and bittersweet flavors of this berry sauce pairs _perfectly_ with the sweetness of the pheasant meat. Would you happen to know what berries are in it? I can detect a hint of… blackberry? Or perhaps mulberry?”

The count seemed to be at a loss for words. His eyebrows furrowed, his brow wrinkling. “Lady Edelgard, pardon me, but is it common for visiting Adrestian royalty to speak out of turn? Are you not the guest of the crown prince himself—”

“It’s alright,” Dimitri hurriedly insisted to him. “She is my step-sister. Actually, I did have the same question about the sauce and I would like if you or the head chef could answer it.”

Flustered, the count offered his prince a hasty bow of his head. “It is a balsamic reduction,” he said, “mainly of mulberries, cranberries, and raspberries.”

“I see,” Dimitri said, offering the count a pleasant all-is-forgiven smile. “It is just the right accompaniment to the meat. The array of textures and the, er, panoply of flavors are stunning and perfectly balanced in how they offset each other. My compliments to the chef.”

“You seem to have quite an interest in cooking, Walter,” Thales said. “One might think you spend more time in the kitchens than your own servants do.”

The count laughed, patting his ample belly. “Well, I do find myself down there before supper on occasion, Lord Fraldarius,” he said, his mood brightened. “One picks up a few things. Of course, I have more important things to do than cook for myself, though.”

“Dimitri’s vassal, I hear, is quite a cook as well,” Thales added, gesturing airily to Dedue, who instantly looked as though he no longer wanted to be in the room.

“Is that so?” Count Charon asked, focusing on Dedue, though his eyes slid off the darker skin of the man from Duscur like water sliding off a duck’s back. The levity in his voice became much more forced. “You cook, boy?”

The idea that anyone would call Dedue, a clearly adult son of a blacksmith with a physique to match, a _boy,_ struck Edelgard as so ludicrous that it was offensive, but he paid it no heed. “Yes,” he said.

“What do you cook? What meals are your specialties?”

Edelgard thought about the overwhelmingly spicy stews Dedue fed his classmates during his interrogations to gauge their heat tolerances, the lentil soup he’d prepared for them on their fishing trip, and Ashe’s impassioned exhortations that he open a restaurant and make the world see the beauty in his people’s culture.

“I am afraid Lord Fraldarius has greatly exaggerated my skills,” he told the count, deflecting. “I help in the dining hall sometimes. That is all.”

“Oh, good for you,” Count Charon said. “It’s quite remarkable that His Highness could teach you that skill.”

Dedue never showed his emotions, but Edelgard could feel an intensity in his stare that was too subtle to be seen with the naked eye alone but instantly changed the mood in the room. It was the same way that Hubert could turn the air to ice with a single glare, but subtler and quieter. Suddenly silenced, though he didn’t quite know why, Count Charon cleared his throat, took a sip of his wine, cleared his throat again, and set to nibbling at his food.

Byleth raised her hand.

“Professor… Eisner, was it? Why do you keep raising your hand?” he asked.

“This is what my students do when they have something to say,” she said.

“Well, then, what do you have to say this time?”

She held out her empty plate. “I’d like a fourth helping, please.”

* * *

Dinner the next night was at Count Sigmund Galatea’s manor. If the villages and farmland surrounding House Charon had looked just average despite the count’s prosperity, the neighboring territory of Galatea stood in stark contrast to it. Even cursory peeks out the window now and then bore witness to smaller and fewer villages, smaller and fewer tracts of fallow farmland, dirt roads where there might have been cobblestones elsewhere, and Edelgard could tell that if it were not winter, the fields would have far little to offer compared to those in Charon county. One would not know that when dining with Count Galatea, though. His servants had prepared for his guests a hearty, rich Daphnel stew—minced turkey, onions, carrot, and garlic in a thick, creamy broth with lumps of diced red and sweet potatoes. It was the kind of supper that lingered heavily in one’s stomach like lumps of warm coals well into the night. But something else lingered in Edelgard’s stomach as well that night; it had been impossible to ignore how thin and gaunt the count had been compared to his rather plump neighbor.

“Dimitri,” she said as she sat on the side of the four-poster bed she and the prince had been given and changed into her pajamas, “did you notice anything strange about supper?”

Dimitri stood at the other side of the bed, back dutifully turned to her, his hand clapped over his eyes for good measure. “Edelgard, you know I cannot taste anything,” he said. “If you suspect poison, Dedue would have caught on and warned us. You know how incredibly well-honed his palate is.”

“No, not that,” she said, shaking her head. “It wasn’t about how it tasted. It was about what it _was.”_

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“I just… couldn’t stop thinking about Ingrid.”

“Ah. I understand,” Dimitri said. “It is… too bad about what happened at the ball. She is indeed quite a beautiful woman, and if you have a certain, er, predilection toward the fairer sex—not that there’s anything _wrong_ with that—then I cannot blame you for falling for her.”

“No,” Edelgard said, raising her voice as though that would hide the nerves and regrets that choked it, “it isn’t about that.” She was grateful that Dimitri couldn’t see the heat rising to her cheeks.

“No need to be coy,” he said. “You have my sympathy. I cannot imagine how difficult it must be to have homosexual inclinations, especially given how few—”

“That’s not why I was thinking of Ingrid,” Edelgard repeated. “Has she ever told you how she lives?”

“She does not need to tell me. I’ve seen it. She’s quite frugal, dislikes frivolous and wasteful behavior, and makes the most of everything she has. Nothing goes to waste with her, down to the smallest scrap of paper.”

“Do you know why?”

“Well, it is a good example to set for commoners and nobles alike—”

“It’s because she’s _poor,”_ she interjected, cutting him off.

“Yes, I knew that. I was just also saying that it was a good example to set.”

“Galatea county has meager harvests and a small population, and what little finances the house has are stretched thin. When I spoke with her brothers at the ball, they both mentioned how often they tightened their belts. What do you think Count Galatea has for dinner when he isn’t entertaining guests of a higher station than him?”

“Ingrid has told me,” Dimitri said, a bit subdued, “that her father would always see to it she was well-fed, even if it meant he could only have watered-down soups. It’s no wonder he’s quite thin.”

“What have we done to deserve his best food while he subsists on scraps?”

“Well… we are royalty.”

“So? And is it right that he can be so thin while his neighbor is so fat?” Edelgard finished buttoning her nightshirt and allowed herself to fall backward onto the bed. “Also… Ingrid has to marry Glenn to bring prosperity to this house. Because she is poor, because she feels an obligation to better the lives of her family, she has to set her own aspirations aside and tie herself to that horrible man. You’ve seen how Glenn behaves, how he treats her—can you just stand aside and let her subordinate her life to his for the sake of her family?” An iron bite sharpened her voice. She knew full well that Dimitri knew what Glenn was. Even if the marriage would be called off when Glenn dropped his disguise—and it probably would be—Ingrid would merely return to her father’s endless well-meaning parade of suitors.

“I—I think it is quite noble of Count Galatea to fast so that his daughter and his people may eat. A less scrupulous count might have demanded his serfs keep him as well-fed as his peers despite the poor harvests. And clearly Ingrid inherited that same self-sacrificial spirit from him. I find that inspiring.”

_“Inspiring?_ A cycle of poverty is keeping your classmate’s family in an endless loop of self-denial and you find that _inspiring?”_

“Yes! Edelgard, you don’t know what it’s like to have the responsibilities of a ruler. Lords, counts, kings, all must sacrifice their own peace of mind, and sometimes even their own lives, for the sake of their people.”

“And yet so few do,” Edelgard said, forced to hide how insulted she’d been. “But is there anything inspiring about _useless_ sacrifice?”

“Well, what are you proposing?”

_“Anything,”_ she responded. “Anything you can think of—any surplus from any other territory that could be spared to this county. Use your imagination. You’ve seen what Ingrid is capable of—do you want her by your side as a knight, where she belongs, or squandering her talents as a housewife because of _economics?”_

“Do you think people are entitled to achieve their dreams?”

“To _achieve_ them? No. To _pursue_ them? Yes! We should be striving to a world where everyone has equal opportunity to rise and fall by their own merits, not by the fortune or misfortune afforded to them by their bloodlines or quirks of geography. Think, Dimitri. What can you do as king to make a world where people are free to choose their own destinies?”

“Count Galatea is a proud man. I am sure he would not accept charity or welfare.”

“That isn’t the point. And even if it were, do the peasants who till the fields for him and tithe to him share his pride? Would they rather starve than accept a helping hand? Stubbornness won’t solve anything.”

Dimitri laughed. “You are one to talk, Edelgard. I’ve met few people as stubborn as you.”

“You’re going to be _king,_ Dimitri. You’re going to rule over a third of this continent. What are you going to _do_ with that power?”

“Revenge.”

_“After_ that.”

He laid down across the opposite side of the bed, lying upside-down beside her. “What _should_ I do?”

Edelgard took a deep breath and sighed. She and Dimitri were so alike in so many ways, in this world especially, but she was a leader and he was a follower at heart. She was a radical, a revolutionary, someone who looked toward the future and took the first steps toward it; he was a reactionary, someone who never acted but reacted, someone whose steps, whether forward or backward, were always in response to someone else’s.

What was to be done with him? He wasn’t fit to play her role. He would always be looking to someone else for guidance and leadership, someone like herself or Byleth. That was why Thales’ influence on him was so dangerous. But at least he was beginning to realize that there could be more to his life than simply to be a tool for revenge. There were other problems in the world that needed fixing and that he would have the power to fix, if only he knew how. But how much could she teach him? How much longer could she remain in this world? She couldn’t hold his hand forever.

True, just as Hilda had said, she was manipulating him. But she was trying to manipulate him into being a good leader for all of Fódlan. Was that not so different from the job of a mentor? Was it not so different from the way Byleth’s teachings had molded her and her classmates?

“The closer I come to being king,” Dimitri said with a sigh of his own, “the more worried I become; the less I know what to do. You have strange and impossible ideas, but if nothing else, they’re compelling. If only you weren’t a princess of Adrestia; then you could be my adviser. But I imagine the other lords would be wary of a king who takes so much advice from Imperial royalty.”

“Perhaps I can advise you as much as I can while we’re still classmates,” she said. She turned her head to better look at his upside-down face, his pale skin and white hair taking on a golden hue from the lamplight, and smiled at him. “After all, what are big sisters for?”

* * *

North of the county of Galatea was Fhirdiad, but it would still take a day and a half at the very least to reach the city. The next day—another day sitting in that carriage and suffering the sight of Thales leering at her from sunup to sundown—was interminable. Edelgard was exhausted; she’d talked with Dimitri well into the night. But she didn’t dare sleep in front of Thales. She didn’t dare lower her guard.

That night, before she could get ready for bed, Byleth took her aside. “Trouble sleeping?” she asked.

Edelgard nodded and stifled a yawn. “I’ve had awful insomnia lately, true, but it’s nothing you should be concerned with, my teacher. It’s just nerves.”

“Is it Rodrigue?”

Struck by her bluntness, Edelgard gulped and took a deep breath to calm her nerves. Byleth was, of course, very perceptive. And Jeralt had probably told her to watch her back around him.

“Yes,” she said. “Dimitri’s contempt for him makes me worry about his moral character. I also… this might not be related, but I overheard him arguing with Glenn a while ago. He was… beating him. There’s something monstrous about him under the surface.”

Sothis appeared behind Byleth. Edelgard felt her jaw involuntarily clench. The sudden appearance of that child still set her on edge just a little. “You have got to stop acting as though you have just seen a ghost whenever I appear,” the phantom child said. “We have known each other for months. At any rate, I, too, understand how you feel about that man. I know he cannot see or hear me, but when his eyes and mine meet, even by accident, I feel…” She shivered and clasped her arms in her hands, as though a chill had run through her tiny body. “I feel as though my skin simply wishes to leap right off of my bones and find somewhere to hide!”

Byleth nodded. “Sothis and I have an idea,” she said. “When I use her power to turn back time, you and Hilda fall asleep at the exact instant I go back to and you wake up around the same time I came back from. So if I wait until sunrise, then turn back time to now-ish, you’ll be asleep the whole time.”

“But we’re still aware of the time you erase,” Edelgard pointed out. “So both of us would live through two nights, one awake, one asleep.”

“You might sleep a bit the first time through,” Byleth said, shrugging.

“Surely even _you_ can see the appeal of an extra night’s sleep,” Sothis said.

Edelgard chose not to dissect that comment. “Besides,” she said, “Hilda and I aren’t really asleep. Our minds return to our own worlds.”

“Even better!” Sothis replied. “If it is night in your world as well, then you can sleep comfortably and safely in your own bed!”

“You should have told us that sooner,” Byleth said.

Edelgard nodded. “Yes, I should have told you many things sooner. Very well, then. Let’s try it.”

They tried it. Edelgard slept as well as she’d expected—barely—and when the first rays of sunlight crept into the room through the window, Byleth called upon Sothis’ power.

Using the power of the so-called Goddess to cheat the world out of an extra night’s sleep. It was certainly the boldness and out-of-the-box thinking Edelgard had come to expect from her professor in both this world and her own.

Her heart throbbed nervously in her chest and fluttered against her ribs like a pet bird raging against its cage as the prospect of going home, if only briefly, of her own free will became all too real. What if her wife was home now and they could be together for just one night? She closed her eyes and took a deep breath to steady herself and calm her nerves—

Everything went white, and every bit of Edelgard’s body burst into flames in a way that had become so familiar that it tickled more than it hurt.

She came to and found herself sitting at her desk in her bedroom at Garreg Mach (why Garreg Mach, she wondered). Right in front of her was a pile of paperwork; from a cursory glance it appeared to be concerning a recent noble rebellion in Fraldarius territory which Byleth and Jeritza had put down a few months ago. Off to the side was a plate with a half-eaten sandwich on it and a cup of bergamot tea that had long since gone cold. The desk was lit by candles that had burned themselves down to nubs. The sky beyond the window was pitch-black.

Was the other Edelgard _working?_

Edelgard felt herself idly tap the nib of her pen against her lower lip (a terrible habit—she’d broken it _years_ ago, except that her doppelganger _hadn’t)_ as she read over the document. It was not a fun one to read. The other Edelgard let out a forlorn sigh to put all other forlorn sighs to shame and bowed her head, cradling it in her hands as she propped her elbows up on the desk.

“I thought I told Hubert to go easy on you,” Edelgard said.

The other Edelgard leaped to her feet, her chair falling on its side with a loud thump muffled only a little by the rug beneath her feet. “Ah! How long have _you_ been here?!”

“I only just arrived here,” Edelgard told her. “I think I’ve figured out how to travel to this world—temporarily, at least—whenever I wish now. If all goes as planned, I should be here until sunrise.”

“Oh, thank the Goddess,” the other Edelgard said, relaxing, her shoulders loosening. “But… can you announce your presence in a different way next time? Maybe clear your throat or tap your toes three times, or something like that.”

“Good idea.” Edelgard rolled back her shoulders, arched her back to straighten it up—there it was, that ache in her spine that she’d gotten just a bit too used to during the war, the pain in her shoulder from when she’d wrenched it in the battle at Fhirdiad. This was her original body indeed, with all the aches and pains and myriad relics of her suffering right where she’d always remembered them being. “Tell me, is Byleth here? Is my wife here? I’ve been separated from her for—goodness, has it been four months already? Please tell me she is here.”

“Oh,” the other Edelgard said in a tone that obviously meant ‘no.’

Edelgard felt like a ship whose sails had lost the wind. She sighed, and when she sighed, her whole body seemed to come down with it, her shoulders slumping, her back slouching, her head bowing. They were always missing each other, as though some invisible force—fate, perhaps—was engineering coincidences that would keep them apart, if not by time, then by space. “I miss my wife so much,” she admitted.

“I figured. She misses you, too.”

“I would hope so.” Edelgard looked around and took stock of herself. She was dressed in her pajamas, her hair—her white hair—was down and fell in a simple, straight cascade over her shoulders, and she was at Garreg Mach for some reason. “Why am I…?”

“At Garreg Mach?” The other Edelgard finished for her, and it was incredibly disturbing to say the least to hear herself finish her own sentence in her own voice against her will.

Edelgard nodded.

“She and the rest of the Black Eagles Strike Force— _great_ choice for a name, by the way—”

“I know; I was so hurt when Ferdinand told me it was ‘low-effort’ after all that time I’d spent coming up with it—”

“She and the rest of the Black Eagles went off to take down this fortress called Shambhala or something—”

_“Shambhala?”_

“Can you please not interrupt? It’s quite confusing when we’re both talking out of the same mouth. Anyway, Lysithea and I are here with Ladislava and her knights until they’re done, since we’re not exactly fit for combat right now.”

Edelgard pressed a hand to her stomach and found flesh that was considerably more yielding than she recalled it being. Not fit for combat indeed; her counterpart was most definitely _not_ keeping up with her exercise routine, and probably not with her diet either.

“Hubert claims this is the safest place for us since it’s out of reach of—”

“The javelins of light,” Edelgard mused. “Yes, Hubert theorized as much. I do hope his theory is correct.” There was a pang of happiness in her heart, but tempered with loneliness. She’d always wished that when her strike force had tracked down the stronghold of Those Who Slither in the Dark, she would be at their side to help them destroy the place and its wicked inhabitants. She’d wanted to see Thales die by her own hand, if possible. But beggars, it seemed, could not be choosers. “So while all of our friends risk their lives to save Fódlan, you’re on vacation here.”

“Well,” the other Edelgard said, “I wouldn’t say that.” Her eyes traveled back to the report she’d been reading and she picked up the document she’d been reading.

“You’re working.” Edelgard read the document, though she didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. She felt as though she were possessed. “The rebellion in Fraldarius?”

The other Edelgard nodded. “Linhardt was up there recently and found a strange black liquid bubbling up from the ground. It was very flammable and very toxic, but he thinks it might be useful. So it’s important that we secure peace in that region and pacify the people so that—”

“You sound an awful lot like me now,” Edelgard interrupted, forcing herself to set down the document and travel to her bed. She laid down. “It’s dark out. I’m here to sleep, not to burn out my eyes squinting through candlelight.”

“You came here to sleep?”

“It’s a long story.” She pulled the covers over herself and settled in, nestling her head in her pillow and closing her eyes. Her bed at Garreg Mach was as inviting as ever, though it yearned to have another occupant. “You know, this is where Byleth and I slept on the night of our wedding. I’m surprised we did much sleeping, though.”

The other Edelgard sighed. “Ah, yes. I’ve had nights like that.”

Edelgard tried very hard not to dwell on those words. “So… what happened to Lazygard?”

The other Edelgard made a face. Edelgard could feel herself making that face and knew exactly how she felt. “Ugh. I’m just happy no one in this world calls me that. Remember when we lived in Fhirdiad and taught Dima how to dance?”

“No, my memory of my childhood is… foggy. Who’s Dima?”

“Dima!” the other Edelgard gasped incredulously. “You know, _Dimitri?_ You know, our _best friend?_ Anyway, I guess he must have forgotten, too, because on the first day of class here I marched up to him and said hi, and he looked at me like he was offended I’d dared to speak to him! Anyway, I was rather… bossy as a kid. We’d practice until sundown no matter how much he complained.”

That, Edelgard had to admit, sounded a little familiar.

“When we were children, Ansy and I always tried to act sterner and bossier and more adult than the others,” the other Edelgard continued, “because of our Crests. Then we grew up. Or, well, _I_ grew up, at least. After I came back to Enbarr and found myself married off to Ferdinand, I started to realize that there wasn’t any point in… well, _anything._ My life was all planned out for me, so I just stopped trying. It didn’t matter if I distinguished myself as a general or got good marks at the Officer’s Academy or worked hard at anything I was meant to do. None of that felt _worth_ doing, really. By now I think it’s more as a matter of principle than anything else.”

“I see,” Edelgard said. “No matter how different we are, it seems stubbornness is an inborn trait.”

“But there are things to do _here_ that are worth doing,” the other Edelgard concluded. “I don’t like paperwork or sitting through boring meetings and I can’t stand working all hours of the day like _you_ apparently do, and I’m terrible at intimidating other nobles the way you do, and making speeches is a _nightmare,_ and your body just _hurts_ all the time and I hate it—”

“Welcome to getting old,” Edelgard interjected, smirking.

“You’re _twenty-four!_ I mean absolutely no offense, but I hate your body and your stupid Crests.”

“Me, too. If Hanneman asks you if you’d like to get rid of them, you have my blessing to say yes.”

“He has. And I will. Anyway, despite your nightmare of a life, for the first time, I feel like I can do something meaningful.” The other Edelgard yawned. “I’m almost starting to not look forward to going back to a world where I don’t matter. Well… I suppose it’s time for bed.”

“Yes,” Edelgard agreed, curling up under the covers. “Time for bed. Good night, me.”

“Good night, other me.”

At least the other Edelgard fell asleep easily. She slept all night.

* * *

Another day of travel brought the travelers to the gates of Fhirdiad just a few hours past sundown. Fhirdiad was an old, beautiful city, though not as old and beautiful as Enbarr (though Edelgard had to admit she was biased). It stood in the middle of a wasteland; the lands encircling the city’s walls—walls not so tall and thick as Arianrhod’s, but just as majestic in their own way—were barren, and the Itha Plains to the northeast were populated more with monsters than with people; the city’s food came from about a day’s travel away, from the markedly more fertile Tailtean Plains west of the river.

If Edelgard recalled her history, though, the great walls and towering spires had until only recently masked a disorderly and unhealthy world beneath the gilded splendor. For most of the past eight hundred years, Fhirdiad had found itself the epicenter of many plagues across northern Fódlan; it had only been within the past twenty years that the city had transformed its haphazard sewer system into a masterclass in civil engineering. The aqueducts that carried fresh water through the city and the sewers that carried waste out were as beautiful in their own way as the great works of sculpture adorning the walls and the artful spires and crenelations reaching like grasping fingers to the sky.

The last time Edelgard had seen this city, flames had engulfed every inch of it. The Immaculate One’s army had been whittled away to a few remaining die-hards among the Knights of Seiros and the Kingdom of Faerghus who had been zealous enough to follow her command to set Fhirdiad alight. The magnificent walls and aquifers had been stained black, the buildings burned down to their hollowed-out stone foundations, beautiful fountains and statuary crushed by the advances of Archbishop Rhea’s last remaining golem soldiers, the prestigious Royal School of Sorcery reduced to crumbled heaps of stone. Rhea had not allowed the citizens to evacuate, and the screams and moans of the innocent damned had rang out from every part of the city, growing weaker and fewer in number as the flames had raged on. As Edelgard and her eagles had braved the fire, the acrid smoke burning their eyes and lungs, the ash blackening their skin and hair, they had felt no remorse cutting down the last of Rhea’s supporters. The enemy had made the decision to follow Rhea’s orders when they could have fled and surrendered. Gilbert, Catherine, Cyril—still just a boy—and the soldiers under their command had trod the paths of monsters in their final moments and had been accordingly slain in a manner befitting such creatures. Ashe, Mercedes, and Annette had wondered if, had they not joined Edelgard and the Black Eagles years ago, they would have been among the zealots here defending their mad leader to their last soot-choked breaths. After a grueling campaign through hell itself, Edelgard’s army had triumphed and Rhea had lain among the burning ruins of her own design, her monstrous body torn apart from stem to stern and simmering in a pool of its own green-black blood. Because of that beast, there was a black scorch mark on the surface of Fódlan where the proud city of Fhirdiad had once stood, and Edelgard had doubts the city would ever be rebuilt to its former greatness in her lifetime.

They rested in the Royal Palace that night. A nervous energy buzzed in the air in all of the drafty halls and empty rooms, carried by servants bustling to and fro and fretting over every last thing that had to be ready in time for tomorrow’s coronation. Byleth and Sothis, exhausted by the trick they had pulled the previous night, were in no condition to give themselves and Edelgard another extra night’s sleep, and given how wearily their shoulders slumped and the tired looks in their eyes, she wouldn’t be able to demand one from them even if she’d wanted to.

Edelgard had been about to enter Dimitri’s bedroom when Thales cornered her in the hallway. Her breath caught in her throat as his voice slithered into her ears.

_“Princess Edelgard? A word, if I may?”_

She turned around to find him looming over her, his face shadowed by the torchlight behind his head. There were little white pinpricks in the darkness where his eyes reflected the light, and little slivers of amber tracing the contours of his cheekbones and nose, and that was the only sign he had a face at all.

“Lord Fraldarius,” she said, inhaling through her nose to keep her breath steady. “You may have a word.”

“I noticed you’ve been spending quite some time with His Highness as of late.”

“That was fourteen words. I said you could have _one.”_

The pinpricks of his eyes showed no emotion. “Is this a particularly Adrestian brand of humor?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. Do continue. You were saying…?”

“I was saying,” he said, “that you are all too familiar with the prince.”

“I’m his step-sister,” Edelgard retorted. “As you very well know, he doesn’t have much else in the way of family.”

“I understand that,” Thales said. “I understand that very well. But you haven’t just been spending time with him as a _sister,_ have you?”

She had to resist the urge to laugh in his face. “I have to wonder,” she said, “how loose you think my Adrestian morals are.”

Thales let out a sharp bark of laughter. “How quickly your mind turns to depravity, little Edelgard! No, no, I’m referring to your little… _discussions_ with His Highness. Every time I speak to him, he seems to sound more and more like you.”

_Good,_ Edelgard wanted to say. She put her hands on her hips. “Are you jealous, Lord Fraldarius?”

“Edelgard, I want you to understand.” Thales put his hand on her shoulder and she felt her breath catch in her throat and freeze into a lump of stone. His touch felt like rat tails slithering across her bare skin, no matter how much clothing there was between his flesh and hers. “You may be family, but Dimitri is a prince of Faerghus, and you are a princess of Adrestia. If word gets out to the other nobles that you are… _educating_ him, they might reject his authority… especially if your influence inspires him to reshape Faerghus in Adrestia’s image. It could be seen as a soft coup by the Empire.”

Edelgard was silent.

“Do you know why the Tragedy of Duscur happened, Edelgard?” he continued. “King Lambert was quite a reformist. It was by his leadership, with the guidance of Lady Cornelia, that Fhirdiad has developed its remarkable sewer system. But when he sought to bring some of his grander and more drastic ideas for reform, especially political reform, beyond the walls of this fair city, the nobles balked, and a few of the most resentful ones hired some militia men to disguise themselves as Duscurites and mount an ambush in the mountains. The rest, as they say, is history. I would hate for the same fate to befall your brother… or _you.”_ There might have been a wicked smile on his face; Edelgard could certainly hear one in his voice. _“Do you know the pain of losing your entire family, Edelgard?”_

Edelgard shook her head, feeling as though Thales was mocking her.

“Prince Dimitri does. Don’t be so selfish, Lady Edelgard. I know that you are merely the ninth daughter of the Emperor, desperately yearning to be _important_ in this world…” Thales leaned forward, and his stale breath stung her nostrils. _“But make yourself_ too _important, and His Highness might have another family member to mourn._ Do you understand?”

Edelgard nodded.

“I am simply looking after you. I hope we won’t need to have this talk again,” Thales said, backing away from her. “If we do, you might not be long for this world. And it would be a shame if you were never able to see your family again.” He stifled a yawn. “Well, I am off to bed. Tomorrow is going to be a big day. I hope I sleep as well tonight as I did last night. Oh—and merry Saint Cichol’s Day, Edelgard.” With those last false pleasantries hanging in the air, he turned around and strode down the hallway, vanishing down the corner. His footsteps against the stone floors gradually faded to silence, and Edelgard was left alone.

She didn’t realize how much she’d been shaking until she put her hand on the doorknob to Dimitri’s room.

* * *

The next morning, Edelgard could almost see where the flames and smoke had been as Dimitri led her and Byleth on a tour of the city. And that afternoon, as she stood with Dimitri on the balcony in the palace overlooking the city in all its splendor, she swore she could hear the screams of all the helpless civilians Rhea had burned alive out of spite carried on the wind. But the only wisps of smoke she could see in the sky were from chimneys, born of fires in furnaces and hearths, not arson. Or, at least, that was what she had to tell herself.

Her brother’s voice dragged her out of her memories of the future and back to the present.

“It is a beautiful city, isn’t it, Edelgard?” Dimitri asked, leaning over the balcony’s railing and surveying the wide open city square just beyond the palace gates. There must have been hundreds of people down there awaiting the coronation of their new king. Though there was a little smile on his face, his hands gripped the railing tightly enough to put a crack in the marble. “How long has it been for you? Nine years?”

“I think so,” Edelgard said.

“I wish I could remember those days.” A gust of cold wind caught and tousled his snow-white hair; he hastily tried to set it right. “Sylvain and Ingrid have always told me that they and Felix were my friends back then, too. I wonder if all five of us ever played together. Do you remember?”

She shook her head, drawing her cloak tighter around her shoulders and pressing herself against it to ward off the same chill. The tips of her nose and ears were so cold that she could barely feel them. “I’m sorry. My memories of the time are quite faint as well. I do remember teaching you to dance, though.”

His cheeks flushed pink. “D—Did you?” He bowed his head, his gaze lingering on the people down below who crowded the city square so tightly that they covered the ground as thickly as freshly-fallen snow. “I… I’m sorry. I must have embarrassed you at the ball. Whatever you taught me, I’ve completely forgotten. Or, at least, I cannot quite manage it as I am now.”

“No, you did fine. You and Marianne seemed to be quite a darling couple, Dima.”

“You think so?” The pink on his cheeks turned red. “I… _Dima?”_ he repeated, his brow furrowing, as though it had taken a few seconds for his ears to pick up on that name.

“I don’t remember much,” Edelgard told him, “but as I just recently recalled, I called you that.”

“Dima,” he repeated, holding the name in his mouth as though tasting a fine wine. His breath quickened just a little, puffs of white clouds drifting from his mouth. “I… do recall that name. And, Edelgard, you… I’ve heard your siblings call you—I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but…”

“Yes,” she answered. “When I was little, my parents and closest siblings would call me El. You’re welcome to do so as well, if you please.”

“El.” His mood lightened. “El and Dima. I… like that.”

“By the way, do you mind me asking what’s come between you and Lord Fraldarius?” she asked him. “You seemed to hold him in such high esteem until recently.”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s a private matter between us.”

Edelgard took his hand and threaded her fingers through his, forming a gentle grip he couldn’t easily pull away from even with his strength. “Trust me, Dima.”

“Well… the truth is… Felix came to me earlier this month and warned me that he might be planning a coup. As regent, he’s been in power since my father’s death, but there’s a chance he might not wish to give it up… or so Felix says. I know things have been quite strained between them for years, though, so perhaps he is only being uncharitable.”

Perhaps Felix had said that, but Edelgard knew that while she probably wasn’t being outright lied to, she wasn’t being told the whole story. “Honestly, I think there might be truth to what he says. Many nobles _say_ they care about the common good, but are only truly concerned with enriching themselves and amassing power for their own sake. Do you know of the Insurrection of the Seven?”

There was a flicker of recognition on Dimitri’s face. “That was… something to do with Adrestia’s ruling nobles, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right. When the Viscounty of Hyrm attempted to secede from the empire and join Leicester, my father had the rebellion crushed and House Hrym dissolved. Ostensibly fearing that he would further centralize power and become a tyrant, the six great noble houses moved to strip him of his power. It was because of this that my uncle took my mother and me here, fearing that we could be held as hostages against the Emperor otherwise. When I came back…”

This was where her past and the other Edelgard’s past had diverged. Edelgard had returned to find her father a helpless man and had been subjected to tortures the likes of which only Dimitri could truly imagine. Her counterpart had returned to find things much more amicable between her father and the nobles, but her hand had been given away in marriage. Without the poisonous influence of Those Who Slither in the Dark, the effects of the coup had been greatly softened, and Duke Aegir now had roughly equal authority to Emperor Ionius, or perhaps a bit more.

“I can’t say if my father was truly enacting a power grab, or whether it was the right thing to do,” Edelgard continued, “but either way, I highly doubt that Duke Aegir and the other five nobles were acting out of a sense of vengeance for Viscount Hrym or altruism toward the common people of Adrestia.” In her world, Duke Aegir had taken control of Hrym territory and ruled it so harshly that people had fled over the Airmid River to Ordelia territory in droves. Perhaps this world’s Duke Aegir was different, but she was sure the core of his personality was unchanged. “Some people care about power for the sake of helping others; others are only concerned with helping themselves. On which side do you think Lord Fraldarius lies?”

“I don’t know,” Dimitri admitted. “He’s been like a father to me for years, but…”

“It’s your decision to make. You know him better than I do. You might even know him better than Felix does. Just ask yourself in whose interests he acts.”

“At least I can depend on you and our professor. You’ve never led me astray. I’m eternally grateful that you two could come all this way to support me.”

“Well, a representative of the church does need to preside over the ceremony. I think Rhea will be fine with our teacher acting in her stead.”

“We have not given her much choice,” he added. “El… I remember what you said to me after Ashe’s death—about living for someone else’s ideals. If I might confess something to you…” Dimitri’s face grew grim, almost pained, and he squeezed her hand tightly enough to make her bones ache. “The dead still haunt me and their cries for vengeance still ring in my ears. Mother, Father… and those who suffered with me beyond the reach of the light. My first duty is to lay them to rest by seeking out and destroying their murderers. But after that… I think I’m beginning to know where my path might lead from there. And it’s all because people like you, our professor, and our classmates… people like Ashe…”

To say the least, Edelgard felt quite pleased with herself. Dimitri would choose his own goals, and if his goals happened to align with her ideals, then all the better. Those Who Slither in the Dark would rue the day they chose an empty vessel to act as their sword.

Dimitri slowly, gingerly held his arms to her sides and closed them around her, moving with a deliberate turtle’s crawl as he rested his head against hers, his cheek resting against her hair and his hands sinking into her fur cloak, and as she sank into his warm embrace in turn and nestled herself in his chest, Edelgard forgot all about her plans, her hopes, her anxieties. She hugged him back. For a moment that seemed to stretch on into minutes, she was El and he was Dima and that was that.

But it had to end.

_“Dima,”_ she whispered into his ear, gently pulling him down to her level, _“I’ve been researching the Tragedy of Duscur.”_ She could feel his pulse quicken under his skin, his hold on her tighten. _“I think things might not be as they seem. I have reason to believe that another entity, perhaps those responsible for Remire, may have framed the Church—”_

_“What?!”_ he hissed, and he clutched her so tightly that she almost feared he might crush every bone in her body. _“Edelgard, those monsters may have torn my past to shreds, but I know what I saw—they were men of faith, men of the church, men of the Goddess—”_

_“I have evidence,”_ she said, knowing she was not quite lying. Hapi was her evidence. _“When we return to Garreg Mach… I’ll show you. I’ll explain everything.”_

_“Edelgard…”_ There was a simmering rage in his voice, one she was accustomed to hearing on the battlefield.

_“Dima, I know that nothing is more important to you than justice and vengeance. I’m no friend to the church. If you wish to destroy them, then destroy them; Fódlan will be better for it. But if there’s even a small chance they may have been framed, your first priority must be the_ true _culprits.”_

Dimitri backed away from her, a dark look on his face. She held him by the wrists. “One more thing… Rodrigue threatened me last night,” she told him. “I think he knows more than he has told you. Think very carefully about whose word you can trust. Mine… or—”

_“Your Highness.”_ Dedue’s voice struck them like a hammer pounding steel into armor. Edelgard and Dimitri broke apart to find him stepping out from the palace onto the balcony. “It is time to begin preparations for the coronation.”

“Thank you, Dedue,” Dimitri said, standing up to his full height. “I will be right along. Edelgard, it will likely be a few more hours until the event as we wait for a few of the other nobles to arrive. Feel free to go anywhere in the palace. Knowing you, I’d recommend staying indoors where it’s warm.” His tone of voice sounded as cold as the winter air.

Edelgard watched him vanish with his vassal into the palace. Steeling herself to enter the lion’s den, she wondered what turn of events would await her this evening. A reversal of fortunes, surely… but for Thales, or for her?

* * *

The coronation ceremony was attended by the reigning nobles of Faerghus, who were all gathered with a select few attendants in the throne room of the royal palace. Count Sigmund Galatea and Count Walter Charon had trailed behind Dimitri’s carriage and arrived at Fhirdiad hours apart but just in time for the ceremony. Among the other gathered nobles were Margrave Silas Leir Gautier, quite easily identifiable as Sylvain’s father by his shock of red hair and confident swagger; Baron Oswin Ulster Dominic, whose head of thinning gray hair Edelgard supposed must have once been the same carrot-red as his niece’s; Duke Rufus Fergus Blaiddyd of Itha, brother to the late king Lambert; Count Ethan Róich Rowe and his battle-scarred knight Gwendal the Gray Lion; and much to Edelgard’s surprise, Lady Cornelia von Rusalka—with her adopted daughter Mercedes at her side.

As she waited for the ceremony to begin, Edelgard crossed the hall and inched her way closer to Cornelia and Mercedes. Cornelia wore an ornate dress with bare arms and shoulders adorned with long, carefully-trimmed feathers and fur; it sported a neckline so low it nearly reached her navel. Mercedes sported a much more conservative gown with an ornately-knitted shawl draped around her shoulders to ward off the chill. She noticed Edelgard approaching and waved, a bright smile on her weary face.

“Lady Cornelia. Mercedes.” Edelgard offered the both of them a formal bow. “A pleasure to see you both here.”

Cornelia smiled without showing teeth. Edelgard could all too easily imagine fangs behind her lips. “Princess Edelgard of Adrestia herself. My, my. The pleasure is all mine, dear,” she said, taking her hand and clasping it just a little too firmly. “What brings you so far north and so… far away from home?”

“The invitation of your future king himself,” Edelgard replied, slipping her hand out of her grasp as politely as custom allowed. “I could ask the same of you—last I heard, you were on your way to Garreg Mach.”

“As luck would have it,” Cornelia said, “as soon as I responded to Professor Manuela’s letter regarding my missing daughter to signal my intent to come collect her, I received word of His Highness’ coronation. And I’m afraid I can’t miss this for the world. Hapi won’t mind. A shame she’s been mixed up in such horrible events, though.”

Edelgard made sure to hide how relieved she was. One fewer agent of Those Who Slither in the Dark at Garreg Mach was something to rest easy over. It meant that Hapi was safe, too, or at least marginally safer.

“How was the ball, Edelgard?” Mercedes asked, offering her a hug she was all too happy to accept. “I got a letter from Annie that said our professor picked Felix for the White Heron Cup! Poor Felix… and poor Annie! She was so eager to be the house representative…”

“Don’t worry, Mercie,” Edelgard said. “I was Felix’s tutor. We won the competition quite handily, actually. As for the ball, as fun as it was, I can say with certainty that it would have been much more fun if you’d been there.”

“You’ll have to tell me all about it after the ceremony,” Mercedes said.

“Of course,” Edelgard said.

“Did you meet anybody at the Goddess Tower?”

Edelgard felt her cheeks turn red. “Well… unfortunately…”

A hush rippled through the throne room. _“Shh,”_ Cornelia hissed through her teeth, laying her cold hands all too firmly on Edelgard and Mercedes’ shoulders. _“It’s starting.”_

Cornelia’s long, sharp nails ghosted like the tickling of spiders’ legs across Edelgard’s neck, and the chill that ran up her spine seemed to whisper in her ear, _“I could kill you whenever I like, Princess Edelgard…”_ She suppressed the urge to shiver or show weakness, knowing it was an empty threat. She couldn’t do it. Not in front of all these lords. Not in front of Dimitri.

All eyes fixed themselves forward. Dimitri stood with two bishops from the Western Church before the empty throne of his father, clad in ornate black and gold-trimmed armor and a furred blue cloak, its wolf’s-pelt mantel engulfing his shoulders—a noble and heroic mirror of his Hurricane King costume, Edelgard noticed; she couldn’t help but be reminded of the gold and crimson armor she had worn to battle in the war, which had itself been a sort of bright and righteous reflection of her sinister guise. Thales, in his guise as Lord Regent Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius, stood with him on one side holding a gold crown encrusted with sapphires; Byleth stood on the opposite side of him with the Revelation of Seiros, the holiest of the church’s holy texts, in her hands, clad in a blue gown and gold regalia that Edelgard swore bore no small resemblance to Sothis’ garb (perhaps the little brat had pestered her into picking it out from among whatever other clothes had been offered to her for the ceremony). To say the least, Byleth looked incredibly beautiful regardless of what she was wearing, but the gown left her arms and much of her legs bare and exposed, and all that skin was more than enough to make Edelgard feel as though her heart was made of melting wax dripping down her legs.

There were a few hushed murmurs among some of the lords. _“I thought the Archbishop would be presiding,”_ Baron Dominic said. _“Is that woman her representative?”_

_“She must be,”_ Count Rowe answered him. _“Only—”_

_“Shh! Quiet, you fools! Show some respect!”_ Duke Rufus hissed at them.

The ceremony began when one of the bishops retreated behind the throne and returned bearing the Hero’s Relic Areadbhar, a massive spear with a steel haft wrapped in black leather bands and a wickedly curved blade forged from the same bonelike umbral steel as the Sword of the Creator, and offered it to Dimitri. The blade had a chilling, strange shape to it; even at this distance Edelgard could see the odd joints sculpted throughout it and was struck by its resemblance to joined-together fingers on a grotesquely lengthened hand, like the bones of a sea-beast’s pectoral fins. When Dimitri took the weapon in his hands, the bony blade lit up with a fiery orange light and the Crest Stone embedded within it shone with a piercing, bloody glow.

_“Children in Faerghus learn to hold swords and spears before they learn to read or write,”_ Mercedes whispered to Edelgard, as though she didn’t already know that. _“The coronation ceremony follows the passage of a boy’s journey to manhood. After this, they recite the oaths.”_

_“I’m surprised you know so much about this,”_ Edelgard whispered back playfully, _“given there don’t seem to be any ghosts or flesh-eating insects involved.”_

Mercedes giggled.

Dimitri swung the spear in an artful, practiced flourish; the strength of his swing sent a gust of wind through the throne room, forcing the attending nobles to brace themselves against the miniature storm for the few seconds it lasted. With the demonstration of his strength over, Dimitri held the spear to his side as Byleth read a few passages from the tome about the righteousness of kings and the blessings of the Goddess upon faithful leaders and had Dimitri recite a few oaths with his other hand resting on the book.

_“I, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, son of Lambert Egitte Blaiddyd, descendant of the first King of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus Loog Dmitri Blaiddyd, descendant of the hero Blaiddyd of the Ten Elites who fought at the side of Saint Seiros in the War of Heroes and was blessed by the Goddess with the Crest of Blaiddyd, do solemnly swear by my heart and soul that I will faithfully execute my role as sovereign over the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the kingdom and all its loyal subjects.”_

Edelgard wondered how many more times she would have to hear the surname ‘Blaiddyd’ before this day was through.

Following the oath there was a choral hymn which all of the attending nobles were expected to take part in, a sermon spoken by one of the bishops, another hymn, and so on and so forth. There were many prayers and much kneeling, standing, kneeling, standing, and kneeling again between them; Edelgard could see the less in-shape nobles becoming winded from the exertion.

The hymns and prayers were cloying; Edelgard felt as though she were drowning in them. And with every minute that dragged on, she felt dread gnaw on her bones; every passing minute seemed to be pulling Dimitri farther and farther away from her. It had been a long time since she’d last felt the terrifying, paralyzing, anguishing anxiety of watching someone important to her slip from her grasp. What more had Thales said to him since they’d last seen each other? Whose voice rang loudest in his head? All this time, she’d been fighting this tug-of-war between herself and Thales, and as time marched forward she became less and less certain of her chances. This was nearly as bad as when she’d watched Byleth drift closer and closer into Archbishop Rhea’s influence like a ship pulled into a swirling maelstrom.

Finally, setting the relic down on the floor in front of him with a slow and careful reverence, Dimitri knelt before the throne, bowed his head, and allowed Byleth to anoint him by smearing holy oil on his forehead and tapping his shoulders with the flat of the blade of the Sword of the Creator. At long last, Thales raised the jeweled diadem over his head and bade Byleth to lay her hands upon it with him. The two of them together, a false representative of the nobility and a false representative of the clergy, placed the diadem upon Dimitri’s brow, nestling the gleaming gold and glittering sapphires upon a bed of white and silver.

_“I,”_ Thales announced, _“hereby resign my title as Lord Regent of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus and consent to having all responsibilities as regent invested in His Majesty the rightful and anointed King Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd of House Blaiddyd. May his reign be long and blessed. All hail King Dimitri!”_

The lords and ladies present echoed his proclamation in a deafening roar so mighty that it nearly knocked Edelgard off her feet, and as Dimitri stood up with Areadbhar in hand and turned around to face his subjects, thunderous applause washed over him.

Edelgard remembered how heavily the crown had rested upon her head when she had taken it from her father and worn it for the first time. The weight of her responsibilities and her duties had never seemed so crushing as they had at the very moment all of her ambitions had become possible, and so she was not the least bit surprised to see the melancholy traced in the worried furrow of Dimitri’s brow and the sad downward curve of his lips.

She smiled at him and saw his dour demeanor brighten ever so slightly. A hopeful sign, perhaps, which quelled the nervous quiver in her gut.

There was another hymn, and another sermon, and then another hymn, and at last—at long last—the ceremony came to an end. Dimitri accepted an embrace from Thales, and a much warmer one from Byleth, and stood before his throne as everybody else around him retreated down the steps and merged with the audience, bending their knees and bowing their heads before the newly crowned king of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus.

* * *

There was a grand feast that night immediately following the coronation; the palace’s vast dining hall had been prepared to receive every lord in Faerghus with room to spare. There was roasted pheasant, grilled Albinean herring and braised Albinean moose medallions, turnip stew with Teutates loach, and several whole Duscur boars roasted over spits. Wine, mead, and champagne seemed to flow from an endless supply. The nobles were loud and raucous, and only grew louder and louder the more they imbibed. Edelgard took only a few sips of her glass, intent on keeping her wits about her; she found she had nearly no appetite to speak of anyway.

When the feast came to an end, Dimitri rose from the head of the table. “My subjects,” he announced, his voice loud and clear, his tone confident, “I have an announcement to make.” He politely cleared his throat into his fist, then looked to Byleth, then to Edelgard, then to Thales, as though awaiting guidance from any of them. “As you all know, I have been attending the Officer’s Academy at Garreg Mach Monastery, and there is still quite some time before the current term ends. I am a man who keeps his word and abides by his obligations,” he said with a bit of a nervous laugh, “and therefore, as it is my obligation to continue cleaning the stables there until I have finished my studies, I shall be returning to the monastery posthaste. I promise to return here and place myself upon the throne at the beginning of the Great Tree Moon. Until then, I humbly ask Lord Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius, dear friend of my father, dear friend of mine, to carry on dutifully in my stead as he has carried on in my father’s. That is all. Thank you.”

With that, and as bemused _huh_ s rippled through the audience, Dimitri returned to his seat. Edelgard could see the shock and Thales’ face and hear the outraged _“What?!”_ Cornelia hissed through her clenched teeth from across the room and took great satisfaction in knowing that for Those Who Slither in the Dark, things had not gone as planned, whatever those plans had been.

“Well, that was interesting,” Mercedes said as Cornelia shot out of her chair and all but ran after Dimitri with Thales. She stifled a yawn. “How much longer are you staying in Fhirdiad, Edelgard? There’s a bakery that sells the best sweet buns in all of Faerghus; you’ve _got_ to try them while you’re here!”

Normally, Edelgard would have happily said yes, but at this moment she would rather hear whatever Thales and Cornelia wanted to speak with their new king about.

She’d hardly taken a few steps toward the king, though, when Hubert rushed to her side and grabbed her by the arm with an uncharacteristic roughness. _“Your Highness,”_ he hissed, his breath short and shallow, beads of cold sweat on his brow, the black forelock that fell over one of his yellow eyes windswept, “I must speak to you. It’s urgent.”

“Where have you been, Hubert? You’ve missed the entire feast. Anyway, I’d like to speak with His Highn—His Majesty,” Edelgard told him, pulling herself free of his grasp. “It’ll only be a minute—”

“Please, Lady Edelgard. I’ve just come from the rookery. A message has arrived by express owl from Enbarr bearing His Majesty’s seal.”

Edelgard’s struggles ceased. She felt her heart sink into her gut and the cold bite into her fingertips. “An urgent message from Enbarr?” she asked, a cold and dark dread gathering within her.

He pressed a worn, opened envelope into her hands. Edelgard recognized the broken seal on it, the shape of the double-headed eagle and Crest of Seiros stamped into the scarlet wax. “Let us go somewhere private,” he said.

His words did nothing to assuage the growing dread, building within her like an oncoming storm, but she followed him out of the throne room and into the great hall, through the castle, past rows of windows that showed nothing but a black abyss, and into the bedchamber that had been reserved for her. The letter could contain dire news, or worse, Hubert could be leading her somewhere he could dispose of her if he’d been replaced by Those Who Slither in the Dark during his absence. Edelgard prepared herself for the unthinkable task of striking him down should she need to.

She removed the paper from its envelope and unfolded it to find a message that was most definitely not in her father’s shaky, yet bold handwriting. She kept her eye on Hubert as she skimmed the message, keeping one hand free for spellcasting if he attacked her while she was distracted.

It was a simple message. Blunt, forward, and to-the-point, written by the Emperor’s personal physician. Ionius von Hresvelg IX had passed away peacefully in his sleep yesterday morning; the news had been sent on the swiftest courier owls to all corners of Fódlan.

“I’m sorry, Lady Edelgard,” Hubert said, crestfallen. “You have my deepest condolences.”

“No,” she said, wracked with disbelief, but the word hardly managed to come out as anything but a whimper. Her breath froze in her chest, stopped by the lump in her throat. “No, he… he wasn’t supposed to…”

Hubert’s brow furrowed and his glare darkened, a hard gleam in his yellow eyes. “Wasn’t supposed to _what,_ Lady Edelgard?”

Before she could compose herself, there was a dagger of ice, its crystalline blade patterned with hoarfrost, pressing ever so gently into the hollow of her throat. The cold radiating off it, and the steely glare in Hubert’s eyes, chilled her to the bone. It was a familiar face he’d worn in her world, but never when speaking to _her._

“Who are you,” he asked, “and what have you done with Lady Edelgard?”

Edelgard took a step away from the dagger protruding from Hubert’s gloved hand and felt her back press against the cold stone wall. “I can explain,” she said.

“You had better. I should have realized it sooner. The change you underwent months ago was nearly as rapid and drastic as the change we saw Brother Tomas undergo at Remire. Tell me… are _you_ one of those fiends? Have you killed the real Edelgard and stolen her face to wreak your evil plots?”

“No,” she said.

“Then what are you?”

“A time traveler,” she said, “from another world’s future.” And when his lips curled and brow furrowed in disbelief, she continued to explain.

When she’d finished, Hubert withdrew the dagger and the magic holding the ice together faded away, letting the icy sheath coating his fingers thaw and form a puddle on the rug at his feet. He looked as though he’d aged five years; there was a weary slump to his shoulders.

He gasped, his eyes widening in shock and horror, and he took a step backward and threw himself to his knees before her. “My deepest apologies, Lady Edelgard. I cannot believe I turned a blade upon you.”

“You are forgiven,” Edelgard said. “In fact, holding me at knifepoint was quite the sensible thing to do, given what you knew. I think your counterpart in my world would approve. At any rate,” she added, “when I said that my father wasn’t supposed to die, I meant that it wasn’t yet his time. In my world, he passes away months from now, and he was far sicklier than this world’s Ionius. Foul play has hastened his demise.”

Hubert lifted his head. “I… see. And the other Lady Edelgard is…”

“She’s fine. We’ve simply traded places for a bit, and I can assure you she is being looked after and taken care of. Trust me, I’m as eager for this situation to be resolved as you are.”

He sighed with relief and stood up, rising far above her. “I wish you had told me this sooner, Your Highness.”

“I’m afraid I have a bad habit of holding things close to my chest,” Edelgard admitted. “Now… we need to find Professor Byleth. We need to return to Garreg Mach as soon—and as quickly—as we can.”

She should have seen this coming. She recalled the secret message she’d found in Ashe’s letter—a message from four hundred years in the past from someone who’d had plenty of time and ample opportunity to learn of the future plots of Those Who Slither in the Dark.

_In sure [Ensure] your families [family is] safe. If you don’t protect [them], they will perish._

That was why she had written to her uncle Volkhard, the only real connection she had to her other siblings, earlier that month and had asked him to gather as many of her siblings as he could and bring them to the safest place she knew of:

Garreg Mach Monastery.


	19. Deceive, Inveigle, Obfuscate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard faces an unpleasant surprise on her way back to Garreg Mach, and someone is acting kinda sus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait! I had horrible fatigue last weekend and couldn't write and that threw my schedule back a bit, but I made it up to you all with an extra long chapter!
> 
> Also, yes, you can tell that I'm still binge-watching the X-Files.

The swiftest route back to Garreg Mach from Fhirdiad was not the route the royal carriage had taken over the past four-and-a-half days, but rather the route traced by the river that separated Fhirdiad’s wild and barren outskirts from the lusher Tailtean Plains—a path from the kingdom’s capital to the Oghma Mountains, passing by the occasional villages that were little more than clusters of houses set up around trading posts. It was straighter and shorter than the main roads, and the horses would travel easier without having to pull a carriage. Edelgard traveled light; it wasn’t any different, really, than traveling for class, except the party was much smaller.

They rode through the night, guided by Byleth’s unerring sense of direction and, on the occasion that erred, Sothis’ uncanny knowledge of the night sky (perhaps there was some truth to the story that the Goddess had come to Fódlan from the Blue Sea Star), and set up camp on the riverbank just as the rising sun brought a lightening purple hue over the horizon.

“You seem to know this area well, Professor,” Hubert remarked to Byleth as he assisted Edelgard and Dedue in hitching the horses, setting up the tents, and building up a snow wall to block out the northern wind.

“Dad took me all over the place,” Byleth replied matter-of-factly, observing by the dawn’s first light the ice floes drifting north down the river’s current as she and Dimitri filled everyone’s canteens and started a fire. “He’s from Faerghus, actually. I think. He never really talks much about his life.”

Edelgard wondered if Jeralt had told her more about himself on the night of the ball than he’d ever told his own daughter and felt a pang of guilt, although it was his fault, not hers, for not being forthcoming with Byleth. Between her father, Rhea, Edelgard, and Dimitri, perhaps Byleth had been fated to be surrounded with secretive people.

“You should ask him when we get back,” Edelgard said to her.

The rim of the horizon had turned orange by the time they were ready to rest. Dedue and Hubert would keep watch in shifts over the next few hours—Byleth and Edelgard had both volunteered, but they had insisted they get some sleep, since they had noticed how worn-out the two of them were. Edelgard huddled in her tent under her cloak, holding a flame in her clasped hands to keep them warm. The worst of the wind that blew down from the north whistled harmlessly over the top of the snow wall, and the warmth from the fire wafted through the tent flap, but it was still cold; the Guardian Moon was upon them and with it came the bitter heralds of winter’s bitterest winds yet to come. The less time she spent in Faerghus, the better.

“El,” Dimitri said, “I’m sorry about your father. I know what it’s like to lose family. I—I wouldn’t wish that on you, no matter what.” Though he was sitting next to her, draped in his own heavy cloak to ward off the cold, when she leaned into him and rested his cheek against his shoulder, he flinched and hastily inched away from her.

The hitch in his voice and the way he’d flinched was telling. Edelgard knew there was a chance that Those Who Slither in the Dark were behind the Emperor’s death, and if they were, then it was likely that Dimitri was to some degree aware of their plans. Then again, maybe he had been kept in the dark, just as he’d been kept in the dark about Remire. She could only project onto him the way she had faltered, seeking to show sympathy to the victims of tragedies she had been implicated in by her monstrous allies.

“I don’t know how to feel,” she said, and she was speaking entirely truthfully, though not for the reasons he might expect. This world’s Edelgard had not known loss. Nobody she had held dear had died before her eyes or locked away in some experimentation chamber so far from her cell in the dungeon that it might as well have been in Albinea. She had not felt sand tick through an hourglass in her mind as she counted the seconds her ailing, wasting-away father had yet to live. Edelgard had no idea how her counterpart would react. She didn’t even know how her counterpart _felt_ about her father in the first place. Her own feelings were complex—she’d felt betrayed, of course, let down by a father who had been powerless to save her, but also sympathetic toward someone who’d been just as helpless as she’d been, and ultimately, she had loved him dearly. Perhaps this world’s Edelgard, though, resented him for pawning her off to his political rival’s son.

“It’s okay to not know,” Dimitri assured her. “Like with Ashe… the world just feels upside-down when someone you care for dies. With every step you take, you feel as though you will fall off the ground and plummet into the sky.”

She nodded. “Thank you. I think I will be fine.”

“You won’t be,” he muttered under his breath.

“What?”

“Nothing. Never mind. I just worry that… so many horrible things have happened to you. You’ve been attacked by the Hurricane King twice, and then Remire… and now this. And you lived such a carefree life before you joined the Blue Lions. I fear if anything more happens, you might not be able to bear it.”

“Don’t worry about me. I can bear much more than you think.”

“I hope so.” Placated, Dimitri allowed her to rest her head against his shoulder. “Try to get some sleep while the horses are resting,” he said.

“By the way,” Edelgard said, closing her eyes, “why were Rodrigue and Cornelia upset with you last night?”

“Oh? Nothing serious. I had forgotten to inform them I intended to return to Garreg Mach,” he answered, glibly enough that she knew he was lying. Still, anything that made those two angry was heartening enough news to her, even if she didn’t know what it was. “This means your eldest brother Burkhart will be emperor, right? I hate to turn the topic to politics, but he seems quite capable.”

“Yes,” she said, “but… Father died so suddenly that I… I’m worried there might be upheaval.”

“I’m sure emperors have died suddenly before.”

“Yes, and the transfer of power wasn’t always smooth.”

“One can only hope it will be this time,” Dimitri assured her, resting his hand on her shoulder as she drifted off to sleep.

* * *

It was a frantic and exhausting ride back to Garreg Mach, but and after three more days and two more nights, the plains of Charon gave way to the foothills of the Oghma Mountains, and those gave way to the mountains themselves, and the narrow and winding roads—well-maintained roads, well-marked—that weaved through the mountains to the monastery. There had been many occasions on which Edelgard had felt relieved to see the monastery’s walls and its steepled towers rising above the forested hills and nestled among the snow-capped peaks towering above, and this was one of them.

Even with Archbishop Rhea and the Knights of Seiros infesting the place, it was still home. More of a home, really, than the Imperial Palace.

As she and the others passed through the Sealed Forest, the woods to the north of the monastery, the walls of Garreg Mach grew taller and her relief began to fade into a quiet apprehension. Would Volkhard be there with her siblings? How many of them would be there? Would they be safe? Had more news of her father reached the monastery from Enbarr? And, given how she had broken down the last time she had seen her family… was she ready to see them again?

The Sealed Forest loomed overhead. An ancient, wild wood, overgrown around fragments of stone pillars and crumbling walls that bore some very small, passing resemblance to the ruins of Zanado; it was a dangerous place normally forbidden to students. Here and there, islands of stone tiles and brick roads of limestone and marble peeked out from amid seas of moss and snow. The towering rows of pine trees lining the winding roads through the forest were glazed with snow and ice, their needles bristling with frost. It was early afternoon and the sun was beginning to set; the rays of sunlight passing through the dappled trees were dulling into a dusky amber as they fell upon the snow.

With the days and nights of travel wearing down on her, Edelgard felt as though her reins would slip from her hands and she would slide right out of her saddle. Although she had trained this body with relentless determination, this was still not the same body that had spent five years marching day in and day out from battlefield to battlefield. Her feet hurt enough that they were throbbing in her boots.

 _“Halt! Who goes there?”_ a voice rang out. Its owner was unmistakable—few among the Knights of Seiros could shout as loudly as Alois Rangeld. Edelgard and her fellow travelers did not draw their weapons when he, Gilbert, and Jeralt emerged from the forest on horseback.

“Byleth?” Jeralt furrowed his brow and rested his lance against his shoulder. “What in blazes are _you_ doing out here?”

“Hi, Dad,” Byleth said, as casually as though she were taking a mid-afternoon stroll.

Gilbert dismounted from his horse and bent a knee to Dimitri, bowing his head in reverence. “Your Highness,” he said. Evidently, word had not yet reached Garreg Mach about Dimitri’s ascension. Edelgard wasn’t surprised. Her own coronation had been kept a secret, too, from all but the six noble houses until she had declared war and sent out her manifesto to every duke, count, lord, and margrave in Fódlan.

But a secret for how long? Was Dimitri really intending to hide the news for the next two months while he finished his studies?

“Rise, Sir Gilbert,” Dimitri answered. “I am pleased to see you. I hope I have not worried you with my sudden absence.”

“No, Your Highness. Lord Rodrigue let us know before you departed,” Gilbert replied, rising to his feet and leading him and the others through the town. “I am surprised to see you back so soon. A journey to Fhirdiad and back takes at least nine or ten days by carriage.”

“We took a shortcut,” Dedue said.

“As soon as we received word of Emperor Ionius’ death,” Hubert added, “Lady Edelgard insisted on returning here posthaste.”

“Right.” Jeralt’s stern, severe frown softened. “I’m sorry about that, Your Highness.”

“Thank you,” Edelgard said.

“Well, that explains why you’re back so early. What I still want to know is why you’re cutting through here,” he said to Byleth.

“If we’d gone around the forest to the town, we’d be here after sundown,” Byleth explained, “but if we’d just cut south directly through, we’d have reached the monastery just in time.”

“Good judgment,” Jeralt said, nodding. “Better to be here in the sunlight than in the moonlight. So let’s head back before it gets dark. Come along now.”

The travelers headed through the forest’s winding trails after the knights. “What are you doing out on patrol here?” Byleth asked. “Are you still scouring the area for Tomas?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Alois said. “And on top of that, we’ve got quite a few very important persons staying here, so we’ve all got our hands full. Between them, and quite a few students saying they’ve sighted Tomas, the Death Knight, and even the Hurricane King around the monastery, it’s sheer pandemonium!”

“That’s impossible,” both Edelgard and Dimitri said in unison.

“The Death Knight can’t be here,” she said, knowing full well that Mercedes had been in Fhirdiad the whole time.

“The Hurricane King can’t be here,” he said, knowing full well that _he_ had been in Fhirdiad the whole time.

Jeralt nodded grimly. “I agree. I think the kids are just seeing shadows in the dark, but we’re better safe than sorry. Especially with so many princes and princesses here.”

“The Hresvelgs?” Edelgard asked.

“Yeah! You’ve sure been keeping ‘em waiting!” Alois said. “They arrived out of the blue about a day before we got the news about the emperor. Lord Arundel said he’d received a summons from you.”

“He did,” she answered. “Are they all still here?”

“They sure are. Well… that depends on how many of them there are. Seven of them arrived at first, and then Prince Burkhart headed out to Enbarr as soon as, well, you know. I’m sorry, Your Highness.”

“Thank you.”

“So, anyway, there’s, um… six of them?”

“I have ten siblings,” she said.

“Oh.” Alois’ shoulders slumped. “So, no, I guess all of the Hresvelgs aren’t here. Sorry, Your Highness. Didn’t mean to get your hopes up. Still, better than nothing, right? A brother in the hand is worth two in the bush, as they say.”

“That’s right. Thank you.” Edelgard took a deep breath and tried to banish her apprehensions. It was right that Burkhart should be headed down to the capital to receive the crown, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was heading into a trap. And the other siblings who hadn’t arrived… she had to just hope they were indisposed for innocuous reasons.

“So you didn’t take the main roads back to Garreg Mach?” Jeralt inquired as he led the travelers along. “I’m surprised you didn’t run into any trouble, following the river like that. There are still a lot of bandits up in the north, aren’t there, Prince Dimitri?”

“We traveled too swiftly for trouble to keep up with us,” Dedue said.

“I am afraid it’s true that there are still a great many bandits and raiders plaguing the kingdom,” Dimitri said. “Even seven years after the Tragedy of Duscur, many towns and villages find themselves regularly beset by bandits. Most are just starving animals lashing out at those more fortunate; some fancy themselves two-bit warlords.”

“Can people really fall into barbarism that swiftly without their king?” Hubert mused, a worried furrow creasing his brow. His eyes met Edelgard’s and quickly darted away. “I think the social order of Adrestia is made of sterner stuff,” he hurriedly assured her.

“Do you think it’ll get better once you take the throne?” Byleth asked Dimitri.

“I hope so,” Dimitri said. “I have nothing but contempt for those low men. If I must, I will scour the kingdom myself to bring peace.”

“I hope there’s an easier way,” she replied.

“Bring order to your kingdom,” Edelgard suggested, “and these ‘low men’ may not become bandits in the first place. Like you said, they are starving animals. If you can prevent them from going hungry in the first place, they won’t turn to such measures. For example, I heard that Miklan Gautier was quite cunning in battle—if he hadn’t been disowned from his house for lack of a Crest, he might have been a fine general someday.”

Dimitri shook his head. “Perhaps,” he said, “but he was rotten long before he was disowned, by Sylvain’s account.”

“One must wonder,” Hubert said, “why the situation deteriorated so quickly. Has the lord regent been neglectful of his duties? No offense intended.”

Though she inwardly smiled at ‘no offense intended’ coming from Hubert’s mouth (in her world, whenever he offended someone, he _absolutely_ intended it) Edelgard was very thankful that Thales wasn’t around to hear that.

There was the faintest rustling in the woods, the snap of a branch; the short, whistling whip of an arrow streaking through the air. Edelgard’s mind, honed by years of fighting, leaped into action sooner than her body, which wasn’t, and the arrowhead buried itself not in her heart but in her shoulder.

The Knights of Seiros leaped into action, forming a defensive perimeter around the students; Byleth joined them, the fiery light of her blade tearing through the lengthening shadows. Soldiers clad in blue—the armor of the Hurricane King’s men—leaped out, nearly a dozen of them, with short swords and long daggers meant for swift, precise, killing cuts.

And tearing through the woods among them, bearing a wicked glaive, was an impossible man. The Hurricane King himself, wrapped in the pelt of a wolf with its forelegs and clawed paws crossing his chest and tail streaming down his back, his helmet molded in the shape of a snarling wolf’s head with steel jaws yawning open to reveal a face forged of steel.

 _“Lady Edelgard!”_ Hubert shouted, racing to sweep her off her horse before she could fall underneath its hooves. Steadied by his grip as he hauled her onto his horse, she gritted her teeth and ripped the arrow from her shoulder, fearing from the burning sensation that it might have been poisoned. A tempest of swords, lances, and axes surrounded them; the Sword of the Creator lashed out through the trees, ripping through trunks and branches and sending showers of snow and ice through the air that flash-melted from the blade’s heat and just as quickly flash-froze in midair into prickling needles.

Edelgard pressed her hand to her shoulder to staunch the bleeding; the blood gushing against her palm was hot enough, compared to the frigid air, that it nearly felt as though it were boiling. _“I’m okay—”_ she hissed through gritted teeth as the pain throbbed with every beat of her heart. Hubert pressed his hand atop hers and a soft greenish glow weaved itself between them; the pain dulled as the wound knitted itself back together.

 _“You monsters!”_ Dimitri howled at his impostor, breaking one of the assassin’s arms with a savage twist of his wrist and ripping away his sword. _“I’ll kill you! Every last one of you!”_

The false Hurricane King beat a hasty retreat. _“What? Y—_ You’re _not supposed to be here!”_ he cried out, a squeaky, panicked voice ringing out from within his helmet as opposed to the genuine article’s low and threatening intonations. _“Retreat! Retrea—”_

Dimitri swung his pilfered sword with so much vigor and ferocity that the hilt broke apart and the blade flew through the air, drawing a thin line of blood across Alois’ cheek as it traced its path to the fake Hurricane King’s shoulder, burying itself so deeply into the armor and flesh that the impostor’s arm was nearly completely severed; gouts of blood stained the wolf’s pelt crimson and the flowing blue robes jet-black and painted lush blossoms of scarlet on the snow as he and his assassins ran for their lives back into the forest, leaving behind nearly a half-dozen slain assassins felled by Jeralt’s spear, Byleth’s sword, Alois’ axe, and Gilbert’s hammer. In the distance, the telltale sound and flash of light of a warp spell signaled that the impostor Hurricane King had flown the coop.

“El, are you alright?” Dimitri cried out, panting, his face pale. Blood gushed from his fingers, splayed like a beast’s claws; when the sword had broken in his hand, its tang had cut deep gashes through them and frozen them.

“Dimitri, let me see your hand,” Byleth said, flanking him and grabbing him by the wrist to take a look at the wounds.

“I’m fine,” Edelgard insisted, every beat of her racing heart sending ripples of burning heat out from her shoulder beneath her skin.

Alois wiped away the blood oozing from the cut on his cheek with his fingertips. “If I’d wanted a close shave today, I’d have asked my wife,” he said.

“Careful,” Dedue said, warily eyeing the woods. “There may still be snipers—”

Another shrill whistle cut through the air, razor-sharp as the arrowhead it heralded, and Edelgard felt it tear into her eye. A hot knife driven deep into her brain, an overwhelming agony as bad as the worst of her captors’ experiments, acid burrowing into her skull. A high-pitched ringing stung her ears. The world became blurs of red and black, the blood pouring down her cheek and neck and soaking into her clothes burned like boiling oil, the last beat of her heart struck her chest like a hammer against an anvil. And perhaps time had frozen, or perhaps she was dead; she couldn’t tell, because every moment felt like an eternity. She thought of the siblings she would never know, the friends she would never see again, the woman she would never embrace, the work she would never finish, only for a thick and heavy cloud of doom to engulf and extinguish the last few thoughts running through her dying mind as the abyss yawned before her and she plummeted into its unfathomable depths.

All her life, she had prepared for this moment. Accepted it, even. Imagined it so often that sometimes it felt like a memory. The moment when all would turn to ash, the moment when all her works would amount to nothing, but this—

This was more than she ever could have possibly prepared for.

Then the rest of her body, down to the tips of her fingers and toes, was set alight and the world was swallowed up in a white as bright as the purest snow.

Byleth wound time back for only a few seconds, not enough time for Edelgard to catch anything but a glimpse of her own world; in an instant, she was back, opening her eyes to see a flash of fire cut through the air as the Sword of the Creator telescoped its blade and shot into the forest. A scream rang out and was suddenly cut short and the blade retracted back to its resting length, its tip drenched in blood.

“Got him,” Byleth said.

Edelgard found herself paralyzed. If Hubert wasn’t keeping her steady, she would have slid right off his horse and fallen to the ground. She couldn’t say she’d ever felt herself die before. Her breathing ragged and shallow, she reached up with a shaking hand and probed with her trembling fingers the hard curve of bone around her eye, feeling for the arrow that should have been there, the blood that should have been there, the pain, the overwhelming pain, all that blood, hotter than hellfire…

Nothing. Byleth had erased it.

She had _died._ And yet she hadn’t. How many times had this happened before without her knowledge?

“Lady Edelgard, are you safe?” Hubert asked, keeping a tight grip on her. “Lady Edelgard,” he repeated after a few seconds when she didn’t respond. “Your Highness.” His voice sounded as though he was miles away and speaking through cotton. She could barely hear him.

More seconds passed.

“Hubert,” she murmured. No other word formed in her mind. Then she blinked, and it was as though she’d snapped out of a trance. “I’m fine,” she said.

“I shudder to think where that arrow would have struck you had the professor not swatted it out of the air,” he said.

She nodded.

“Let’s make ourselves scarce in case there are any more of those men around,” Jeralt said, riding to the front of the pack, his horse’s hooves crushing one of the fallen soldiers into the mud and snow beneath it. “Dammit. I’d hoped those kids were just seeing things.”

Everyone’s voices still sounded faint, distant, and muffled. Edelgard thought she might have heard a whisper from Sothis, _“See to the little one,”_ and before the words had registered in her mind, Byleth had flanked her. “Edelgard, are you okay?” she asked.

Edelgard tried to control her breathing. She meant to say ‘yes, Byleth,’ but somehow the _yes_ didn’t make it out of her throat. “Byleth,” she croaked.

Guilt and concern furrowed Byleth’s brow. Besides Edelgard, only she knew what had really happened—or, rather, what _hadn’t_ happened. She reached out, her arm bridging the gap between her horse and Hubert’s, and rested a hand on Edelgard’s wounded shoulder. “You’re alive,” she said to her.

Edelgard laid her hand on top of Byleth’s and tried to put on a brave face. “I’m alive,” she agreed, though part of her still felt as though she wasn’t.

“You’re alive. It’ll be okay,” Byleth said, and Edelgard wondered how many times Sothis’ power had allowed her to live through _her own_ death. How many times had her wife faced the terror of oblivion? How many times had she fallen into that abyss only to be yanked back onto safe and stable ground by her own powers?

Dimitri glared into the forest, his piercing gaze so hateful beneath the furrowed snowcaps of his eyebrows that it was as though he was trying to murder his doppelganger through sheer force of will alone. As she gathered at least a fraction of her wits about her, Edelgard could tell that beneath the simmering anger was boiling confusion; he probably had no idea why his allies would be sending a fake Hurricane King to attack people. She knew exactly what Those Who Slither in the Dark were doing, though—

Making sure that when the truth came out, nobody would be on his side except _them._

* * *

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Professor Manuela said as she wiped the blood from Edelgard’s bare shoulder with a damp cloth and examined the remnants of the wound where the arrow had pierced her skin. Edelgard sat on a cot in the infirmary, naked from the waist up and shivering as the air cooled her sweat-dampened skin. “And as for you and the Hurricane King—I swear, you two must be a pair of magnets for each other. I’m not sure there’s a damn thing anyone can do to keep you two from running into each other.”

Edelgard was still shaken by the attack. She felt lightheaded, the room threatening to swirl around her if she tried to do so much as stand up or even turn her head. “I don’t think it was the real Hurricane King,” she said, still struggling a bit to find her voice. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Dimitri sitting on a cot across the room, studying the flexing of his newly-healed fingers. When her words reached him, he looked up at her and hurriedly looked away. For her effort, she was awarded a wave of nausea that wrenched at her stomach and forced her to squeeze her eyes shut.

“Really? What makes you say that?”

“The real Hurricane King nearly choked Seteth to death and almost killed you. But I can’t see whoever was wearing that outfit tonight pulling off either feat. I think it was just a bandit or something making good use of the Hurricane King’s reputation.”

“Well, the knights will know for sure when they’ve caught him, whoever it is,” Manuela sighed. She pressed hard against the wound; Edelgard winced and gritted her teeth. “Does it hurt when I do this?”

“I think I just gave you your answer,” Edelgard wheezed to her.

“Yup. It’s as I thought,” she said, frowning. “Hubert did a good job closing up the wound, but I think you might have left a bit of the arrowhead in there when you ripped it out.” She clucked her tongue and reached for her tools, picking up a little scalpel and a dampened rag. “That’s why only storybook heroes rip out arrows, darling. Best to leave them in until a medical professional arrives. Unless they’re poisoned, of course. Then again, I suppose you had no way of knowing that. Now hold on; it’s not often that I have to cut someone open—oh, don’t look at me like that! I’m not saying I’m _bad_ at it!”

Edelgard took a deep breath and closed her eyes as Manuela rubbed a numbing salve over the wound. She _heard_ more than felt the slim blade slipping deftly into her flesh. It wasn’t anything like the experiments, she told herself. _They_ had never been kind enough to do anything to numb the pain. Manuela was _healing_ her. It was a procedure she’d undergone dozens of times during the war, by the same pair of attentive healing hands even. She wasn’t going to die from it again. Silly her, why had she thought that? Why had she thought she would die from a simple medical incision? She bit her lip and gnawed at it compulsively, her lungs swelling against her ribs and burning in her chest, her heart throbbing—

Manuela set the scalpel aside, took a pair of steel tweezers, and fished around in the wound until with a delighted _aha!_ she pulled a tiny fragment of sharp steel out and set it down. “Seems to be all of it,” she said, and with another gentle application of warm, soothing healing magic, the wound closed itself up again. “Now that’ll be good as new in a few days.”

Edelgard gasped for breath.

“First time under the knife? Don’t worry. It’s normal to be a little nervous. Let me tell you about the first time _I_ had to cut someone open. Or maybe not. I wouldn’t want to ruin your appetite.”

“I don’t have much of one anyway right now, but thank you, Professor,” she said, taking her clothes and dressing herself as Manuela moved on to take another look at Dimitri’s fingers.

_“All better, Your Highness? Let’s see you make a fist. Okay, alright, you’re free to go. But you’ve got to handle your weapons a little more carefully from now on! Even magic can’t reattach fingers.”_

She forced herself to stand. She felt sick. Near-death experiences were one thing; she’d had more than she could count, and she considered herself rather inured against them. _Actual_ death experiences were something else altogether.

“I think I’m going to go straight to bed,” she mumbled to herself, and as soon as she stepped out into the hallway she found herself leaning against the wall to support her weight. Her legs felt like sacks of jelly. All the work she’d done to get this body in shape, and a measly three-day ride had still left it weak and weary.

She nearly leaped out of her skin when Dimitri grabbed her from behind, but he only set his hands on her waist and shoulder to keep her from falling over. “El. I don’t think you’ll make it back to the dormitories alone,” he said.

“Thank you.”

The two of them walked down the hall and carefully descended the staircase to the great hall. “They were trying to kill you,” he said to her, “not us. _You.”_

“I know,” she said.

“What do you know about the Tragedy of Duscur?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow.” Dimitri’s question was a sharp reminder that she still had to get the information she needed out of Hapi.

His fingers dug into her flesh like claws. “You’ll tell me now.” He had no idea what she’d just gone through. Nobody else did.

Edelgard’s mind raced. What could she say right now without proof to back it up? All she had was knowledge from her own world. “Dima,” she said, “I…”

Her saving grace, fortunately, was that all of the Blue Lions were gathered at the foot of the staircase, mercifully ending Dimitri’s attempts to extract the truth from her. Byleth grabbed her firmly by the arm and helped guide her and Dimitri down the last few steps. “Are you two alright?” she asked.

“We all heard what happened,” Annette said breathlessly. “Were you really attacked by the Hurricane King?”

“We’re fine now,” Edelgard said, “just tired.”

“If you actually fought that beast, you two royal idiots are lucky to be alive,” Felix chastised her and Dimitri.

“I can’t believe he’d attack the two of you, of all people,” Ingrid said, shaking her head. “Somebody’s got to put him down before he kills someone.”

“You two and the Professor must be hungry after all that,” Raphael said. “C’mon, there’s still time to grab dinner at the dining hall. There’s Daphnel stew tonight; that’s like the most filling thing they’ve got!”

“I’m not hungry,” Edelgard said.

“That’s what your _brain_ says,” he retorted, “but your body needs food, no matter what. Especially if you haven’t had a proper meal in three days!”

“I’m just glad you’re both alright,” Ignatz said. “We’ve lost too many of our classmates already.”

“I didn’t want to believe the Hurricane King was really here,” Bernadetta squeaked, hiding behind Dedue. “Oh, no… is Bernie next?”

“Only if you give him a _reason_ to kill you,” Glenn assured her with a sadistic little smirk. “Like, for example, if you’ve somehow annoyed him…”

“Oh, no…”

“No one’s gonna kill you, Bernie, not while I’m around,” Sylvain insisted to her, clearly still trying to put himself back in her good graces.

 _“Excuse me.”_ A less familiar voice broke through the babble of Edelgard’s classmates, and the crowd likewise parted to allow Volkhard von Arundel to step up. A desperate worry painted his face ashen. “El, thank the Goddess’ holy graces you’re safe,” he breathed, his tensed shoulders slumping with relaxation as he caught sight of her. “Your siblings have been waiting for you. We were so worried when we heard what had happened—”

He rested his hands gently on her shoulders and Edelgard resisted the urge to tear herself away. This man was not Thales. He was her Uncle Volkhard. He was a good, kind man who loved her. That was it. That was all. There was no more to him. No secrets. No hidden evils. Nothing beneath the depths, only an earnest surface.

“Uncle,” she said, catching her breath and trying to calm herself, “I’m glad you’re safe, too. I came back here as quickly as I could when I heard the news—”

“I know, I know. It’s terrible,” Volkhard said. “We’re all waiting for updates from Enbarr. Come along; your siblings will be so excited to see you.”

“She needs rest,” Byleth said. “I’m sure she’ll be ready tomorrow morning.”

“Of course. Of course, El. I know you’ve been through quite a lot. I’ll come by in the morning.”

“Thank you,” Edelgard murmured. Seeing her family was an emotional ordeal she was absolutely certain she couldn’t handle right now.

“Professor,” Ingrid said, stepping up, “if it’s alright with you, I’ll take her back to her room.” With Byleth’s silent assent, she took Edelgard by the wrist and led her past her classmates.

She said nothing else until the two of them were well out of earshot of anyone else, stopping at the foot of the dormitory’s staircase. She took a deep breath and squeezed Edelgard’s wrist firmly, as though making sure she was still there.

“I’m so glad you’re safe,” she said. Her eyes darted to and fro, glancing at everything except her face. “When I heard you’d been shot, all I could think about was the ball and… if the last thing I’d ever said to you had been accusing you of having ‘loose morals,’ I don’t know if I could have lived with myself.” A vulnerable smile crossed her face.

The ball. Edelgard had nearly forgotten that had been the last time either of them had spoken to each other. Had it only been eight days ago? “Well,” she said, drawing a shaky breath, “that… doesn’t have to be the last thing you’ve ever said to me anymore.”

“I’m sorry about the ball,” Ingrid said. “There was a part of me that felt angry at you back there. All this time, I’d thought we were friends, and knowing how you really about me felt soured so many of the moments we shared together. But then you ran off, and Ferdinand and Hubert went out to look for you, and I felt so terrible, and I…” She shook her head and pulled Edelgard along up the stairs. “Now’s not a good time to talk about this. You need to rest.”

“I can carry on a conversation,” Edelgard retorted, stumbling as her aching feet struggled to keep apace with Ingrid’s steps. “Please accept my apology as well for what happened at the ball. It was my fault for overstepping your boundaries in the first place.”

The two of them reached level ground at the top of the stairs, right in front of the door to Ingrid’s room, and came to an abrupt stop. Ingrid turned around to face Edelgard, wiping with the side of her hand at moist eyes. Even with her eyes red-rimmed and her face wrenched with worry, she was as stunningly beautiful as always. “Do you really… feel that way about me? Have you really felt this way all this time?” Her voice shook.

“I didn’t realize it until you did. And I didn’t intend to feel that way about you.”

“And do you still…”

“No,” Edelgard lied. “No, I don’t.”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t lose any more people I care about. The Glenn I knew and loved won’t ever come back, and Ashe lived and died four hundred years ago, and you’ve been my only girl friend since I was twelve,” she said, and the space between _girl_ and _friend_ was a chasm. Her voice cracked several times over. “I don’t know how to feel about you anymore, but I don’t want to lose you, and I’m glad you’re safe.” She clenched her trembling fists. “When I see that dastard Hurricane King, I’ll…”

Edelgard couldn’t stop herself from throwing her arms around her. Her heart was in her throat, her chest in a vise; tears burned her eyes. But Ingrid pulled herself away.

“No,” she said, shaking her head and holding up her hands as though to ward her off. “I… Sorry. I’m still not comfortable with… never mind. Maybe we can train together tomorrow if you’re feeling up to it. But no sauna afterward.”

“Does it make you _that_ uncomfortable to know how I feel about women?” Edelgard snapped at her, incredulous. “If you’re still letting your prejudices get in your way—”

Ingrid’s lip curled. “My _prejudices?”_ she snapped back. “Can you just get off your high horse for on—” She let out a sigh, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring as she exhaled. “I’m sorry, Edelgard. I… I don’t mean—It’s just that I—I’m sorry.” Her voice was still strained. “Neither of us can handle this conversation right now, so—let’s just both sleep on it. Good night.”

She opened the door to her room and all but scurried inside as the door swung shut behind her.

Edelgard let out a sigh that made her chest ache as she trudged to her bedroom next door, nearly feeling as though she’d just killed Ingrid a second time. She thumped her forehead against the door, frustrated. She supposed she only had herself to blame for this.

“Wow,” Hilda called out, poking her head out from behind her bedroom door. “Rough breakup, huh. Wanna talk about it?”

Edelgard stiffened. “How much of that did you overhear?”

“Enough to know you fucked up. I’ve seen _Sylvain_ break up with girls more amicably.”

“You’re the worst.”

“Love you, too, babe,” Hilda said, blowing her a kiss before slipping back into her room.

Edelgard went to bed. That night, she was troubled by the same dream she always had. The deaths of her siblings, one by one, until nobody was left but her. Only this time, the dream kept going. Because now she knew what it felt like, she dreamed that she, too, died from those experiments.

Alone.

* * *

She woke up to hear a scream echoing through her room in her own voice, ringing in her throat. Cold sweat dampened her skin and soaked her bedsheets, and the air around her had made it all as cold as the nights she’d just spent riding through the bitter winds. She shivered as she pushed her bedsheets off the bed into a crumpled heap on the floor, bracing herself against the cold air filling her room and rubbing her arms for warmth. Beyond her window, the sun was starting to paint the horizon violet. She almost laughed. At least she’d almost gotten a full night’s sleep.

 _“Pull yourself together, Edelgard,”_ she chastised herself. She was stronger than this, and she knew it.

There was a knock on her door. She froze. An assassin wouldn’t _knock,_ would they? Or perhaps they would, if their aim was to lower her guard…

 _“Edelgard?”_ Hilda called out from the hallway, her voice muffled by the door. _“Are you okay?”_

Edelgard wouldn’t have answered the door, but Hilda forced it open anyway and stepped inside, holding a little candle to light her way. “Wow,” she said. “You’re really off your game if you forgot to lock your door before you went to bed.”

“What are you doing here?”

“You just screamed loud enough that I heard it through the wall,” Hilda said. “Claude and I, of course, assumed someone was trying to kill you, and since it would look suspicious if _he_ snuck into your bedroom in the middle of the night—”

Edelgard looked again out the window. It was early morning.

Hilda closed the door behind her. The guttering little flame of her candle flickered from the movement of the air as she set it down on Edelgard’s desk. “Look, I don’t like you, but we’re both Time Squad, so we’ve both got to look out for each other.”

“That’s quite mature of you.”

“I’m a twenty-four-year-old woman in an eighteen-year-old girl’s body; of _course_ I’m mature. So what, did you just have a nightmare or something?” Hilda took a seat on the bed, then yelped and shot up as though she’d just sat on a tack. “Ugh, _gross!_ What’d you do, piss the bed?”

“It’s sweat,” Edelgard retorted.

“Must’ve been some nightmare. A whole year at Garreg Mach in our world and you never woke me up back then.” Hilda sat down by the desk instead. “Let me guess. It was about your family.”

“Perhaps.”

“I figured it out pretty quickly when I first got here, you know. What the No-Eyed People must’ve done to you. As soon as I saw you with brown hair and Dimitri with white, it all started coming together. And now all your siblings are here… siblings you didn’t have in our world.”

“That I didn’t have _anymore,”_ Edelgard corrected, feeling her tongue cleave to the roof of her mouth.

“Yeah, I figured. They killed your family, didn’t they?”

She nodded.

“Wow. And you _still_ worked for them?”

“Technically, _they_ were working for _me._ Although they thought otherwise. It was complicated.”

“Right. Sure. Whatever you say.” Hilda yawned. “You know, back then I didn’t know anything about you or what you’d been through. I just thought you were a jerk.”

“And now?”

“You’re still a jerk,” she said, shrugging, “but I feel sorry for you.”

“Ah,” Edelgard said. That was much worse.

Hilda let out a sigh, idly weaving her fingers through her pink hair. “When I first came here, it was weird seeing Leonie and everyone else I haven’t seen since the war. I thought I’d be happy to see them again, and I _am,_ but… it really hurts to look at them sometimes. So you with your ten brothers and sisters… I’ve never envied you before, but I _really_ don’t envy you right now.”

“Thanks,” Edelgard said facetiously.

“Well, if you get attacked, just scream again and I guess I’ll have to show up and make sure you don’t die or something,” Hilda added, taking her candle and leaving the room.

Edelgard looked out the window. The sun would be rising soon, and she didn’t usually sleep past then anyway; besides, she might freeze to death if she went back to bed with those damp sheets. She might as well do something to occupy her time. She lit her desk lamp and rifled through her drawer for her textbook on dark magic and managed to read about three pages about forming the proper seals for a Luna Λ spell using advanced trigonometry without a single word of it actually imprinting on her mind. She yawned, her eyes burning from weariness.

The door to her room burst open again; Edelgard shot up to her feet, grabbed her chair as an impromptu shield, and cursed herself for not locking the door on the way out. The panic rushing through her veins didn’t last long, though—it was just Hilda again.

“I just remembered,” Hilda said, brandishing an envelope, “Claude wanted me to give you this when you got back.”

Edelgard set the chair down and took the envelope from her, slid her fingernail across it to open it, and removed the letter.

_Come to the abandoned chapel any time between two and four o’clock. We’re keeping her safe there. Bring chocolate if you have any._

“Between two and four,” she repeated to herself, making sure that fact stayed in her head where it belonged, and then with a snap of her fingers she turned the letter and envelope into ash.

“Ew. Now you’re gonna have to sweep that off the rug, you know,” Hilda said, staring with distaste at the little pile of ash that now lay at her feet. “Anyway, Captain Jeralt is really sticking his neck out for your new friend, so I hope you can get more than three words out of her.”

“So do I,” Edelgard said. Winning Dimitri over to her side, fully and completely, depended on it.

Hilda cleared out the top of Edelgard’s dresser drawer, sat down on it, and let out a sigh. “And to think, when I first showed up here, I thought to myself, ‘finally, a vacation!’ I thought I’d be able to live it up for a while. You know… spend some time _not_ being on a crazy desert treasure hunt with Claude. My skin burns so easily,” she complained, pinching her arm, “so after a week I looked like a lobster! And all that sand? It’s coarse, and rough, and irritating, and… well, you get it. But _no…”_ She rolled her eyes. “You and Other Claude had to get yourself _involved.”_

Edelgard rolled her eyes back at her. “Oh, please. The events in motion here are darker than anything that’s happened in our world. Could you really sit back and relax as you watched this world fall into chaos?”

Hilda kicked her legs idly and played with the hem of her nightgown, kneading the embroidered silk between her fingers. It was quite a cute nightgown, Edelgard noticed. Pink, like her hair, because of course Hilda color-coordinated everything. And there was something endearing about that girlish way she carried herself. Edelgard felt her mouth turn dry and her heart hammer against her ribs. “I guess not. Not anymore. Thanks to your stupid war, and stupid Claude. All I wanted was to enjoy life, but so much for that! I had to go and become _diligent._ I bet the other Edelgard would say the same thing. You’ve ruined the both of us.”

“I don’t think that’s a fair assessment,” Edelgard said.

“Wow, El.” Hilda stopped swinging her legs and leaned forward, a curious look in her eyes as they reflected the lamplight. “You’re actually pretty… well, _pretty_ when you’re irritated,” she said with a little smile that was, of all things… _cute?_

“Excuse me?” Edelgard asked, taken aback. “Hilda, what’s gotten into you?” She felt herself clear her throat and tap her foot exactly three times.

Oh, no.

The question wasn’t _what_ had gotten into Hilda, but _who._ And the answer was obvious.

“Well, _you’re_ pretty when you’re _everything,”_ the other Edelgard blurted out using her mouth. Edelgard felt as though she’d just bitten into a bar of soap.

“El, is that really _you?”_

“Yes! And Hilda, you’re… _you’re_ here now, too?”

“I am!” Before Edelgard could wrest any control over her body and resist, Hilda had all but bounded across the bedroom and hugged her and— _goodness,_ she was warm. And soft. And smooth, her skin as silky as the fabric of her nightgown. And she was not just pretty but _gorgeous,_ in fact, so well-shaped in so many places, with such a bright and sprightly face and such luxuriously voluminous and lustrous hair and the cutest button nose that—

Oh, _Goddess,_ this was uncomfortable.

“Oh, El, it’s _so_ good to see you again!” Hilda sobbed. “You won’t believe what I’m going through in the other world! Claude’s like a slave driver!”

“You think _you’ve_ got a tough work load? I’m the _emperor!”_ Edelgard felt her counterpart say as she puppeteered her body into giving Hilda just as tight an embrace. “I’ve missed you so much, Hil!”

Hilda squeezed her arm. “Ooh, you’ve got _muscle_ now, El. I _like_ it,” she whispered, slithering closer to her.

Edelgard pulled herself away from Hilda before the other Edelgard could make her nuzzle her hair or some other grossly cuddly thing like that. “Wait, wait. This is—How did this happen?”

“I—ugh, yeah,” Hilda said, crossing her arms and similarly struggling to restrain herself. “Oh, come on, we haven’t seen each other in like four months!” She shook her head. “Let’s just try to forget this happened.”

“Wait. Let me think,” Edelgard said.

“Oh, come on, please, can’t you just let me kiss her once?” her counterpart commandeered her mouth to complain. “I’d let you kiss Byleth if I had a chance!”

“Hold on. Hold on. Hilda. Hildas. Edelgard. Listen.” She held up her hands in a plea for silence from the three other people in the room. “When the two of us return to our world, it’s because Byleth in this world turns back time. Something about it affects us as time travelers. So, the only way you two can be here now is if…”

“Oh, I get it! She must be turning back time in our world, too!” Hilda finished.

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Edelgard said. “Byleth doesn’t have the Crest of Flames anymore; the stone in her heart dissolved. Isn’t that what was connecting her to Sothis? So how does she still have that power?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but who cares? She’s got it!” Hilda said.

 _“I_ care,” Edelgard retorted, “because if she’s using it, then something just happened that she’s trying to undo. But what?” Her mind raced. Had someone died? Had _several_ someones died? She knew that in her world, Byleth was leading an attack on Shambhala. Had the unthinkable happened? “Hilda. _Other_ Hilda.”

Hilda looked offended. She put her hands on her hips. “Me? _Excuse_ me? If anything, _she’s_ Other Hilda,” she said, jabbing her thumb into her chest, “and _I’m_ just plain old Hilda!”

“How did you even know which Hilda I was talking about in the first place?”

“Well, it was obvious by context—”

Edelgard crossed her arms. “There you have it, then. You’re Other Hilda. Other Hilda, what were you doing before you came here?”

Hilda furrowed her brow. “…Sleeping? No, wait, Claude had just woken me up. He, Nader, and I were gonna ride west from Goneril to Hrym to rendezvous with the Black Eagles Strike Force—how’s _that_ the best name you could come up with, by the way?”

“It’s elegant in its simplicity and its descriptiveness,” Edelgard insisted.

“Exactly,” the other Edelgard chimed in.

“You’re hopeless,” Hilda said, and Edelgard had the feeling the two Hildas were saying that in unison.

Edelgard collapsed into her chair. Something bad was happening at Shambhala or near Shambhala, or wherever Byleth was—bad enough that she’d had to call upon a power she hadn’t used for at least four months. And there was nothing she could do about it. Any number of her friends—her Black Eagles, all of them as close to her and dear to her as family—could be in dire straits, and she was powerless. Even if this world’s Byleth sent her back there, she was still all the way at Garreg Mach, halfway across Fódlan…

She took a deep breath. “Hilda. Talk to Byleth as soon as you can. Arrange a time for her to send you back. It’s the only way we can know what’s going on there.”

Hilda’s face fell. “It’s… really that serious, isn’t it? You sure Byleth wouldn’t turn back time because she… dropped a vase, or accidentally burped in Count Gloucester’s face, or something?”

“She’s not that frivolous. Not in this world, not in that world.” Edelgard shook her head. She couldn’t dwell on the unknown. She would find out what had happened in due time, but until then, she had work to do. Family to see. Answers to obtain.

Hilda snorted with laughter and clasped her hands over her mouth to hold back a stream of giggles.

“What?” Edelgard asked sharply, glaring at her. “Is this funny?”

“No, no, it’s terrible,” Hilda said. “Just… I was just thinking, if anyone was overhearing this conversation, they’d think we were possessed. And they’d be _right,_ sort of.” She paused, as though expecting an answer that never came. Her face fell. “I think she’s gone now.”

Edelgard waited as well, expecting her counterpart to chime in if she was still there. There was nothing. She was alone in her body, and the fact that looking at Hilda wasn’t giving her heart palpitations anymore made that clear.

“Well,” Hilda said, “whatever just went wrong… I hope your wife fixed it.”

* * *

Everybody had expected Edelgard to still be rattled from the attack that morning, as evidenced by the fact that as soon as she set foot in the classroom, Byleth walked up to her, placed her hands gently yet firmly on her shoulders, turned her around, and marched her back onto the lawn.

“Professor,” Edelgard protested as Byleth pushed her out the doors, “this really isn’t necessary. I’m perfectly capable of attending class today—”

“You look terrible,” Byleth said, and her flat, stern tone of voice brooked no argument. She crouched down and lowered her voice. _“And you died yesterday,”_ she whispered.

“I can hardly let that stop me,” Edelgard replied. “There’s so much to do. Trust me, Professor, I’m fine. There’s nothing wrong with me; I’d hardly call myself traumatized or—” She meant to say more, but the words stuck in her throat. Finally, after all these years, a lie too big for her to tell.

Sothis appeared beside Byleth. “Oh, please, do not embarrass yourself by putting on a brave face! Anybody can tell that what happened has left you shaken. Those who are mortal are not meant to know death in its entirety. You are suffering more than you realize, arrogant one.” Only she could say such an epithet so softly and with such care and sympathy.

Byleth reached out and laid her hand against her eye, placing the gentle, warm pressure of her palm against it. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

“No, Professor,” Edelgard said. “I wasn’t injured there… thanks to you.”

“Sometimes it hurts,” Byleth told her. “When it happens to me, sometimes… like a phantom pain.”

“How many times has it happened to you?” she asked, almost fearful to hear the answer.

“Only twice. Hasn’t happened recently. Though you’d know if it had.”

Edelgard nodded. “I’m sorry, Professor.” She wondered again how many times her wife had experienced death in all its terrible glory. “That must be why you work so hard to keep us safe. All this time… I had no idea.” She looked up into her eyes. Byleth looked more beautiful than ever before. There was a kindness there, in each of the smallest details of her flat expression, in all the subtle quirks that showed her faint and buried emotions, that no other human could experience, and it lit her up from within.

“Every day, Byleth, I find a new reason to love you,” she found herself saying, the words leaping from her mouth without waiting for permission from her mind, as though her counterpart had leaped into her body to say them for her.

Byleth’s brow furrowed in bemusement, her lips ever so slightly quirking upward.

“Perhaps I should have told you this before, or perhaps it’s wrong to tell you at all,” Edelgard said, knowing she had no choice but to explain herself, “but in the other world, you and I are… I came to this world, actually, on the eve of our wedding. I loved you from the moment I laid eyes on you, all those years ago.” Before Byleth could answer her, she shook her head. “No, no. It’s nothing you should concern yourself with. She is not you; you shouldn’t be burdened with my feelings for her.” By the time the last words of her confession had left her, she felt as though her heart had withered and crumbled to dust.

Byleth was silent for a while. “That explains a lot,” she said.

“Indeed,” Sothis said. “It is no wonder she wept that time you brought her over for tea.” She let out a little sigh as she lounged beside her host, hovering in the air behind her shoulder. “Ah, what a strange and sad romance,” she added, a sympathetic little smile on her face.

Edelgard could feel her face turning as red as the Adrestian flag and as hot as the lava pools of Ailell.

“I can see why you thought you should keep that a secret.” With a friendly little smile, Byleth patted Edelgard on the cheek, which did nothing to assuage her mortified embarrassment. “You’ll be with her again soon. Now take the day off and spend some time with your family.”

Edelgard reached up and held Byleth’s hand by the wrist before she could let it slip away. “Th—Thank you, Professor,” she stammered, still blushing madly. “I-I… Please, just forget what I told you,” she added, letting go of her wrist as though she’d just touched a hot stove. “I’m sorry. I suppose I must be lovesick.”

“I’m glad you told me,” Byleth replied. “I’d wondered why you seemed so lonely.”

To spare herself any further embarrassment, Edelgard hurried as far away from the classroom as her legs could carry her and spent the rest of the morning in the greenhouse.

Volkhard, evidently, had thought she would need a long time to recuperate as well, as he did not find her until just after eleven in the morning, which was a time that Edelgard no longer truly considered morning due to the way her work schedule typically worked out. With a gentle hand resting on her shoulder, he guided her to the courtyard, where she found six people waiting for her: three she recognized from Gronder Field, and three who were still strangers to her. But she was not a stranger to _them._ Pascal and Hedwig, her younger brother and sister, were there, as was Gerlinde, her eldest sister. The other three, one man, two women, looked familiar—they all had parts of their father’s face, a nose here, a pair of ears there, a chin, a brow—and yet unfamiliar.

Gerlinde was her absent brother Burkhart’s twin, sharing his strong jawline and the wavy golden hair both had inherited from their mother. Little Hedwig, twelve or thirteen, was taller than most girls her age, gangling and wispy, with round glasses perched atop a freckled nose highlighting her thin face and long chestnut hair tied in a familiar-looking braid down her back. Pascal, about fifteen, was a little short for his age and was more likely to grow wider than taller, his face soft and round and his thick curls of sea-blue hair bouncing with every slightest turn of his head.

The other three she didn’t recognize—couldn’t place a name to their familiar, yet unfamiliar faces—made her heart skip a beat nonetheless. One young woman who seemed to be about nineteen or twenty was soft and stout, waves of long, curly light brown hair framing a rosy-cheeked face; the other woman, who looked between her age and Gerlinde’s, had curls and coils of wiry black hair framing a face like a knife. The man had brown hair cropped on his left side to a short bristle that matched the beard tracing his jaw and swept across his right.

The six of them were huddled over a table with cards in their hands, and in their midst was a bright splotch of red easily identifiable as Sylvain Gautier. He was the first among them to notice Edelgard had arrived, and gave her a friendly wave that made the rest of them turn their heads in her direction.

“Gerlinde, Justine, Joachim, Heidemarie,” Volkhard announced, “your little sister is safe and sound.”

Aside from Joachim, Edelgard couldn’t quite be sure who among the other two was who, and so the stout, plump woman who all but ran over to embrace her, throwing her cards in the air as she did so, was either Justine or Heidemarie—

No, her memory told her. _Justine_ had had dark hair. Her sibling’s faces were faint and ghostly to her now, but a spark of recognition in the depths of her mind told her at least that much.

 _“Heidi—”_ she gasped as Heidemarie wrapped her arms around her and squeezed every last breath from her lungs.

“Oh, it’s so good to see you again, El,” Heidemarie hummed, her voice muffled as she nuzzled her neck. “I was so worried… I can’t believe you were attacked right outside the monastery…”

 _“Hey! Heidi!”_ Joachim called out, crouching down to observe the cards his sister had thrown to the ground, _“You had a royal flush!”_

 _“Not anymore, she doesn’t,”_ Sylvain crowed, a smug smile on his face.

“Sylvain,” Edelgard said, “stop gambling with my siblings.”

“Technically,” he said, hurriedly standing up and preparing to make a hasty exit, “we’re not wagering anything, so it isn’t gambling. Anyway, Princess Gerlinde, Princess Justine, if either of you are free for lunch, I’d love to share—”

“Sylvain,” she said, breaking free from Heidemarie’s grasp and taking a menacing step toward him, “get lost in something other than my older sisters’ eyes.”

Sylvain promptly dropped the cards in his hand and got lost.

Pascal looked crestfallen. “He was just teaching us Faerghus hold-em, El.”

Joachim finished collecting his sister’s hand and set to collecting Sylvain’s hand as well. The cards crumpled in his fist. “He had _crap!_ How in the name of Sothis almighty were we _losing_ to this guy?!”

 _“Language,_ Joachim,” Justine scolded him, whacking him across the top of his head with her palm. “All _three_ of the babies are here now.”

“We’re not babies,” Hedwig protested.

“El’s not a baby,” Pascal protested at the exact same time.

“I don’t know if we can call El a baby anymore,” Heidemarie said, wrapping her arm around Edelgard again and squeezing with the force and intensity of a ravenous boa constrictor from the jungles of Dagda. “Look how she just threatened Sylvain! I think she’s starting to take after you, Justine!”

“Well, it’s about time,” Justine said. “So, Ellie, what were you doing up in Fhirdiad? Don’t tell me you’re starting to like it more than Enbarr.”

“My step-brother asked me to accompany him, and I think the winter weather has cured me of the desire to ever go there again,” Edelgard said, trying to keep herself calm. Her siblings were here, more than half of them this time, and they were all tall and proud and happy and healthy—and oh, Heidemarie and her hugs, she’d always given the _best_ hugs, how could Edelgard have ever let the torture tear that from her memory? “Is it… just you, then?”

“You sound disappointed,” Joachim said, smirking. “Come on! I was never as much of a jerk to you as _Burky_ was, was I?”

“Unfortunately, Immanuel and Dagmar were very busy,” Volkhard told her. “I don’t think I could drag them away from Fort Merceus if their lives depended on it. Burkhart has gone off to receive the crown and put together the finishing arrangements for your father’s funerary parade, and when I met with Anselm…”

“Oh, let me guess,” Justine said. She crossed her arms. “‘Uncle Volkhard, I don’t care how many of my siblings will be there. My work, whatever it is, is of _critical_ importance. Now begone and trouble me no more!’ He probably won’t even show up for the funeral, whenever that is. Such a pompous ass.”

“L- _Language,_ Justy!” Hedwig scolded her.

“Oh, come on, I can say it, can’t I? He’s an _ass,_ always strutting around like he’s Wilhelm the First. Did anyone else get a letter last month about how he had a _very important conversation_ with the White Lion of Fhirdiad at Gronder Field? Macuil’s beard, I wanted to vomit.”

“He likes El, though,” Pascal said.

“You’re too hard on Ansy,” Joachim said. “He just likes feeling important. Can’t blame him.”

Heidemarie giggled. “El, do you remember when you were just as pompous as him? I remember the two of you strutting around the palace like you owned the place.”

“It’s all quite hazy, I’m afraid,” Edelgard said, desperate to remain a spectator to this conversation if only so that she might find it easier to retreat if she needed a moment.

“Oh, no. El’s been learning so much here, it’s pushing all the childhood memories out of her brain!” Joachim wailed with mock concern. “We’ve got to bring her back to Enbarr on the double! Pasky, let’s stow her away in the back of our carriage. No one here will miss her!”

“Sit down, El,” Gerlinde said, gesturing to one of the empty seats. “I want to know what in the world you’ve been getting yourself into here. What have you been studying? And what is all this madness with the Hurricane King?”

“Let’s not talk about the man who’s tried to kill her what, three times?” Joachim interjected. “El, what are you studying? Hedy tells me you were slinging fireballs at Gronder Field. Dagmar would be so proud.”

“I’m not in the mood to talk about myself,” Edelgard said, taking a seat next to Heidemarie. “Actually… I’d like to know what _you’re_ all up to.”

Her siblings all smiled at her, and she felt her heart flutter and do somersaults in her chest.

* * *

Edelgard quickly found herself exhausted by her brothers and sisters. There were so many of them, and they were living such happy lives, and when they shared those lives with her, the memories she’d long repressed of the ways they had died kept seeping into her conscious mind. Gerlinde, who’d vanished into the operating room and never came out. Justine, who’d bitten and kicked and scratched at her captors and been beaten within an inch of her life for it, and the experiments had taken her the extra inch. Joachim, whose skin had split open into weeping sores. Heidemarie, whose bones had become as brittle as blown glass. Pascal, who had been granted the mercy of a quiet death in his sleep. Hedwig, whose fever had turned her mind to porridge and who had died too addled to know that she’d been dying.

She took refuge from them that afternoon, biding the time until her window of opportunity to visit Hapi, by once again retreating to the greenhouse. The thick, humid air within the glass-paneled walls was a welcome respite from the wintry air outside that was thin and sharp as a knife. And the fragrances from flowers and herbs filled her nostrils with a rich bouquet of sweet, floral, and savory scents. She could spend hours here in winter (though her obligations almost always kept her from doing so), freed from the confines of a winter coat.

Of course, she was not the only one accustomed to warm weather who found the greenhouse’s climate alluring. It wasn’t surprising to see Petra among the flowers as well, a heavy coat pooled on the floor at her side. Brigid had a hot and humid climate; even the winters were mild. She spent more time in the greenhouse and sauna than any other student.

“Hello, Edelgard,” Petra said, looking up at her from where she was sitting and offering her a friendly smile. Her tanned skin, soaked with sweat from the humidity, gleamed like polished bronze. “Are you not having comfort in the cold either?”

“No, I’ve never liked the cold,” Edelgard replied. “Enbarr has much milder weather, although I suppose Brigid must be much warmer still.”

“Yes. I was in Enbarr last winter, when they were bringing me to Fódlan,” Petra said. “In Brigid, you must be climbing to the top of the mountains to be feeling the cold of Fódlan. I am not using to it.”

“May I sit next to you?”

“Yes, if you are wanting that.”

Edelgard sat down, laying her cloak at her side. The tiled floor of the greenhouse wasn’t exactly the most comfortable seat, but it was hardly anything to take issue with. Down here, closer to the flowers, the floral perfume that pervaded the thick, soupy air was even stronger.

“In Brigid,” Petra said, “assassinations are many. I have also been the targeted in the past. They were not succeeding. But still, the fear is being real,” she added. “It is making you feel like prey, knowing your enemy is hiding from you and seeking the kill, and it can be staying with you for a long time. I have sorrow that you were attacked.”

“Thank you, Petra,” Edelgard said. She supposed she should be annoyed that everyone except for Byleth was acting like she’d never survived an attempt on her life before, but they had no way of knowing that, nor did they have any way of knowing how that incident had actually affected her. “You’re very kind. I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with this as well.”

“It is the reality of being a princess. In Brigid and in Fódlan.” Petra took a deep breath and filled her lungs with the greenhouse’s rich air.

“This place must remind you of home.”

“Yes, the islands are filled with jungles, and the greenhouse is like being a small jungle. I have gladness that it is not as big as a jungle, though, or as easy to become lost in.” She nodded. “I am feeling ill for home sometimes. It is a hurting loneliness. Brigid is so small that we are not having a word for it in our language. But since Fódlan is large, you all have a word for it. It is on the top of my tongue…”

“Homesickness,” Edelgard suggested.

“Yes, that is it.” Petra clapped her hands. “But the greenhouse is medicine.”

Edelgard nodded. “A panacea.”

“What is that? Is that the, um, your word for…” she mumbled something in her native tongue. “The flesh and blood that is coming out when a baby is being born.”

“That’s a placenta. A panacea is a cure-all, a single medicine that treats many illnesses.”

“Ah. I have understanding.” Petra nodded. “This is missing one thing, though. There are no singing birds. But it still fixes the homesickness well,” she said, sighing. “It must be nice to be seeing your brothers and your sisters.”

“Yes,” Edelgard said. “I feel like I haven’t seen them in years.”

“Dorothea is saying that your brothers and sisters are a royal pain in the butt,” Petra said. “But they are not making my butt hurt. And I am not understanding how a pain can be royal. Can a pain be a lord or a duke as well?”

Edelgard snickered. “No, a royal pain is just an expression. It just means you find someone very irritating.”

“Oh. Some of your older brothers and sisters are being very irritating. I am thinking they are royal pains, then. But your younger ones are being very nice.”

It was understandable, Edelgard supposed, that some of her siblings might not be so kind to Petra. After all, it was only recently that Brigid and Adrestia had been at war; Petra was an outsider, taken hostage by the winning side to extract further concessions from the losers, and to many people still a foreigner and an enemy. “Tell me which of them is irritating you and I’ll set them straight.”

Petra laughed and shook her head. “That is not being needed. They are like the buzzing of flies to me.”

Outside in the distance, muffled by the stone and glass walls, the bells tolled two. Edelgard stood up, stretching the stiffness out of her arms and legs. “It was nice to talk to you, Petra, but I’ve got to get going. Thank you for spending time with me.”

“The pleasure is belonging to me, Edelgard,” Petra said.

Edelgard took up her cloak and headed for the doors, but just as she reached for the doorknob, they swung open before her and she found herself nearly bowled over by a human missile flinging itself over the threshold.

 _“H-H-Hey, Petra!”_ Hedwig cried out, excitable as a newly-adopted puppy. “C-Can I still p-practice archery with you today? I-I won’t b-bother you t-too much, I p-promise!”

The dazzling smile on Petra’s face could have lit up a room. “Yes, Hedwig. I would be liking that greatly!”

“A-And is it really true that you enrolled h-here when you were o-only f-fifteen? Was it h-hard?” Hedwig looked over her shoulder and it was only then that she seemed to notice she’d nearly tackled Edelgard. “Oh! H-Hi, El! C-Can you, um… w-w-would you like to w-watch us p-practice?”

The beaming grin on her face was infectious, and Edelgard couldn’t help but feel a smile digging into her cheeks. “You’re that eager to enroll here, aren’t you?”

Hedwig nodded so vigorously that her head could have rolled right off her spindly neck, her braid bouncing up and down, and it was then that Edelgard realized why her hairstyle looked so familiar—Petra had done up her hair just the same way she herself did hers. The two of them were an adorable couple; a closer pair of sisters in spirit than she and Edelgard were in blood. “T-T-Two years! I-I’m gonna enroll in t-two years a-and I’ll be the b-best! O-Or m-maybe three… d-does it matter when my b-birthday is?”

Edelgard realized that she’d completely forgotten when Hedwig’s birthday was. Or that of any of her other siblings, for that matter. “I think you’ll be fine, Hedy,” she said, patting her on the head. “I’ve got some business to attend to this afternoon, but I’ll be free tomorrow to watch you.”

Hedwig squeezed her in a tight embrace. Goodness, the girl was nearly six years younger than her and already just a little taller than her. “Okay.”

Edelgard left the greenhouse with her heart aching as much as her cheeks did. _A hurting loneliness,_ as Petra had said, was an apt way to describe the kind of homesickness she felt, even now—though it hurt much less now.

* * *

She headed for the abandoned chapel tucked away in the southern part of the monastery, swapping out her fur cloak for a much more understated coat so that she wouldn’t attract so much attention. On the way, she swiped a mug and some milk from the dining hall and got a sachet of cocoa powder from Annette.

The abandoned chapel loomed over the snowy field south of the monastic quarters, a crumbling wreck, its steepled roof wracked with holes and patches of missing shingles, its ornately sculpted buttresses worn, its tall and narrow stained glass windows smashed in places. The closer to it she drew, the less suitable it looked as a place to hide someone away in winter, especially as snowy of a winter as this year’s. As she walked, she noticed that she was tracing the path of a trail of tiny cat paw prints that led all the way to the front door.

Jeralt rode up to her on her way there, intercepting her as she reached the front door. “Whoa, there,” he said, giving her a stern squint. “Students like you had better stay away from this place. It could collapse at any moment.”

She stared at him.

He let out a laugh. “Just kidding, Your Highness. I’m patrolling this area for the next few hours, so I’ll cover you while you meet with your friend. I hope you can get some answers from her; it’s been a real pain keeping everyone else away from here.”

“How is she?”

“Warm, well-fed, and in good company, which is way more than she had when the rest of the knights were holding her for interrogation.”

“Good company?” she repeated, arching her eyebrows.

“You’ll see what I mean.” With another tug of his reins, his horse turned and carried him back the way he came, trampling a path across the snowy drifts.

Edelgard did, in fact, see what he meant when she entered the chapel. It was small and a bit cramped inside, about the size of a classroom, and the ceiling was tall and arched and the walls were ribbed with ornate pillars that stood before a humble altar adorned with small bronze statues of the saints. There had once been a few pews in there, but most of them had been torn away and broken down for firewood. In one corner was a large tent constructed from a complex network of blankets of all sorts of colors and textures, and it was surrounded by cats of all shapes and sizes and breeds. There was a little campfire made of broken-down furniture in front of the tent’s entrance, the wood blackened and smeared with ash and soot. The wind whistled and howled through the holes in the roof overhead.

As she approached, Hapi slowly and carefully poked her head out of the tent, sniffed the air, and caught sight of her. At once, the neutral, slightly worried look on her face softened into a little half-smile.

“Hello, Hapi,” she said. “I’m back.”

Hapi ducked back into the tent, then stuck her arm out and beckoned her inside with a crook of her finger. Edelgard followed her, weaving between the lounging cats and the makeshift firepit, crouched down, and carefully made her way inside. Within the tent was an oil lamp casting faint, amber radiance onto the blankets covering the floor. Edelgard was struck by the sudden memory of building pillow and blanket forts with her sisters when she’d been a little girl and felt a pang of nostalgia. She wondered where all these blankets had come from. Claude probably knew.

Hapi propped herself against the wall on a lumpy, makeshift throne of pillows and blankets and one of her feline friends immediately curled up in her lap.

“It seems cats like you,” Edelgard noted. “I hope they kept you company all this time.” She took the mug of milk, carefully used a fire spell to warm it until the ceramic was hot in her hand and tiny bubbles were just barely beginning to form on the surface of the milk, then emptied her sachet into it and mixed the powder in with a spoon. She offered the beverage to Hapi. “I have a gift for you.”

Hapi leaned forward, hesitantly reached out, and closed her hands around the mug, carefully lifting it out of Edelgard’s grasp. She held it close, letting the warmth bleed into her hands, and gave it a wary sniff. Satisfied, she raised the mug to her lips.

“It might be hot,” Edelgard warned her.

Hapi either didn’t seem to notice or didn’t seem to care, holding the mug up higher and higher as she gulped it down. Then, abruptly, she set the mug down and stared at what was left of the hot cocoa forlornly, as though remorseful over how quickly she’d downed most of it.

“I can bring you more next time,” Edelgard said to her.

Hapi held out the mug to her.

“No, it’s all for you,” Edelgard said, nudging the mug back toward her.

Hapi offered her the mug again.

“I mean it. Drink the rest of it.”

She offered her the mug again.

“I had some before I got here.”

That answer seemed to satisfy her, and she raised the mug to her lips and took a few pensive sips. Edelgard took a seat on the floor, crossed her legs, and was rewarded with a cat of her own forcing its way onto her lap, sticking its bottom in her face as cats were wont to do. She carefully nudged the cat into a less intrusive position, which it begrudgingly accepted after about a minute of pestering.

Hapi let out a frail, whispery little laugh, then froze like a startled deer, her eyes wide as saucers, her mouth clamped shut.

“Is something wrong?” Edelgard asked her.

She shook her head and took another sip of her cocoa. She was taking very little, very sparing sips now, as though she wanted to savor it for as long as possible.

“I have some questions to ask you, Hapi. Would you mind answering them for me?”

Hapi shook her head.

“Do you know a man named Solon? He was with you at Remire.”

She nodded.

“Do Solon, Cornelia, and Thales work together?”

She nodded.

“How long has Cornelia… looked after you? Seven years?”

She shook her head.

“Eight years?”

She shook her head again.

“Nine years?”

She opened her mouth as if to speak, then clamped it shut again and shook her head.

“Ten?”

She nodded, stroking her cat’s fur as it purred in her lap.

“All that time, has Cornelia conducted experiments on you? On your Crest?”

She nodded. The fact that her hair had color to it made it clear that whatever she’d undergone had not been the same procedure Edelgard knew or that Lysithea, Mercedes, and Dimitri had been subjected to, but it seemed to be closely related.

“Are you aware of the Tragedy of Duscur?”

She nodded.

“Was Thales behind it?”

She nodded again.

That was the answer Edelgard needed. “Thales and Solon… do they still work together?”

Hapi nodded, then lifted her head and looked around worriedly, as though worried her masters might smite her for daring to compromise them.

“So Thales had a hand in both the Tragedy of Duscur and Remire. Did he and Solon pretend to be with the church while they carried out their experiments on the others?”

Hapi nodded.

“But not on you?”

She shook her head.

“How do you know my mother?” Edelgard asked.

Hapi just stared at her and took another sip of cocoa, unable to answer it with just a nod or shake of her head.

“Of course. Why are you so afraid of speaking?” Edelgard asked her. “I’ve heard you speak before. Every time you let so much as a sound slip out, you act as though you’ve committed some grave sin. Neither the Goddess nor Thales will strike you down with a bolt from the heavens, I assure you.”

Hapi shook her head and huddled against the wall.

“These monsters have hurt me, too,” Hapi,” Edelgard said to her, wishing she could show her the scars she had on her original body. “But I’m not afraid of them, and I don’t fear any reprisal or punishment from them. You don’t have to be, either. Whatever they have threatened to do to you, I have promised to do to them a thousandfold.”

Hapi shuddered and shook her head again.

“Do you really believe that something horrible will happen if you speak? Is that how Cornelia has kept you from speaking out for so long?”

She nodded.

“Well… there was that one time you said ‘hello’ to me,” Edelgard said. “Nothing bad happened after that, right? And again, the night of the ball, when you were trying to escape the knights, you spoke to me and nothing happened. Cornelia _lied_ to you, Hapi. Just as she lied to so many other people. She lied to keep you docile, to keep you compliant. Speak. Just try it. I assure you, nothing bad will happen.”

Hapi finished her cocoa and set the mug down. “She told me my words would summon monsters,” she whispered, her voice raspy and hoarse from disuse. She moved her mouth wordlessly for a few more seconds and licked her lips.

“I haven’t seen any lately.”

Her face crumpled. “Fuck,” she spat. “You mean all this time, I could’ve been _talking?_ What a piece of shit.” Her cat, startled, scurried out of her lap and slipped out of the tent. “Dammit,” she said, sighing.

“I know,” Edelgard said, reaching out and taking her hand.

The wind howled overhead, and a dull roar like distant thunder came with it.

“Was Aunt Anselma really your mother?” Hapi asked her.

“Assuming we’re speaking about the same person,” Edelgard answered. “My mother and I fled to Faerghus about nine or ten years ago, and I never saw her again. She was exiled for political reasons. That would line up with when Cornelia began her experiments on you.” She shuddered. “But what would my mother be doing with that monster?”

“I dunno. She was always nice to me,” Hapi said. “When she saw how Cornelia was treating me, she’d get really angry at her. I could hear the venom in her voice. You sounded a lot like her just then.”

“Did I?” Edelgard gave her a melancholy smile. “I barely remember my mother. I was too young when she vanished. But I’m glad to hear I’ve taken after her in some ways.”

“In the right light, you look just like her,” she said. “She always took care of me when she could sneak something in. After a year or two, she started secretly teaching me how to read. That’s when she started calling herself my aunt, and saying a lot of nonsense about how she was gonna get me out of there somehow. And when she did, she’d bring me back to Enbarr with her and her kid—” Hapi paused, her mouth hanging agape with shock. “That kid was you.”

Edelgard nodded, silently choking down the lump in her throat.

“When Cornelia found out, she was furious. I never saw Aunt Anselma again.”

“Her death in the Tragedy of Duscur was retaliation, then.” Edelgard felt her fingernails leave crescent-shaped divots in her palms as she bunched her hands into fists. “I’m sorry.”

“Hey, nothing you could’ve done—” Hapi coughed. She kept trying to move her mouth, but nothing came out. Her voice, unused for years upon years, had given out completely.

“You’ve said enough for today,” Edelgard told her, unclenching her fists so she could lay a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. You’re safe here.”

“Cornelia’s gonna kill you,” Hapi whispered, her voice so hoarse and scratchy that the words were barely audible.

“She can try,” Edelgard said with a bravado that was mostly skin deep.

Hapi grabbed her and pulled her closer into a surprisingly firm hug. “Yeah,” she whispered, “that’s what I’m afraid of. Moron.”

Another dull rumble shook the air. The doors to the chapel burst open with a gust of bitter wind that filled the whole room, battering the tent’s flimsy blanket walls. _“You kids get the_ fuck _out of here!”_ Jeralt roared.

With Hapi still clinging to her, Edelgard scurried out of the tent, scattering the cats every which way. Jeralt dashed across the room, grabbing her by the wrist. “We’ve got to get out of here. _Now.”_

“What’s going on?” Edelgard asked, following him out.

The roof collapsed and an enormous beast fell to the floor. It was at least five times the size of a fully grown wolf, with bristly black fur glazed with hoarfrost and a mane twisted into matted knots, with gnarled fangs bursting from its blood-red mouth. Its claws dug into the marble floor, leaving long scratches, and its eyes burned like hot coals. “That,” he said, brandishing his lance. “Get out. I’ll handle it.”

Edelgard hurried outside, wrapping her cloak around herself and Hapi, who stared wide-eyed into the chapel. The beast let out a deafening roar as Jeralt steeled himself to fight it.

Hapi ripped herself free of Edelgard’s grasp and started running away from her; Edelgard ran after her, quickly catching up, and tackled her to the ground. “You can’t run off,” she told her, trying to pin her down. “If you get caught, we’ll all be in trouble. You can’t run off—”

Hapi sank her teeth into her arm. Edelgard yelped, but kept her grip on her. She wriggled like an angry cat, kicking and scratching, but eventually, her struggles slowed and ceased. She began to shiver from the cold. Ignoring the blood soaking her sleeve, Edelgard helped her up and brushed the snow out of her hair.

“I did this,” she rasped, hysterical. “I did this, I talked, I made that thing come, and more are gonna come, because I’m still talking, and _shit,_ why am I still talking?”

“You didn’t summon that thing,” Edelgard assured her. “You didn’t do anything. Cornelia lied to you.”

Hapi shook her head. Tears were rolling down her cheeks now. “No. She cursed me. She cursed my Crest. Monsters come when I speak. See? More are gonna come, because I can’t _shut up—”_

The beast let out a keening howl, gurgled, and fell silent. Jeralt emerged from the chapel, his lance’s silver-etched steel blade drenched in blood. There were deep scratches in his armor and a cut running across the side of his head that had stained his rusty hair red, but he was unharmed.

“You two alright?” he called out, removing the saddlebag from his horse and pulling out a pair of dry blankets. “Take these.”

“We’ll manage,” Edelgard said, helping Hapi wrap herself up in the blanket.

“So much for that hiding place. Damn.” Jeralt stroked his beard. “I think I know another place,” he added, mounting his horse. “Get on,” he said, offering his hand to Hapi.

Hapi shook her head and backed away. Edelgard could tell that she was going to run away again and prepared to give chase. “More are coming,” she rasped, white clouds pouring from her mouth as she panted for breath. “Because I talked—” Her faint voice vanished.

“You can’t know that for sure,” Edelgard said. “What about the other times you talked and nothing happened? Don’t let your fear get the better of you.”

“I’ll need you to come with me before people start snooping around and asking questions,” Jeralt said to Hapi. “Edelgard, sorry, but you’ll have to sneak back into the Officer’s Academy while I’m hiding her. Can you manage that?”

Edelgard nodded. “Hapi, go with him. Everything will work out, I promise.”

Hapi relented and let Jeralt haul her onto his horse.

“You and your Time Squad friends are really racking up a tab with me, Your Highness,” Jeralt grunted, and with a snap of his reins he took off. Edelgard hurried in the opposite direction, back to the Officer’s Academy.

* * *

She managed to get to her room, bandage the bite wound on her arm (thank goodness Hapi’s teeth were only as sharp as a normal human’s), and change into a fresh uniform just in time for Volkhard to come and collect her for dinner. She could barely taste the food that night, but her siblings seemed to enjoy it just as much as they enjoyed her company.

She felt like an impostor among them, a thief, stealing their love and happiness from this world’s Edelgard. The guilt sank in her stomach like a lead weight. Worse, to be among them, to be indulging in the presence of her long-dead siblings, felt like a betrayal of the new family she had formed out of her Black Eagles. And all the while, she still worried about Hapi. Was it true that she summoned great and terrible beasts simply by speaking? No, there had to be another trigger. She had spoken so much and yet only one lone dire wolf had attacked. It had to be something else that she had done. Perhaps not speech in general, but a specific word, or a specific phrase…

Dinner wound down, and Edelgard was the first to return to her room—only for a certain unwelcome classmate to step in her way.

“Hi there, Edelgard,” Glenn said, accosting her at the entrance to the dining hall and corralling her against the wall. “How’s it going?”

“Fine, Glenn,” she said to him brusquely. “Do you mind? I’m tired and I think something I ate hasn’t agreed with me.”

“It must be nice,” he said, “being with your family again. You all seem quite close.”

“I do,” Edelgard said, wondering what his angle was.

“But… I wonder… how close are you all, really?” A wicked grin lit up his face. “How well do you know them? Do you think you’d notice if one of them was… hmm… how do I say this… not acting like themselves?” He looked into the dining hall, his gaze falling on the table her siblings had occupied, and licked his lips.

“What are you saying?” Edelgard asked, a dark cloud of worry gathering in her mind.

“Lately, Felix has been up my ass about me ‘not being his real brother anymore’ or some nonsense,” Glenn said, rolling his eyes. “And I think you’ve been encouraging him all this time to think that.”

“You’ve hardly been making it difficult for him,” she said.

He shrugged. “So let me make it easy for _you._ Look at your brothers and sisters, Edelgard.”

She glanced at them, but didn’t take her eyes off of him for more than a second.

“Aren’t you worried one of them might not be your real brother or sister anymore?”

 _“Should_ I be?”

“Maybe you should. Or maybe _they_ should be worried about _you._ After all, you’re hardly the lazy, stupid, useless little El they all knew. As though you’ve been… replaced… by a completely different person. By an… untrustworthy person.”

“Is that what you think?” she asked him. She struggled to keep her breath and her pulse steady. For him to suggest that one of her siblings had already been killed and was being used as a skin-suit chilled her to the bone more than the bitterest of Faerghus’ winter winds could. “Do you think people can’t change?”

“I’m just saying,” Glenn said. “Maybe someone among your family isn’t who they say they are. Besides you, of course. Or maybe I’m just getting back at you for turning my sweet baby brother against me.”

“Again, you hardly needed my help. Don’t blame me for your own bad behavior.”

This was bad. She had to do something to preserve her life, something to lessen her risk. Glenn had identified her as a threat months ago; now he was preparing to make his move against her. There had to be something she could do, some leverage she could pull, that would keep her safe from him.

“You’re playing with fire, Edel,” Glenn said, still grinning. “I heard that sniper aimed right for your head last night. He might not miss next time.”

“I think he will,” Edelgard said, a plot brewing in her mind, “if there ever _is_ a next time.”

“Ooh, so confident. Do you really think that you, a princess, are immune to… oh… what are they called? Political assassinations?”

She forced herself to keep her composure, though her stomach was twisting itself into knots and icicles were dripping down her back. “Oh… I think I’m quite immune to them… from _you,”_ she said, keeping her voice level. Normally, keeping a poker face like this would have been second nature to her, but her brush with death had still left her shaken.

Glenn’s smile shrank by a molar or two. “Excuse me?”

“I know what really happened during the Tragedy of Duscur,” she said to him, “and who was really responsible. And I’ve detailed that knowledge,” she added, seeing Glenn’s hand drift under his jacket as though in search of a hidden dagger, “in a series of letters distributed to random people all across the monastery and throughout the Empire, to be opened on a set date should I die for any reason before then, natural or otherwise, or if I should go missing.”

“You can’t be serious,” Glenn hissed, his grin twisting into a furious scowl as his icy eyes grew wide with fear and his face grew so pale that it almost defeated the purpose of his disguise.

“I am,” she bluffed. _“Deadly_ serious, my friend.”

He had turned as white as a ghost. “Is this… is this the part where you threaten me?” he sneered, putting on a hateful scowl to hide the fear in his eyes.

“No,” she said, leaning in closer. He backed away from her. “This is the part,” she whispered, “where you get on your hands and knees and start licking my boots.”

“You’re bluffing,” Glenn said.

“You might want to believe that,” Edelgard retorted, “but do you _really_ want to take that risk?”

“What do you want?”

“The only list of recipients is in here,” she said, tapping on one temple with her finger. “You could scour Adrestia and you’d never be sure you’d found them all. So unless you want to ruin your master’s years of hard work and careful plotting… I suggest that you do _whatever it takes_ to keep me alive and healthy.”

Glenn stared at her, jaw agape.

“Oh, and that goes for Felix and Ingrid, too,” she added. “And everyone in my family, of course. In fact, I think you should do a very good job of keeping everyone here at Garreg Mach out of harm’s way, just in case the wrong person ends up dead.” She forced herself to smile. “Have I made myself clear?”

Glenn gulped and nodded. “As crystal, Edelgard.”

“Good,” Edelgard said. She patted him on the cheek. “Now run along like a good little boy.”

He ran along like a good little boy.

Edelgard looked again at her brothers and sisters, studying the way they ate, the way they talked, the way they held their silverware, the way they laughed. Glenn was right. If any of them were impostors, she had no way of knowing. She just had to hope that her bluff had bought her enough time to crush the plans of Those Who Slither in the Dark.

She wasn’t going to sleep well tonight.


	20. Distant Fires

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Hresvelg family receives more bad news.

Lysithea’s hair had once sparkled and gleamed like freshly fallen snow in the sun, but with its color returned, now the early morning sunbeams were like light passing through a wineglass, revealing rich and subtle gradients of color between scarlet and deep burgundy so dark in places it was nearly violet. There were about three or so inches of solid red now growing from her scalp before fading into bleached snow-white, but she had cut her hair short now, down to her chin; and the scant few inches of white remaining knew their days were numbered. Her skin was less pale, too, her complexion rosier, turning what once had been a rare blush to an almost permanent fixture; the dark gray patches of skin under her eyes, too, had lightened to a brighter and livelier hue. She looked healthier than she’d ever been.

She inhaled the crisp autumn hair deeply through her nostrils, eyes closed and head held high, and exhaled with a luxurious, satisfied sigh. “This is nice,” she murmured. It was an odd sight to see her relaxing, sitting on a bench in the monastery’s courtyard with her cane propped up beside her, with no book for herself to bury her nose in or notes to take or anything productive to occupy herself with at all. “It feels so… odd,” she added, “to have all the time in the world. I probably haven’t felt this way since I was seven or eight.”

“All these years playing the grown-up,” Edelgard teased her, resting a hand on her shoulder, “and you finally get to feel like a child again.”

Normally, such needling would have made Lysithea fly into a rage, but instead she just laughed. “I suppose I do. I had to grow up so quickly, and now I can finally slow down. How many years do you think I have now? Hanneman says I still might not live to seventy, but maybe I can reach fifty or sixty… that’s thirty, perhaps forty years from now…”

“There’s no need to count them now,” Edelgard assured her.

“That’s right. It’s just force of habit.”

The two of them sat in silence for a while, basking in the sunlight and the brisk autumn air.

“I’m sick of being an invalid, though,” she added, tapping on the head of her cane. Four months ago, she’d been confined to a wheelchair; two months ago, she’d progressed to crutches; now she still needed a cane to keep herself upright. “He never told me it’d take me this long to build my strength back up.”

“Patience. You’ll have plenty of time to walk around.”

She looked up at the wispy clouds slowly drifting across the periwinkle sky. “We should be out there with the rest of the Eagles,” she said. “They shouldn’t be fighting those monsters without us. We should be out there, showing them that no matter what they did to us, we’re still stronger and we can still beat them. But I can’t do anything except complain as long as I can’t walk.” She rested her head against Edelgard’s shoulder. “I must learn to enjoy doing nothing.”

“You’re a quick learner,” Edelgard said to her, gently braiding her fingers into the silken locks of her hair. “It won’t take you long. You’re already starting to enjoy yourself, aren’t you?”

She nodded and curled up at her side, suppressing a yawn. “Your counterpart is a good teacher.”

“Why, thank you,” the other Edelgard piped up. “Hilda and I are experts at being lazy.”

Lysithea laughed. “It’s a pity _you_ can’t take lessons from her, Edelgard. Er, _our_ Edelgard.”

“I’m trying,” Edelgard said. “But there’s just too much to be done. As much as I cherish moments like these, it’s almost as though I just can’t help myself.”

“Do you know what might fix that?”

“What?”

“Having your Crests removed and needing someone to roll you around everywhere for two months.” Another yawn escaped Lysithea’s mouth. “And… needing to sleep… twelve hours every day. Hanneman and Linhardt had no idea how fatigued I’d be. But as far as side effects go, it’s better than dying. And sometimes I wake up now and I don’t feel tired, and that’s the most amazing thing in the world.”

“It is,” Edelgard agreed. “I don’t recall if I’ve ever slept more than five or six hours a night since I was eleven. At least, not unaided. Twelve sounds nice.”

Lysithea’s head drooped onto her shoulder; one of her hands ambled over to Edelgard’s and curled around it. “How’s my big brother?” she mumbled.

“Arcturus? I’m afraid we don’t talk much; he has quite a chip on his shoulder against the Empire. He’s a good student and stays out of trouble, from what I can tell. Though he does get a little carried away if he’s sparring against someone from the Black Eagles. Or me.”

The other Edelgard cleared her throat.

“It seems my counterpart has something to say,” Edelgard said. She waited.

“He’s a bit of a jerk,” the other Edelgard said. “But it’s really fun to watch him and Lorenz bicker.”

Lysithea laughed. “That sounds like him,” she said.

“I asked him about you once,” Edelgard added. “He got incredibly angry, asked me how I knew anything about his family, and immediately challenged me to a duel.”

Lysithea laughed even harder, hard enough that tears leaked from her eyes. “That’s him. Oh, that is _definitely_ him. Did you win?”

“Well, of course.”

“Good.” She sniffled and took Edelgard by the arm, pulling herself in closer. “I wish I were there. If I could see him again… and Astraea, and Castor, and Ganymede…”

“I wish you were there with me, too,” Edelgard told her, wrapping an arm around her shoulder and holding her closer, basking in the warmth of her skin as the cool autumn air blew through the courtyard.

“At least you get to see your siblings again. I’m glad you can have that. There aren’t many people in the world who went through what we went through…”

“It’s nice to see them again. But… it hurts, too. Seeing what they could have been… Wondering why you had to live when they died…”

“But it’s worth it,” Lysithea finished.

“Of course,” Edelgard said.

“How much longer will you be here?”

“Not long, probably,” she said. “Byleth only sent us back for an hour so that Hilda could gather information for me. Would you like me to walk you back to the dormitories?”

Lysithea nodded again and let Edelgard help her off of the bench. Her movements were slow and careful. “Well… thank you for spending the morning with me.”

“It should be _you_ I’m thanking,” Edelgard said. “I’ve been so worried about what the others are up to ever since last night. If you weren’t here, I’d have just spent the past hour worrying another few years off of my life—and I don’t have many left to spare.”

“I’m glad I can help,” Lysithea said, smiling as her cane tapped on the cobblestone path and her free hand curled around Edelgard’s. It was a bright and hopeful smile that lit up her face, and the sight of it made it easier to believe that perhaps everything would work out for the best.

“I’ll miss you,” Edelgard told her. “You, Byleth, Ferdinand, Hubert, Dorothea, and everyone else… you’re all just as much my family now as they were.”

“You’re just as much of a family to me as they were, too,” she answered, smiling. “I’ll be here if you need me.”

It wasn’t long before Edelgard felt the familiar sensation of being ripped away from her world yet again, and though her time there had been short, she felt satisfied when she woke up in her bed at Garreg Mach, six years into another world’s past.

She pulled herself out of bed, stretching the aches from her arms and legs, and realized that somebody was knocking on her door. Perfect timing. “Who’s there?” she called out.

 _“It’s me,”_ came Ingrid’s voice, muffled by the door.

Edelgard crossed the room to open it and found Ingrid standing expectantly before her, a little nervous half-smile flitting across her face as she pressed a notebook protectively against her chest. “I wanted to make sure you were alright,” she said. “It’s not like you to sleep so soundly this early in the day. And,” she added, squirming a bit, “I wondered if you’d like to have… tea later this afternoon. I know you like that.”

“Maybe I should be asking you if _you’re_ alright,” Edelgard said to her, eyeing her with concern.

“I’ve also taken the liberty of copying my notes from this morning’s lecture and yesterday’s for you,” Ingrid continued, thrusting the notebook at her. “I know the Professor is concerned about your mental state, but she shouldn’t be pushing you out of the classroom if you think you’re well enough to attend—”

“What’s wrong?” Edelgard asked, taking the notebook.

Ingrid looked away, kneading her hands together. “The other night, I… I didn’t mean to push you away. I’m just—I’m trying to understand how I feel. I’d like to talk to you about it. Perhaps over tea or lunch, if you’d like.”

“I might just give you an answer you don’t want to hear.”

“I haven’t thought of any I want to hear myself,” she admitted. Her green eyes, pretty as they were, still wouldn’t meet Edelgard’s.

“I’d be happy to have tea this afternoon,” Edelgard told her. “Three o’clock?”

“Oh. I’m attending Catherine’s seminar then. But two works for me.”

“Two it is. I’ll see you then.”

“Thank you,” Ingrid said, and she smiled uneasily and walked back down the hall.

“She’s sending you a lot of mixed signals, isn’t she?” Hilda asked, popping her head out from behind her door.

“Can you _please_ stop listening in on us?” Edelgard snapped at her.

“No.” Hilda stepped out into the hall and shut the door behind her. “Can I come in?”

“Certainly,” Edelgard said, welcoming her into her room. “So,” she said, “what have you—” Everything else got stuck in her throat. Her saliva turned to paste in her mouth. “What have you found out?” she repeated hoarsely.

Hilda closed the door and promptly flopped onto Edelgard’s bed. “I’m beat,” she muttered. “Even though it wasn’t this body out there, my brain still feels worn out.”

“What’s happening?”

“Well, we’re all in Shambhala. Weird place. I’ve never seen anything like it before. The whole place is made of steel, and there are these big metal tubes everywhere, and cold blue lights running across the walls—”

“Hilda, focus.”

“Byleth told me what happened yesterday.”

“What was it?”

“Her first plan was to bust down the front door and barge in. But the No-Eyes were expecting them. As soon as the Black Eagles reached the entrance, she saw javelins of light streak across the sky. Dozens of them flying out to the north and west.”

Edelgard felt her legs threaten to give out beneath her and quickly found her desk and her chair. She felt as though she’d been struck across the face. North and west. She could imagine Enbarr and Derdriu, the two remaining largest cities in Fódlan, struck by those things, pulverized, wiped off the map as if by the hand of a vengeful goddess. Thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people dead. The Empire’s tenuous peace would shatter. Fódlan’s seat of power would lay in shambles, its survivors confused, angry, and fearful—and ripe for future conquest.

She rubbed her eye. “Scorched earth,” she muttered, her voice catching in her throat. Byleth must have been terrified by the thought of what she’d triggered, crushed by the weight of the deaths on her shoulders, desperate to undo it—and perhaps in that moment of desperation she had reached deep within herself to call upon a power she may have thought she’d no longer had.

“So, change of plans,” Hilda went on. “We managed to hide our forces and sneak in a small exploratory team without triggering the javelins. The good news is that we’re making good progress and haven’t gotten caught so far. The bad news is I’m stuck on the team.”

“Well, you do seem quite capable—”

“It’s bad for _me,_ not bad for _them,”_ Hilda corrected. She rubbed her head. “That place gives me a headache.”

“I presume your team’s goal is to take control of the javelins and render the city vulnerable to attack,” Edelgard said.

 _“Take control_ of the javelins?” Hilda asked, furrowing her brow. “You say that like we’re going to _use_ th—You’re totally going to use them, aren’t you?”

Edelgard’s jaw dropped. She felt insulted. “Are you _insane?_ Do you honestly think I’d be capable of something so heinous?”

“You shoved Crest Stones down your soldiers’ throats to turn them into rampaging demonic beasts,” Hilda said, “so…”

“That was Those Who Slither in the Dark,” she retorted, offended, “and if I’d had total control of them, I wouldn’t have allowed that. The most I was able to do was keep their disgusting experiments away from the main thrust of our campaign.”

“Right. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Why are you belaboring this point? It seems like quite a lot of effort for the likes of _you._ Back to the point, no, Hilda, I would _not_ make use of the javelins if I had them at my disposal.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re right. All you’ve really got to do is _threaten_ to use them and people will just bow down and do whatever you want. Saves a lot of effort versus the whole war thing. Honestly, if _I_ had to conquer a place…”

“Setting aside that the threat of the javelins isn’t doing such a good job deterring _us,”_ she pointed out, “I find your implications about my moral character offensive. Those Who Slither in the Dark, the Immaculate One—these monsters are my enemies because they have no value for human life. But everything I’ve done has been to _improve_ human life.”

“You killed thousands of people and burned down their homes to improve human life. Okay.”

“What are a few passing years of momentary terror compared to the slow, subtle, inescapable terror of the past millennium? What is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake—” Edelgard stopped herself from launching into a rant. Her words would have fallen on deaf ears, anyway. “Why do you insist on badgering me about this? Have I caused you that much suffering?”

“No, it’s just fun to get you flustered,” Hilda said with a teasing little smile.

“Forget it,” Edelgard said. “The point is that I couldn’t stop them from doing as they pleased in our world. At least I can stop them from doing as they please in this one.”

“Noted,” Hilda said. “So that’s about it. If everything works out, we might even be able to capture the No-Eyes’ leader. Claude and Nader are _really_ excited about that.” She rolled her eyes. “Well, at least _someone_ is.”

“Why those two in particular?”

“Claude thinks if he brings a live one back to the Almyran court, his dad will make him king over his brothers.”

“Ah, merit-based inheritance. I’d never realized the Almyrans and I had so much in common. No wonder you dislike me.”

 _“What?”_ Now it was _Hilda’s_ turn to look offended. “Hey, I know I had some wrong ideas about Almyra a long time ago, but that’s changed. I _live_ there now.”

“Noted. Who else is on the team?”

“Well, besides myself and Byleth, there’s Bernadetta, Ignatz, Ashe, Ferdinand, Hubert, Dorothea, and a few of my new friends from Almyra.”

Edelgard sighed. The team’s composition wasn’t exactly unimpeachable, to say the least. Ferdinand must have insisted on going if only to be at Hubert’s side, but he was the _prime minister,_ and if he was severely wounded or even killed—that would be unthinkable. If only she could be there by their sides in case they needed her…

“So, that’s what happened,” Hilda said. “Do you feel better now?”

“No,” Edelgard admitted. “Now I feel exactly as anxious as I did before, only now for a completely different reason.”

“Yeah,” Hilda said. “Me, too.”

* * *

“I don’t really do tea very often,” Ingrid said, plucking a little finger sandwich off the tray as she waited for the cup of chamomile tea placed before her to cool. “When I think of afternoon tea I just think of Ferdinand or Lorenz blathering on about the proper behavior of noblemen to each other. But it’s nice every once in a while, I suppose.” The sunlight filtering through the window made her long, braided hair shine like gold. “You don’t mind chamomile, do you?”

“No, not at all,” Edelgard said, blowing on her cup to cool it. “In fact, I think we could both use something to calm ourselves down.”

“Right. You… don’t look well, Edelgard.”

“I don’t feel well. There’s a lot weighing on my mind. To my knowledge, no one’s tried to assassinate me before,” she said. “Or at the very least,” she added with a bitter little laugh, “no one’s ever gotten close enough for me to know. I suppose I’d thought all this time that nobody would see any use in killing the ninth daughter of the emperor.”

“The emperor…” Ingrid’s mouth pulled itself into a taut frown. “I’m sorry about your father. I’m shocked, too—I’d heard he was in perfect health. I never know what to say when things like this happen, but…”

Edelgard could tell that she was trying very hard to avoid talking to her about what she’d originally wanted to talk about, even if that meant focusing on even less enjoyable topics. “Ingrid, perhaps we should address the wyvern in the room,” she said. She took a sip of her tea.

“Um… yes. You’re right. Of course. The wyvern in the room.” Ingrid put her cup to her lips and took a sip, flinching from the unexpected heat and obviously using the newly forming burns on her tongue to gather her thoughts for a few more seconds.

Edelgard waited patiently for her to continue.

“I was five years old when I first picked up a sword,” Ingrid told her. “Even back then, before I could even read those stories of chivalry and heroism, all I wanted to be was a knight. And I’d leave home at sunrise to play and come back at sunset covered head to toe in dirt and mud. The older I got, though, the less cute my father and brothers thought it all was. They said I’d have to start acting like a girl eventually. Eventually, after Glenn… passed… my father started bringing me new suitors, and the way they looked at me, studied me, appraised me, the way men looked at me—was how they reminded me of that. And the way you were looking at me that night… it’s stupid, but you reminded me of them.”

“I’m sorry.” Edelgard shook her head. “Ingrid, I’m so sorry. That isn’t stupid at all; it’s perfectly understandable. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I thought about how helpful you’d been… getting me dressed up for the ball, doing my hair, being there for me to stop Annette and Hilda from plastering all that ridiculous clown makeup on my face… and I felt as though all that time, you’d just been treating me like a doll to put on display for yourself, just like I had to dress up for all those men. I felt betrayed.” Ingrid clasped her hands around her teacup for warmth, her eyes downcast. “I felt as though all this time, you’d only…”

“That was never my intention,” Edelgard assured her. “I wanted to help you be beautiful on your terms, not anyone else’s. Just as I’ve wanted you to live on your own terms. If I found you beautiful then, it’s only because… well… you _are,_ Ingrid. And I mean that _objectively.”_

“And just to clarify,” Ingrid said, “it doesn’t make me uncomfortable that you love women. It just made me uncomfortable that you loved _me.”_

“Oh, Ingrid…” Edelgard reached out and pried her hands away from her teacup, grasping them gently, letting their warmth seep into her cold fingers. “I… I know exactly how you feel. There was a time in my life where I, too, couldn’t see myself as worthy of anybody’s love. I know exactly how you feel.”

“You do?”

“I’ve been alone for a long time, too,” she said. “Longer than you might think. There was a time when Hubert and I had nobody—not a single person in the entire world we could so much as call our friends, let alone people who loved us. And we had thought those days of loneliness would never end.”

“But your family…”

“It’s complicated. But I can assure you, Ingrid, that one day you will find yourself surrounded by more people who care for you than you can imagine.”

Ingrid slipped her hands out of Edelgard’s grip so she could wipe her eyes on her sleeve. “I think you’re misinterpreting this. I… I like you, Edelgard, even though you can be _so_ frustrating sometimes, and I’m glad you like me, but your _love_ isn’t something I can accept.”

“I understand,” Edelgard said, unable to help herself from feeling slightly wounded. “I never meant to overstep your bounds and make you uncomfortable, and for that, I’m sorry. I’d like if we could set this beside us and move on. It’s clear that neither of us are proud of how we behaved.”

Ingrid nodded and took a halfhearted sip of her tea. “I’ve always envied men, just a bit. If I were a man, having a Crest wouldn’t get in the way of being a knight. In fact, it would be a boon. I wouldn’t have so many expectations put upon me to spend my life raising children. Men are held to high standards for their actions, not looking pretty. And if I were a man, Edelgard, I’d—I’d probably think you were a beautiful woman.” At last, she lifted her head and let her eyes meet Edelgard’s. “I mean… I _do_ think you’re beautiful, but I don’t _feel_ it the way you do. I can’t.”

Her crumbling face, like her wavering voice, seemed to threaten to fall to pieces and spew out torrents of contradicting and poorly understood emotions. “The way we lost Mercedes, and then Ashe… I’m afraid if I keep pushing you away, you’ll be gone forever. I want to be your friend again. I just don’t know how to do that anymore.”

“Perhaps,” Edelgard said, selecting a biscuit from the tray to go along with her tea, “we will figure it out if we just finish our tea together.”

A fragile smile forced its way onto Ingrid’s face. “Yes, perhaps.”

The door to the tearoom swung open, letting in a gust of cold air, and Edelgard felt Hubert’s dark and shadowy demeanor enter the room. “Lady Edelgard,” he said, bowing curtly before her as she turned around in her seat to face him. “I am sorry for disturbing you and Lady Ingrid during teatime, but there is an urgent matter that requires your attention.”

Edelgard quickly chewed and swallowed the biscuit and wiped the crumbs from her lips. “What is it?” she asked, her mind racing. She had the distinct and unmistakable feeling in her gut that something terrible had happened. Were one or more of her siblings hurt? Had the fake Hurricane King or fake Death Knight been spotted near the monastery? Had someone been killed? “What’s going on, Hubert?”

“More news has arrived from Enbarr. It’s…” Hubert shook his head. “I am to bring you to the Black Eagles classroom. Everyone else is gathered there.”

More news from Enbarr? What could it be? And what could have Hubert so rattled? Had something terrible happened to the six houses, or worse—had something happened to Burkhart?

“Go on, Edelgard,” Ingrid said, leaving her seat and collecting a few of the remaining finger sandwiches and little pastries. “I could use some extra prep for Catherine’s lecture, anyway. We can finish up later.”

Taking a deep breath to calm her nerves, Edelgard stood up and followed Hubert to meet with the rest of the Black Eagles.

“I am afraid there has been…” He lowered his voice as he led her along. “I do not know how else to describe it, Your Highness, but there appears to be a coup in progress.”

 _“What?”_ Edelgard gasped, too shocked and angered to be dumbstruck.

“I can tell from your reaction that this did not occur in your future.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “What do you mean, coup?”

“It appears your brother Anselm had already laid claim on your father’s crown by the time Burkhart arrived at the palace.”

“That’s impossible,” she said to Hubert. Anselm was eighth in line; all of his and Edelgard’s older brothers and sisters would need to be rendered unfit for the position in order for him to have a legitimate claim.

“By law, it would seem so. However, he seems not to care.”

They reached the Black Eagles classroom, where they found Edelgard’s siblings, Volkhard, Professor Hanneman, and the rest of the Black Eagles students (and Bernadetta hiding in the corner) gathered under the red banners, angered and disbelieving voices ricocheting off the cold stone walls as they discussed the news.

“That little _shit!”_ Justine snarled, dragging a hand irritably through her wiry black hair. “Who in the Goddess’ name does he think he is?”

“Language,” Joachim chided her, earning himself a slap upside the head for his trouble.

Hedwig rushed over to Edelgard and yanked her over the threshold. “El, i-it’s t-t-terrible! Burky s-sent us a l-letter, a-a-and Ansy—A-Ansy is t-t-t—”

“I know what’s going on,” Edelgard assured her, gently tousling her hair. She could remember now how bad Hedwig’s stutter got when she was upset. “Hubert told me. Hedy, I’m so sorry.”

“Everybody, please, please, calm down,” Ferdinand said, trying to impose some sort of order on the unruly crowd. “This is nothing for us to concern ourselves over!”

“Yeah,” Dorothea muttered. “Does it really matter to anyone other than stuck-up nobles who the emperor is? I hardly think life is going to change for anyone else because of this.”

“Hush, Dorothea,” he retorted. “This is not a problem in the slightest,” he addressed everyone else. “The emperor requires the prime minister’s backing and that of the other five great houses to have a legitimate claim. I am absolutely certain that my father will side with Prince Burkhart. He is, after all, the crown prince by law, and that is the end of the discussion.”

Edelgard wished she shared Ferdinand’s optimism about his father, but Duke Ludwig von Aegir only cared about power: if Anselm promised him that, he would be quite happy to abandon his devotion to the law. Like most nobles, he saw legality as something only worth caring about insofar as it was a tool to maintain or gain more power, and cast it aside quite casually whenever it could not serve those ends.

“I can’t believe he’d do this to us,” Gerlinde fumed, pacing back and forth and radiating nervous energy. “I can’t believe that little rat—If he dares lay a _finger_ on Burky, I’ll…”

“No matter which of the noble houses back Prince Anselm, if any,” Linhardt piped up, “he’d have a hard time ruling without the backing of the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Military Affairs.” He yawned. “I don’t see that happening, so can we all just stop caring so much about this? I’m long overdue for a nap.”

“Yeah,” Caspar said to him, “but that would mean our dads would have to _agree_ on something.” He scratched his head. “Oh, man, what if they both pick different emperors? What happens then?”

“All we can do is stay calm and wait for more news to come in,” Volkhard assured everyone, tapping on the unfolded letter he held in his hand. “Whatever happens in Enbarr, we can rest assured that at the very least, we are quite safe here at Garreg Mach.” He looked to the door and noticed Edelgard and Hubert standing at the threshold. “Ah, El. You’re here. I take it Hubert has filled you in on the news?”

“Yes, Uncle,” Edelgard said. “I didn’t think it could be true, though. How can Anselm possibly have a valid claim to the crown?”

“He _can’t,”_ Gerlinde spat.

“According to the letter we received from Burkhart this afternoon,” Volkhard said, “when the late Emperor Ionius’ will was read, it specified that Anselm, by virtue of his Major Crest, should be crowned emperor, bypassing the norms of succession.”

“I still can’t believe Father would do something like that!” Justine snarled. “To his own eldest son!”

“Burkhart believes the will to be a forgery, of course,” he continued, “and in all honesty, I’m inclined to agree with him. In all my time serving His Majesty as lord regent, he never once indicated any discontent about our norms of succession. We can only hope that a majority of the great noble houses will side with the law and with Burkhart.” He shook his head, a pained wince crossing his face. “Oh, but this is awful… I’d never imagined the Hresvelg family could be torn apart like this.”

As the initial surprise over the news subsided, the angered outbursts from the Hresvelgs and Black Eagles grew quieter and more subdued, progressing to worried whispers.

“I am not knowing what to make out of this,” Petra said. “Whoever is becoming Emperor, what will become of Brigid?”

“If there’s a civil war or something,” Bernadetta moaned, “I—I won’t have to _fight_ in it, will I?”

“We all know that Anselm was bragging about meeting with Prince Dimitri after the Battle of the Eagle and Lion,” Justine said. “What if this is some plot by Faerghus to destabilize Adrestia?”

“You can’t seriously claim our brother is collaborating with the Kingdom,” Joachim said, though there was fear in his eyes.

“Before today, we couldn’t seriously claim that our brother was trying to rip our empire in two,” she retorted.

Edelgard’s blood ran cold. That was exactly what was happening. The Holy Kingdom of Faerghus was resource-poor, unstable, and wouldn’t likely be able to match the Adrestian Empire’s army at full strength if they wanted to conquer it—after all, it had taken a miraculous genius tactician from the future to lead them to victory four hundred years ago—and so their only strategy was to have the Empire tear itself apart from within and seize the opportunity to crush the divided Adrestia. Those Who Slither in the Dark had probably been planning this for months, perhaps even years. Had Dimitri known that this would happen? Was that really what he’d been talking with Anselm about?

“That’s ridiculous,” Volkhard said. “Why, Burkhart and I have had plenty of dealings in Faerghus these past few months and neither of us had any sinister intentions.”

“Edelgard,” Heidemarie said, “you were always Anselm’s favorite. Did he ever tell you anything about this?”

“Did _he_ ever tell her anything about this?” Justine scoffed. “What about Prince Dimitri or Lord Fraldarius? She’s been spending an awful lot of time with those two…”

“Excuse me?” Edelgard clenched her fists. “Justine, why—What in blazes are you implying?” She couldn’t believe she was raising her voice at one of her own sisters, but neither could she believe that one of her own sisters was accusing her of treason.

“I don’t think I’m implying anything,” Justine said, her eyes narrowing. “I think I’m stating it quite plainly, Edelgard. What were you doing with Prince Dimitri and Lord Fraldarius up in Fhirdiad? Discussing your master plans? Plotting your betrayal? What’s he promising you that would make destroying the Empire worth it?”

“Justine, that’s enough!” Volkhard barked, protectively grabbing Edelgard by the shoulders.

“Hey, hold on, Justine! Edelgard would never betray the Empire!” Pascal piped up, running to Edelgard’s side.

“Y-Yea—sh-she’s a g-good p-p-person!” Hedwig stammered, stepping in front of her and reminding her once again that the twelve-year-old girl was just a hair taller than her. “E-El d-d-d-d-oesn’t—s-she c-c-can’t…”

“Why have you been spending so much time with Prince Dimitri, then?” Justine asked Edelgard, stepping up to her and pushing Hedwig out of the way. She loomed over her, her pale lilac eyes icy and accusing. “Well, Ellie?”

“Y-You can’t accuse me of these things,” Edelgard gasped, her voice faltering. “I—He’s my step-brother, and that’s all he is. I’m not collaborating with him on anything except perhaps to make sure he doesn’t make a mess of the training hall again.”

Justine grabbed her by the collar, her fist curling into her blouse and resting dangerously close to her throat. The other princes’ and princesses’ retainers tensed, remaining wary but electing not to interfere—but not Hubert.

“Princess Justine, unhand Lady Edelgard at once!” he snarled, conjuring an icy dagger. “You may be a higher ranking princess, but my duty is to her and her alone—and I will cut you down if you harm her.”

At that instant, the other six retainers produced knives and daggers, ready to defend their lieges. With the cloying, stifling heat of violence filling the air, Edelgard felt a twinge in her left eye that quickly blossomed into a searing, blooming, blistering heat stabbing into her head.

“Oh, _will_ you?” Justine sneered as her retainer came into her orbit. “Try laying a hand on a princess, I _dare_ you!”

“Princess Justine, please,” Ferdinand said, “I must ask you not to manhandle my fiancee!”

“Everyone settle down,” Joachim said, weaving between Justine and Edelgard and pushing them apart. “We can’t afford to assume that any of us are traitors—we are _family!_ We can’t let this tear us apart. Hubert, put that knife away, for the Goddess’ sake. _All_ of you, put your knives away.”

Hubert sheepishly dispelled his magic; the icy dagger engulfing his hand melted away and made a puddle on the floor. The other retainers tucked their weapons back into their coats.

“Joachim is right. We shouldn’t fight among ourselves,” Heidemarie said. “And besides, who’s to say Anselm _wouldn’t_ make a better emperor than Burkhart, if it’s what our father wanted?”

Gerlinde looked at her the way a hungry guard dog might look at a slab of raw meat. “Dearest Heidi, would you mind saying that to my _face?”_ she snarled.

“Well… if you ask me, Anselm always worked much harder than Burkhart,” Hanneman noted, stroking his mustache. “Burkhart was naturally much more talented and received higher marks, but I found that when Anselm was here last year, he was significantly more dedicated to bettering himself. As terrible as this is, I can see why the late emperor may have wished for Anselm to succeed him instead.”

“Professor!” Gerlinde gasped, horrified and insulted. “Are you calling Burk _lazy?”_

“From the sound of it,” Linhardt said, “he seemed to engineer his studies to achieve the highest grades with the least possible effort. Honestly, I find that quite admirable. Very efficient.”

“Efficient, yes,” Hanneman agreed. “He wasn’t lazy in the slightest and took his obligations with the utmost seriousness, but… how do I say this?” He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “He was obsessed with perfection and would only study subjects he knew he could master quickly and easily, rather than challenge himself and show weakness.”

“Damn. Is that really a quality we’d want in our next emperor?” Caspar wondered aloud. “Maybe there’s something to this will.” Edelgard could tell that as a second son who stood to inherit nothing from Count Bergliez, he was beginning to empathize more with Anselm and his bid for the crown, as much as he might insist that he didn’t mind not having any inheritance.

“Oh, shut up, you little brat,” Gerlinde spat at him. “And you, El—you were always Ansy’s favorite little sister, weren’t you? I’ll bet he’s doing all this for _you.”_

“That’s ridiculous,” Edelgard protested.

“Is it? You’re the only two with Crests.”

“And you you think I _wanted_ one? Crests are nothing but a burden on society. If I could have my way, I’d get rid of them altogether!”

“I’d bet you weren’t even surprised to hear the news about Father.” Gerlinde snarled at her.

“How dare you!” Hubert snarled.

Edelgard found it very hard to breathe. The air in the room was cloying, hot, and suffocating, boiling from the anger of her older sisters. And when Justine or Gerlinde glared at her, she felt her mind slip away and sink deep into the dungeon of her memory, recalling their screams and moans of pain and sorrow and anger, and though she knew intellectually what she was being accused of and how nonsensical it was, deep in her heart, she felt she was being accused of an even worse crime—the crime of survival. The crime of living when so many others had died. Living for no reason when others had died for no reason. Her heart hammered in her chest, her mouth and lips dry. Salt stung her lips. Her eye, still throbbing and burning from its phantom wound, screamed in her head as though rent asunder once more. Almost by instinct, she felt herself stepping carefully and gingerly toward the door.

Justine lunged forward and grabbed her by the arm, long and sharp fingernails cutting into her skin. “Where do you think _you’re_ going, you little traitor? Back to your new friends in Faerghus to plot your next—”

A sharp thunderclap split the air. She reeled backward, a red mark on her cheek, her mouth agape and eyes wide with shock. Edelgard at first thought that she had instinctively slapped her until Dorothea grabbed her and dragged her out of the classroom.

“And here I was, thinking family reunions _that_ bad only happened on the stage,” Dorothea said as she led Edelgard across the lawn.

“Dorothea, what are you—”

“I was looking for an excuse to leave,” she said. “I hadn’t thought it was possible, but your siblings are even harder to stand than _you,_ Edie.”

“I suppose that’s a compliment.” Edelgard paused to catch her breath as she and Dorothea ducked behind a snow-glazed hedge. She held her hand against her eye as though to staunch a river of blood, though all she felt on her cheeks and lips were hot, salty tears. “Thank you.”

Dorothea looked down at her hand, staring with amazement at her reddened palm. “I just slapped a _princess.”_

“Seems to me you’ve wanted to do that for a long time,” Edelgard said.

Dorothea laughed. “I have. To _you._ But it’s hard to dislike you when you’re crying.”

Edelgard dried her eyes on her sleeve. “Well, perhaps I’ll cry more often, then.”

“Don’t push your luck,” Dorothea told her with a sardonic little smile. “Something wrong with your eye?”

“Nothing. Just a bit of a phantom pain; it acts up from time to time.” She finished drying her eyes and swallowing the lump in her throat. With her eyes unclouded, she could see just how gorgeous Dorothea was, as always; the last vestiges of tears even made her seem to shimmer in the sunlight.

She wrapped her arms around Dorothea and held her in a tight embrace that surprised even her.

“Okay,” Dorothea said, gingerly trying to pull herself free. “Goddess, you’re huggy.”

Realizing what she’d done, Edelgard let go of her. “Ah… Sorry, Dorothea. I’m not sure what came over me.”

“Apology accepted,” Dorothea said with a shrug. “Anyway, I wasn’t going to stand back and watch your own sister accuse you of treason over something so _stupid._ Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows you joined the Blue Lions because of Professor Byleth’s breasts, not because you’ve been secretly plotting against the Empire.”

“Running away probably hasn’t dissuaded them of that notion,” Edelgard admitted. “And by slapping my sister, you’ve probably invited just as much suspicion upon yourself.”

“And what do I care? I’m a worthless commoner,” Dorothea said. “Besides, it’s as I said. Whoever gets to be the emperor, does it really matter to anyone but a bunch of nobles? Kids running around in the streets of Enbarr will still be kids running around in the streets. Farmers tending their crops will still be farmers tending their crops. Life will only change for the selfish, rich oafs who somehow think their little world is the only one that matters.”

Edelgard wished she could agree with Dorothea. “Sadly, I think this incident will change life for a great many people,” she said, “and not for the better. I hadn’t realized before that because of us nobles, even something as simple as an argument between two brothers can affect the lives of untold thousands of people. There’s something terribly wrong with our world where men are given such power over others simply because of who their parents were.”

“If you’ve taken such a dislike of nobility,” Dorothea teased her, “then I suppose you wouldn’t mind giving up your title and going off to spend the rest of your life tending to a farm?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Edelgard said to her, “as long as I did it with the right person.”

“Oh? Planning on seducing your professor?” she asked with a wink.

Edelgard couldn’t stop her face from turning red. “Anyway, thank you, Dorothea, but… I have to talk with Dimitri.”

“Do you think he might actually be behind this?” Dorothea wondered. “No offense, Edie, but he’s… I wouldn’t say _dumb,_ but _simple._ Guileless. You know. Not exactly Claude von Riegan, there.”

“I don’t think he is,” Edelgard lied, “but he did have correspondences with Anselm. He might know something about what’s going on.”

* * *

Edelgard knew exactly where to find Dimitri as the afternoon dragged on and the sky began to darken, because he still had his punishment from Byleth over his actions in the training hall to serve. He was in the stables, making certain that the horses all had fresh food and water, the pegasus’ wings were preened, the floors swept and manure disposed of, and the wyverns’ scales polished. She found him, also unsurprisingly, with Marianne, the two of them working together to comb the snarls out of one of the horses’ mane. They conversed in low, private whispers when they said anything at all, but mostly passed the time in the kind of silence only two people who loved each other could share. Poor Hilda.

“Excuse me, Dimitri,” Edelgard finally said, stepping into the stables. “When you’re finished here, can I speak with you about something?” She tried to make herself sound vulnerable, but not _too_ vulnerable.

Dimitri noticed her and smiled a particularly forced smile. “Ah, Edelgard. Yes, of course. Marianne and I will be finished quite soon.”

“Thank you. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“No, it will only be a few more minutes.”

Edelgard waited, and then Dimitri and Marianne went their separate ways. She followed him into a secluded part of the monastery near the south walls. The sun setting over the walls bathed the snowy lawn in cold blue shadow.

“That girl… Marianne, right? Of the Golden Deer?” Edelgard inquired, hoping to lighten the mood and lower his guard.

Even in the dimming light, she could see a slight pinkish hue light up Dimitri’s cheeks. “Yes. She’s, um… Margrave Edmund’s adopted daughter. This punishment really is not so much of a punishment, I must say, when our schedules align.”

“She seems nice, but… I’ve always thought she looked terribly lonely.”

“Yes, I… I can sense a great pain in her past. As soon as we met, I just felt as though we had a certain kinship.”

Edelgard wondered if he felt the same ‘kinship’ with her, if he could truly sense such a thing in others.

“Now, I… I am not sure how to describe it,” he said, shaking his head as though ashamed of some foolish thought he’d have, “but I feel oddly lucky around her, despite what she says to the contrary. As though a day in which I meet her cannot be truly bad.”

“Perhaps she can enroll in the Blue Lions.”

“With only two months left in the term, I cannot see her doing that. Besides…” He crossed his arms. Edelgard saw a flash of bright blue on the cuff of his overcoat.

“What’s that on your arm?” she asked.

“What?”

“Your left arm. There’s something on the cuff…” She reached for his arm and tried to lift it, but he pinned his arms to his sides and tucked in his hands.

“It’s nothing.”

“Dima…”

He sighed and took out his hands, revealing a gash on the cuff of his overcoat that had been expertly stitched together and detailed with an ornately embroidered lion in blue and white thread.

“Oh, that is beautiful,” she commented. “Bernadetta did that for you, I imagine?” That handiwork was unmistakable.

“Yes,” he said sheepishly, hiding the cuff again. “I… I wish I could’ve done it myself, but I am hopeless at needlework. I remember your mother tried to teach me once, but all I could do was break the needles.”

“Bernadetta and Marianne,” she noted, smiling coyly. “It seems you attract the quiet girls. Or perhaps they attract you?”

“I-I—I—El, wh-what are you saying? I—I’m most certainly not—” he sputtered. “Is this what you wished to speak with me about? Don’t we have more important things to discuss?”

“Yes, actually… Actually, we do,” she said.

“Or perhaps it can wait,” he said, a notable U-turn from his urgency the other day. “You don’t look well. I’m sorry for badgering you about it the other day—it is more important that you get some rest.”

“I suppose I don’t look well. I don’t feel well, either,” Edelgard said. “I know we have something important to discuss, but first the news about my father, and then that encounter with the fake Hurricane King, and now…”

“And now?” he repeated, furrowing his brow with mock concern. “What has happened now? Is someone hurt? Has one of your siblings…”

She told him about Anselm.

Dimitri was speechless for a while, his mouth hanging agape. Edelgard studied his face, looking for any trace of guilt beneath the surprise. She found plenty. The question was how false it was.

“I’m sorry, El,” he finally said. “That’s horrible.”

“It is,” she said, sniffling. “I’ve never—I’ve never been accused of having a hand in something so monstrous before, and by my own sisters… I…” She made herself look and sound as hurt as possible, though that wasn’t hard to do. Dimitri had to see over and over again that his alliance with Those Who Slither in the Dark did nothing but harm the people he was closest to. “I’m worried for the Empire, but more than that, my family—my own family—is being torn apart.”

He laid a hesitant hand on her shoulder, his careful and cautious body language proof of his culpability. He had known about this all along. He had probably been waiting for this day to come with bated breath. On this day, his conquest of Fódlan had truly begun long before his army could even take a single step under his command. And now, for whatever it was worth, he knew how the plotting of his allies hurt the people he cared about.

“I’m sorry,” he said, choking out his words through the lump in his throat. “I—I’m so, so sorry, El. I didn’t mean—I cannot believe I thought this day was lucky. I just hope everything comes to a peaceful resolution between your brothers. And I am truly, most sincerely sorry that your siblings would think less of you just because of the time you’ve spent with me…”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s quite ridiculous to pin the blame for these events on Faerghus. Only somebody who is still resentful over the War of the Eagle and Lion would jump to such a conclusion.”

He laughed. “Yes, that is one way of putting it.”

“But you have spoken with both Burkhart and Anselm, haven’t you?” she asked. “Did anything Anselm say hint that he was plotting something like that?”

“Well…” Dimitri thought for a moment. “He did say that he admired the austerity of Faerghus. There was some implication that he disliked the direction the Empire has been headed in. But I hadn’t imagined that he was plotting something so wicked. I’m sorry, El. If I had heard the treachery in his words, perhaps I could have done something.”

His words were lies, all of them, but his tone was far more honest. He truly did seem sorry for the role he had played in this affair. Edelgard put her arms around him and rested her head against his chest, her ear pressed against his heart as it beat a nervous tattoo against his ribcage. A faint, stale scent of manure clung to him. “Thank you, Dima.”

“El,” he murmured. “Do you trust me?” he asked. “As much as I trust you?”

“Yes. Of course.”

He let one of his strong hands rest against her back while the other combed her hair with exceeding gentleness. Edelgard was aware of the strength in those hands—and knew that if he so chose, he could break every bone in her body in an instant. To allow him to embrace her like this was proof of her unconditional trust in him—a trust he longed to reciprocate. Still, a chill dampened her thoughts as memories of the last moments of her life followed in the wake of his touch. “I truly believe that whatever bad news tomorrow might bring, the future will be brighter. I will make Faerghus better, and all of Fódlan will follow. That is what I believe. And you have helped me believe it.”

Edelgard smiled into his chest. It was a smile that broke her heart, and the floodgates burst open, and the hatred she had felt from Gerlinde and Justine—undeserved, misdirected, yet at the same time wholly and entirely deserved—pierced her heart like a knife.

Ever since the day she had emerged from the dungeon alone with ragged snow-white hair streaming down her shoulders and scars covering everything except her face, she had known deep in her heart that her family would rightfully hate her if any had survived; she had carried that hatred in herself, burning a torch for the dead not unlike the dead that Dimitri had kept with him and the phantoms that whispered in his ears. She had had a new family that had set those fears to rest—but that new family was far away, and she could not bring herself to fully imagine the true extent of whatever danger now surrounded them.

She wept into him. Real, genuine tears burned her eyes like acid. He held her tighter, and she felt his legs move in slow, careful steps, gently pulling her along. Before she knew it, she stopped hearing snow crunching beneath their boots and felt her feet meet solid stone, then ascend a flight of stairs step by painstaking step. She realized as he stood her up in front of her bedroom door that she had stopped crying a long time ago.

“You need to rest,” Dimitri whispered to her. “I wish I could tell you that you could go to sleep and wake up and what happened today would turn out to be nothing but a dream, but I cannot.”

Edelgard became aware that her stomach was growling. “I need food,” she mumbled. “And you need a bath.”

He let out a sheepish laugh. “That I do,” he said. He let her go. “I apologize for the smell. Why don’t I bring up a plate from the dining hall for you?”

She took a hold of him before he could leave. “I still need to tell you the truth,” she said, against her better judgment. “Whoever tried to kill me when we came back… I think they were trying to keep me from telling you.”

“I won’t let anybody hurt you,” he assured her.

“The men responsible for the Tragedy of Duscur,” she said, taking a deep breath as he bent his knees and crouched down to let her whisper in his ear, _“all those years ago, the ones who were truly responsible… a cabal of nobles who wanted to see your father violently removed from power due to his reforms.”_ She tightened her grip on his shoulder and leaned in closer, feeling his pulse race beneath his skin. _“And as for the experiments… they were conducted by the very same Solon from Remire… and Thales, both pretending to work on behalf of the Church of Seiros.”_

His pale blue eyes widened. His face was white as a sheet, his complexion sickly and ashen. He pulled away from her, a slight tremble in his shoulders reaching down to his fingertips, his mouth agape. He tried to speak, but no sound came out.

“El… Thank you for telling me this,” he croaked, managing a weak smile. Edelgard’s heart soared. Today, in spite of everything, she had won no small victory. Dimitri was hers. And she felt happy for that, not because she had successfully manipulated him, not because her plan was succeeding, but because she realized that she truly loved him.

His next words, though, nearly knocked her off her feet.

“So,” he said, “Ashe must have told you that in his letter, too.”

She kept the best poker face she could muster. “Yes… of course,” she said. “Of course he told me. He would have wanted us to know. He would have wanted us to fight them…” She took his cold hands and squeezed them. “…Together.”

But did this mean that all this time, ever since he’d read his letter— _when had he read his letter?—_ he’d been going along with Thales’ plots, tolerating his presence? Edelgard couldn’t exactly judge him for that, given her own actions—but her entire plan had hinged on what she’d known of Dimitri’s personality, assuming he would betray them as soon as the truth was made known.

“Solon,” he repeated, as though tasting the name in his mouth before he spat it out. His eyes narrowed, his jaw clenched; he wrenched away from her and his gloved hands curled into fists as a bitter scowl tugged at his mouth. As another searing burst of pain made her eye throb, a pang of fear struck Edelgard in her heart—fear that she had misplaced her trust, that Thales had sunk his claws deeper into Dimitri than she had expected, that she might die right here and now because she had been just that much too brave—

“That traitorous dastard will pay for what he has done a thousand times over,” he snarled, “and as for this Thales, whoever he is, I will kill him too.”

With that, he stormed back down the stairs.

“But Thales is—”

Edelgard’s mind raced. It was worse than she had feared. Dimitri knew who his enemies were— _but he didn’t know who Thales was._ The man he knew as Rodrigue was simply that: the man he knew as Rodrigue, and as far as he knew, nothing more. But what relation, then, did Rodrigue claim to have to Solon and the so-called Men in Black, and how had Thales convinced Dimitri not to rip him to shreds for it?

That meant she hadn’t won his soul yet. Far from it—she still had to expose Thales.

Edelgard let out a long, deep, exhausted sigh, her heart beating as frantically as a hummingbird’s, and sat down with her back against her bedroom door, only to nearly flatten a little package resting on the floor that she hadn’t noticed before. It was wrapped in parchment paper and adorned with a note written in Annette’s handwriting:

> _Dear Edelgard,_
> 
> _Bernadetta told us what happened in the Black Eagles classroom earlier this afternoon, so a few of the other students and I put together a little gift basket for you! We hope it helps you feel better! ♡_

Beneath the note were the signatures of Annette, Ingrid, Bernadetta (hers was as timid and small as she was), Sylvain, Ignatz, Dedue, and Raphael. Edelgard unwrapped the gift to find a collection of lemon drops, a few icing-glazed cookies, an entire pastry leaking raspberry jelly, some leftover tea biscuits, a thick hunk of pepper-crusted beef jerky (thanks to Raphael, no doubt), and a sachet of dried chamomile and lavender courtesy of Dedue (which she hoped wasn’t meant to be edible).

Edelgard felt her heavy heart ache happily as she took the gift into her bedroom and fed herself. It wasn’t the healthiest dinner in the world, but it assuaged her hunger and some of her melancholy.

* * *

Time Squad’s ranks had swelled, and as a result, Claude’s little band of time travelers and time traveler-adjacent operatives needed a less cramped place to meet than Professor Byleth’s bedroom. Fortunately, Captain Jeralt knew exactly where the group could meet without fear of being overheard—and it happened to be the same sanctuary he’d found for his new ward.

“Are you sure about this place, Captain Jeralt?” Edelgard asked him, staring up at the black silhouette of the guard tower as it stood against the darkness. She recalled that there were plenty of these towers dotting the walls of Garreg Mach, most of them abandoned, one of which was used by Glenn to meet with his fellow agents.

“I’m positive. This tower is still in use, and it was a pretty simple matter of rerouting all of the other knight’s patrols so I’m the only one near it,” he answered, opening the door and leading the group up the winding stairs to the outpost at the top.

Most of the blankets from the chapel had been repurposed to make the outpost into a sort of makeshift home, lining the floor to soften the hard wood panels and draped against the stone brick walls, propped up to form a makeshift little tent. On the table in the center of the circular room, an oil lamp provided soft, flickering light, the edges of the amber circle ebbing and flowing against the darkness like waves crashing against the shore.

“Don’t worry; it’s just us,” Jeralt preemptively announced to Hapi, who poked her head out of her makeshift tent at the sound of his voice. “Brought a few friends, but I’m sure you can trust ‘em. This here—” He gestured to Byleth. “—is my daughter, Byleth.”

“We’ve met,” Byleth said. “Nice to meet you again.”

Hubert glared at Hapi until Edelgard elbowed him in the ribs.

“Ooh, it’s cozy up here,” Hilda noted, observing the hodgepodge of colored and patterned blankets that livened up the bare stone walls. “If I could fit my mattress up the stairs, I think I wouldn’t mind living here.”

Hapi recoiled a little at the sight of the newcomer.

“It’s alright,” Claude assured her. “This is my number one, Hilda.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Hilda told her with a cheerful smile.

Hapi faintly returned the smile and padded out of the tent. A trio of kittens followed her out and scampered down the stairs. “Hi,” she said.

“Oh, hello, kitties!” Claude exclaimed as they ran between his legs. “Anyway, we’re the Time Squad. Welcome aboard.”

“You still need to pick a better name,” Edelgard told him. “I know you’re capable of cleverer monikers than _that.”_

“It’s elegant in its simplicity and its descriptiveness,” he and Hilda said in unison. Hilda stuck her tongue out at her.

Sothis materialized out of thin air at Byleth’s side. “It is a silly name,” she said, nodding in agreement at Edelgard, “but you are all silly people, so I think it is quite proper. Arrogant one, you and the lazy one are still the only two who can see and hear me, correct?”

Edelgard looked around to see if anyone was staring with slack-jawed amazement at the phantom and nodded.

“Ah. Perhaps I should just go back to sleep, then.”

Byleth shook her head.

“Oh? You desire my counsel? Very well. I shall stay, but I do hope that those of you who are capable of doing so will heed my words,” Sothis said, staring directly at Edelgard with a pointed glare.

“Well, Edelgard,” Claude said, “you were the one who called this meeting together. What’s new?”

Quite a lot was new, and once everyone had gathered in a loose circle around the table, Edelgard explained the news that had come out of Enbarr as well as the revelation from her encounter with Dimitri. As she spoke, Hapi carefully and gingerly crept to her side, wary of everyone else.

“Well, so much for stopping the war,” Hilda sighed.

“We still have time to reveal Thales to Dimitri,” Edelgard said. “Dimitri hasn’t moved his troops yet. Perhaps he’s too sentimental about his time here to make a move until after graduation. The damage has already been done to the Empire, but we can still stop Those Who Slither—”

“—The No-Eyed People,” Claude corrected.

“Why do these creeps have so many names?” Jeralt muttered, crossing his arms. “And do you have to be so poetic about them? ‘Those Who Slither in the Dark?’” he scoffed.

“Hubert came up with that epithet in my world,” Edelgard said. “It has a nice ring to it.”

“I thought so as well, Lady Edelgard,” Hubert said, nodding. “My counterpart shares my good taste, then.”

“It’s a mouthful,” Jeralt said, rolling his eyes. “If they attack and I need to deliver a message to the other knights, am I going to shout, ‘Help! Those Who Slither in the Dark are attacking!’ No, I’m going to say, ‘Hey! Creeps incoming!’”

“Byleth, I do like your father,” Sothis told her host with a wry little smile.

“If we expose Those Who Slither,” Hubert wondered aloud, “will it put a stop to the turmoil in the Empire?”

“I feel like this is something that’ll keep going, no matter what,” Claude said. “The No-Eyed People might have started it, but it’s like rolling a ball down a hill. All you need to do is push it and gravity does the rest. But if we can stop them, then at least we can stop them from making the situation worse. So… How do we expose Rodrigue for what he really is?”

“Just _tell_ Dimitri,” Hilda said. “Like you told him the truth about Duscur. He trusts you, doesn’t he?”

“He does,” Edelgard said, “but I’m not sure how far that trust will go if I stretch it. I took a risk today, telling him about Duscur; even if I’d brought him here to hear it straight from Hapi’s mouth, he might have rejected the truth if Ashe’s letter hadn’t told him already. I don’t know how much more I can alter his feelings toward Rodrigue without evidence, either. We need to keep in mind that Rodrigue is doing as much as he can to keep Dimitri on his good side, as well, and none of us are privy to that. We’re playing a game of chess in which the other side of the board is shrouded in mist.”

“Just tell him Ashe wrote it in his letter,” Hilda said. “It’ll save us a lot of work.”

“If Ashe didn’t tell him in _his_ letter, then it’s likely he didn’t know,” Claude said. “So that could blow up in our faces, considering there wasn’t actually anything about the No-Eyed People in his letter to Edelgard. She’s right. There’s an Almyran saying, ‘you can only feed someone once with fruit from a poisonous tree.’”

“What about that kid, Glenn?” Jeralt asked. “He’s one of the creeps, too, right? If we snatch him up, maybe we can… coerce some answers out of him.”

“One of these fiends,” Hubert said, sounding _very_ much like the Hubert Edelgard knew best, “might need quite a lot of… coercion.”

“I am loath to endorse the abduction of little ones,” Sothis said, “but it may work. And, if he truly is one of these fiends, then perhaps he is not so little after all. Byleth, what do you think?”

Byleth thought for a moment, then lifted her head, her azure eyes scanning the room. Edelgard felt a growing dread in her heart that only intensified as their eyes met. The memory of Byleth kneeling over her father’s dying body as he breathed his last, bleeding out from Kronya’s dagger, struck her like a hammer to her heart. The guilt, the pain, watching from a distance the death of a good man and the death knell of her hope, the first tears Byleth had ever shed.

Edelgard wondered, could she really trust her little act of deception to have fully defanged Glenn? Would that be enough to stay his hand? Or would Jeralt end up with another knife in his back? Would _she?_

Jeralt, perhaps noticing the turmoil written on her face, turned toward her and gave her a slow, confident nod— _trust me,_ it seemed to say.

“I’m on board with this plan,” Claude said.

“So am I,” Edelgard said. “These… _creeps_ use some sort of magical glamour to maintain their disguises, or skin-suits, like we saw with Solon at Remire. If we capture Glenn, we might be able to figure out a way to forcibly dispel that disguise. Then, exposing Rodrigue’s true form will be a matter of getting him and Dimitri in the same room.”

“We’ll do it, then,” Byleth said. “We’ll abduct Glenn Fraldarius.”

* * *

Everyone went their separate ways and took their own paths back from the tower to the Officer’s Academy, knowing that the sight of a large crowd of people milling about in the middle of the night would attract all kinds of suspicion. Edelgard’s path kept her close to the monastery wall, clinging to the dark stone so that the light of the waxing moon overhead would not reveal her against the steel-blue glow of the fresh snow blanketing the lawn.

As she hugged the wall and inched along her path nearer to the dormitories, she caught sight of a dark figure hurrying toward a distant guard tower. Knowing it was Glenn, she carefully crept closer, biding her time. She didn’t want to intercept him—just to overhear whatever he had to say to his masters.

By the time she reached the tower, Glenn had already begun conversing with the others. Thales’ voice crackled, infused with a buzzing undercurrent; when Edelgard dared to peer into the door, she saw Glenn standing alone at the foot of the stairs, lit by a lone torch, and a strange black box nestled into the space of a missing brick in the wall. Thales’ voice seemed to be coming from the box.

 _“We will have to get rid of her, of course,”_ Thales hissed. _“Her behavior at Fhirdiad has made it imperative that we separate her from the Hurricane King; now this blackmail scheme makes it even more pressing of an issue.”_

“But the letters—” Glenn started.

 _“Damn the letters!”_ an unfamiliar voice piped up from within the box. The crackling and buzzing grew louder and overwhelmed what was said next. _“—would even believe her?”_

 _“Still, it is a risk we cannot afford to take at this critical moment,”_ Thales said. _“Operation Antediluvia is still in a precarious state. We cannot afford setbacks… or for our most valuable assets to turn on us. She has made herself untouchable, or so she thinks… yet she must be disposed of.”_

“But the letters—”

 _“Is that all you can say, fool?”_ Cornelia’s voice emerged from the sea of hissing and buzzing. _“‘But the letters, the letters, the_ letters,’ _you oaf! We said we would_ dispose _of her, not_ kill _her!”_

 _“Indeed,”_ Thales said. _“There is, of course, a way we can remove her from the equation without triggering her pathetic attempt at blackmail.”_

“You want me to wear her skin?” Glenn added, a hopeful uptick to his voice that chilled Edelgard to the bone. She had to get out of here. If Glenn caught her here…

 _“No, you fool! We want a_ competent _infiltrator to wear her skin!”_ Cornelia snarled at him.

 _“Our little Hurricane King is quite close to the girl,”_ Thales said. _“An agent pretending to be her would need to replicate her_ perfectly _—including her behavior. After all, we can’t allow her to die or go missing, can we? And another sudden shift in personality would arouse… suspicion. Do as she says and stand by for now. We’ll arrange for another agent to be placed in Garreg Mach to study her…”_

Edelgard slipped away as silently as she could, still clinging to the wall, consulting her mental map of the monastery—honed from five years of using it as a forward operating base and the headquarters of the Black Eagles Strike Force—as she planned a new, safe route back to the dormitories. The heel of her palm, numbed by the cold, pressed against her eye to soothe the pain like a block of ice pressed against an aching bruise. In spite of that, though, the pain grew worse and worse. The cold air stung her lungs with each breath, prickling her face with needles.

After a few minutes of careful and painstaking backtracking had brought her farther up the wall and farther away from the tower, she saw Glenn’s silhouette stride across the lawn.

Edelgard sighed with relief. On the bright side, she knew for certain that Glenn would honor the terms of her fake blackmail… for now. But now there was a new problem to contend with. The link between Dimitri and Thales had to be severed quickly.

Her heart pounding in her chest and pulse singing in her ears, she made it back to the dormitories. She passed by Professor Byleth’s room, only to see Glenn ambling casually across the lawn, kicking up plumes of snow with each skipping step and occasional pirouette with childish glee.

The door adjacent to Byleth’s room creaked open, dim candlelight bleeding through the darkness within, and Dedue took a step outside, his dark face illuminated by the little candle held in his hand. Glenn froze like a startled deer, then dashed away to his room, a plume of snow trailing in his wake.

Dedue’s head turned and his eyes locked with Edelgard’s, the shadows flickering across his face to trace deep valleys and canyons in his brow, nose, and cheekbones. He slowly lifted his free hand and raised a single finger to his lips, then crept back into his room and shut the door.


	21. Lucis et Umbrae

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard has some bonding time with her friends and family, hears a ghost, attends a meeting with Rhea that goes off the rails, and learns about Claude's fascinating new poison.

The kitchen was bustling with activity. All students took an afternoon here and there to prepare meals for the rest of the academy’s students and faculty; proactive and diligent students signed up for their own positions in the schedule, while those less-diligent students (i.e. Hilda) typically waited until somebody, usually their professor, noticed they hadn’t signed up and wrote their name into the schedule for at least five days straight to teach them a lesson. Today, Edelgard joined Dedue, Bernadetta, Annette, and Ingrid to make beef stew.

“Okay, Dedue,” Bernadetta said, protectively placing herself over the spice rack with her arms splayed wide, “I-I’m gonna pick out what I need for my special spice mix! S-So, uh, no peeking!”

Dedue stood in the corner of the kitchen as Annette tended to the finely-diced mix of carrots, celery, onion, and garlic sauteing at the bottom of a large cast-iron cauldron, his hand firmly clamped over his eyes. “I will not peek, Bernadetta. Collect your spices.”

“A-Are you sure you’re not looking? Because I—I won’t give up my secret spices, even if I die!”

“Would it help if I turned around?” he asked.

“Y-Yes,” she squeaked.

Dedue turned his back to her and everyone else, situating himself in the corner. “I shall.”

“Is it really so important that you keep your ‘special spice mix’ a secret, Bernadetta?” Ingrid asked as she turned a mound of freshly-scrubbed red potatoes into a mound of cubes.

“Yes,” Bernadetta, Edelgard, and Annette all answered in unison.

“Okay,” Ingrid said.

“Okay, is everyone, uh… not looking?” Bernadetta asked.

Edelgard focused on tenderizing the meat for the stew with a little wooden mallet, thankful that unlike the last time she’d been on meal preparation duty, Sylvain wasn’t here to make jokes about how good she was at beating her meat. “Nobody’s looking, Bernadetta.”

As she busied herself in her work, she heard the clink of glasses as Bernadetta selected her clandestine spice mix, followed by the grinding of a mortar and pestle.

“The mirepoix is just about done,” Annette pronounced, “so I’m gonna get the stock. Oh! Wait! Shouldn’t we deglaze the veggies with a dash of wine?”

“We will need it later anyway,” Dedue said. “There should be a bottle of cooking wine in the cupboard.”

“Alright! I got it!” Annette strained, letting out an adorable little grunt, and Edelgard could see her standing on the tips of her toes under the cupboard, hand outstretched and fingers splayed as she tried to lift herself up just one more inch.

“Dedue, can you help Annette?” she asked, worried that the poor girl might accidentally knock the bottle over and send it crashing to the floor.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “Bernadetta, I am turning around and uncovering my eyes. Prepare yourself.”

“I-It’s okay! I’m done!” Bernadetta held out a small bowl filled with a fine speckled dust of ground herbs and spices, her proud grin an unusual sight on her face.

Edelgard was relieved to finally look up from the sea of red flesh speckled with white flecks and ribbons of sinew. She wasn’t squeamish and had grown quite accustomed to cooking for herself and others during the war, but she didn’t particularly enjoy immersing herself in meat after seeing so many bodies cut open.

She set aside her mallet and took out a knife, setting to work cubing the meat. Though it wasn’t as time-consuming as tenderizing, there was a lot of meat to prepare—after all, this would have to be doled out for all the students, along with Edelgard’s siblings.

She felt Dedue jostle against her, thankfully not forcefully enough to knock her down or put her fingers under her knife. “Apologies,” he said as she collected herself. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” she assured him as he slipped past her. “It’s alright. It’s just a little cramped in here.”

A cloud of steam hissed out of the pot as Annette poured in a dash of cooking wine under Dedue’s supervision. “There we go! How’s the meat coming, Edelgard?”

“We will need to start browning it soon,” Dedue said.

“It’s coming along,” she said. “This would go a lot quicker if I could just use an axe or a sword…”

Ingrid laughed. “I can see you doing that, Edelgard. Swinging your axe all over the kitchen with reckless abandon. You’d make a bigger mess than Annette.”

“Hey, I haven’t made any messes in a long time!” Annette protested. “But, uh, anyway, Bernie, do you wanna help me get the pot with the stock?”

As she and Bernadetta hurried to retrieve a pot brimming with rich brown beef stock, Dedue took out a large cast-iron skillet and lightly oiled it with vegetable oil. “I do not mean to rush you, Edelgard. I am simply getting the skillet ready.”

Edelgard nodded and continued to cube the meat.

“Do you need help?”

“No, I’ve got it.”

“You _have_ been a bit sluggish lately, Edelgard,” Ingrid said for the umpteenth time. “Are you not getting enough sleep?”

“I’m used to not getting enough sleep,” she assured her, though she supposed it was her mind that was used to it, not her body.

“It’s your older sisters, isn’t it? Goddess only knows I’d be a mess if my own family accused me of treason.”

“Yeah, it’s not fair,” Annette chimed in as she and Bernadetta hauled the pot of stock across the kitchen. “They shouldn’t look down on you just because of who your friends are! I mean, do they think _Bernie’s_ a traitor, too?”

“Oh, no,” Bernadetta moaned. “Why did you say that? There’s no way they don’t think Bernie’s a traitor!”

“Here, let me help you,” Ingrid said to Edelgard, stepping away from her potatoes and taking up an extra butcher’s knife. “Move over.”

Since she wasn’t one to refuse help from someone with a knife, Edelgard moved over and allowed Ingrid to help. The work, though menial and mindless, was soothing; after everything that had happened with her family, Edelgard was thankful for this diversion and her friends in the Blue Lions to keep her spirits up.

“Annette, Bernadetta, can you finish the potatoes?” Ingrid called out as the two girls carefully upended the pot of stock into the cauldron. “They say too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the soup, but many hands make light work. I’m sure Professor Byleth would say something like that if she were in here.”

“That is exactly what she would say,” Edelgard said, knowing it to be true because Byleth had, in fact, said that exact thing to her many times before.

 _“They always say that too many cooks will spoil, will spoil the stew,”_ Annette sang as she started up one of her impromptu ditties, _“But all I need to make a yummy stew is a little bit of you and a little bit of you and a little bit of you… and I don’t mean that in a cannibal way, in a cannibal way, ‘cause that would be really, really creepy…_ Oh, right! Bernie, do you still need to put in your spices?”

Ingrid and Edelgard finished cubing the meat and, while Annette continued to serenade them, took to dusting the cubes in flour and seasoning them with salt and pepper. “The meat is ready,” Ingrid announced.

“The skillet is ready,” Dedue announced.

After a few minutes of browning the meat until every surface of every cube had developed a deep brown sear, it all went into the pot, and one more dash of wine freed the leftover fond remnants from the bottom of the skillet.

“And now,” he said, tending to the fire keeping the stew stewing, “we wait. Place the potatoes in a basin with water so they will be fresh until it is time to add them.” There was the faintest hint of a smile on his face. “It is nice to cook with people who know what they are doing.”

“It’s nice to cook with people, period,” Annette said.

“Are you going to stand by and watch this all afternoon?” Bernadetta asked.

“Yes,” he said. “If any of you have other engagements, feel free to leave. I will handle it from here.”

“I’ve got a class later this afternoon,” Ingrid said, washing her hands and preparing to leave. Though she was on much better terms with Dedue than she’d once been, the two of them still didn’t care much for spending time together.

“Me, too,” Annette said. “But this was really fun! We should all volunteer for next Wednesday, too! No one’s signed up for that slot yet!”

“I’ll stay here with you,” Bernadetta said to Dedue. “I mean… if you wouldn’t mind,” she added, nervously kneading her hands together. “I can just… hide in the corner. You won’t even know I’m there!”

“Thank you,” Dedue said. “It would be nice to have you here. I did not know you were so enthusiastic about cooking.”

“I should head out, too,” Edelgard said, enjoying the sight of stoic Dedue and timid little Bernie developing a sort of friendship, even though she feared it might end in tears soon. Once she’d washed and dried her hands to remove all the flour and meat juices that had stained her hands powdery white, she took up her bag and slung her cloak over her shoulder. “You two enjoy yourselves.”

“Take care of yourself,” Dedue told her. “Perhaps you should take the afternoon to rest.”

Edelgard nodded and left the kitchen, bracing herself against the gust of cold wind that blew through the door to the dining hall when it opened. The cold air set into her bones no matter how bundled up she was, and after taking just a few steps into the courtyard, her nose and ears stung. She did not relish the months to come, which would be colder than this, and almost regretted not staying in the kitchen, where at least it was warm and the smell of all that stew was only going to grow stronger while all that meat braised.

She caught up with Annette. “Excuse me, Annette?” she asked. “May I ask you where you buy those sachets of cocoa?”

“Oh, you like them?” Annette asked with a cheery smile, her face flushed and reddened nearly to match the color of her hair by the cold wind. “There’s a sweets shop in town that sells them. Oh, and are you making your cocoa with water or milk?”

“Milk, of course,” Edelgard said.

“I was gonna tell you you’ve got to use milk if you weren’t. It’s the only way to get hot cocoa that’s properly rich and creamy. And maybe the warm milk will help you sleep!”

“I’m glad you’re concerned for my health,” she said. She rubbed her eye with the heel of her palm, irritated by a sudden twinge that sank into her head like a white-hot needle.

“Is something wrong with your eye?”

“No, nothing,” she assured Annette. “Ever since that sniper nearly killed me, I’ve just had this twinge in it.”

“That’s weird. I thought you got shot in the shoulder.”

“Yes, but… well… the second arrow, the one Professor Byleth knocked out of the air—I was certain it was headed for my face. I can almost imagine that it actually hit me, and it’s such a vivid image that when I dwell on it, my eye hurts.” Technically, she wasn’t quite lying, just oversimplifying a very complicated situation.

The levity on Annette’s face vanished, her carrot-colored eyebrows knitted in concern. “Oh, that’s terrible!” she gasped.

“Don’t worry. It’s all in my head.”

“Well, sadness and stress is all in your head, too, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. And everything going on with your siblings probably isn’t making it any easier on you,” Annette said, putting her arm firmly around her waist. “Here, let me walk you back to your room so you can rest up… But you’d _better_ rest. I’m gonna check up on you later to make sure you’re taking a nap or something!”

“I suppose I do need someone to keep me on task,” Edelgard agreed. “After all this time, resting is still my weakest skill.”

The two of them made their way to the dormitories. Out of the corner of her eye, Edelgard spied Glenn clinging to Dimitri like a second shadow. After how Thales had castigated him last night, Edelgard was sure he was trying to make himself useful… seemingly by keeping Dimitri occupied so that he couldn’t be turned against his subterranean allies.

“I’m sorry you’re going through such awful stuff,” Annette told her. “I remember when I lost my dad… I mean, he’s not dead, he’s here, like literally _here,_ but he’s, well, you know… it’s complicated. Anyway, I know family drama can be really tough and it must be a lot harder when you’re all princes and princesses, but just hang in there, and we’ll all be here for you when you need us!”

“Thank you, Annie.”

“And before that you got stood up by Ingrid at the ball, went to Fhirdiad for a week, almost got killed—I don’t know how you’re still standing!”

“Neither do I, to be honest. It’s instinct, I suppose. As long as I have to keep moving, I keep moving, no matter how I feel. That’s just how I’ve always been.”

“That’s how I’ve always been, too! We’re so alike, Edelgard! Just two overachievers who forgot how to relax! Well, Mercie’s not here to help me remember, so you and I are gonna have to take care of each other.”

“Will we? I suppose we can keep each other on the straight and narrow, so to speak. Perhaps we should do our relaxing together. Like a study session, but for… the exact opposite.”

“How many times have we talked about doing that?” Annette asked, grinning as she opened Edelgard’s bedroom door for her. It was a frighteningly mischievous grin.

“Excuse me, Annette,” Edelgard said as Annette dragged her into her bedroom, “but I don’t think I’m fatigued enough to need help opening my door—”

“Starting today, I’m gonna help you take it easy! No matter how difficult it is, I’ll do it!” Annette exclaimed, and Edelgard found herself not only dragged into her room but also dragged to her bed—Annette had frighteningly strong arms for her size from all that axe training she’d been doing.

“Annette. Is this _really_ necessary?” she asked as Annette drew her covers up to her chin and tucked her into bed. The spark that seemed to leap between them as Annette’s hand brushed against her cheek felt oddly invigorating.

“It sure is! Now close your eyes and dream about that yummy stew we just made until dinnertime.”

“You know I’ll have to do this to _you_ some time,” Edelgard said, trying her best to look threatening with herself cocooned firmly in her bedsheets. It didn’t work.

“Of course,” Annette said. “Sleep tight! I’ll be back to check up on you after Professor Hanneman’s seminar. And then we can go to the dining hall and have dinner together!” She all but skipped out of the bedroom, leaving Edelgard by herself.

Edelgard’s head sank into her pillow, but not for long. She supposed it was nice to be mothered by somebody after everything that had happened, but unfortunately, the world had other plans and she didn’t have the luxury of lying down when they happened. Rest would have to come later.

“Sorry, Annie,” she mumbled to herself, throwing off her covers and pulling herself out of bed. “There’s no rest for the wicked.”

She rifled through her bag to make sure she had everything she needed, and amid her notebooks, ink bottle, and quill pen she spied a familiar scrap of paper—long, thin, and covered with impenetrable code—that Dedue must have slipped to her while she had been occupied in the kitchen.

It read:

15 MR CVT MYUAE Q OXU UYID QXFY TMQGJG VW FAL IDDJPXXSJ DIK EE PPXFJ LWKJP NJ VFKC MNRD EVXNH KWY DUL LTZ

* * *

“So,” Jeralt said, “our little creep is sticking to Dimitri like glue. That makes things harder.” With an irritated grunt, he rested his elbows on the table and stared out at the darkening sky through the narrow, slit-like windows. “Hope he’s not expecting us.”

“How would he?” Byleth asked. “We’re all trustworthy here.”

Hapi took a sip from her mug of steaming cocoa, then held her finger up to her lips.

“Why are we making this so difficult?” Hilda asked as she worked a comb through Hapi’s tangled, snarled, and matted mane of scarlet hair. “Professor, just call him into your office after class and bonk him on the head.”

“And make everyone suspect her?” Edelgard asked. “That is an _excellent_ idea, Hilda. There is no way that making Byleth the last person to see Glenn would invite heightened scrutiny on her.”

Hilda rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Ugh, Hapi, you _desperately_ need some soap and conditioner in this mess,” she said as one of the teeth snapped off of her comb. “Hey, Edelgard, can you help me out here? You’re just _so_ good at styling your hair…”

“I would, but it looks like you’ve broken your only comb.”

Much to Edelgard’s surprise, she pulled a spare comb out of her purse. “Don’t be ridiculous. I _always_ carry a spare comb in case I lose one! Isn’t that smart of me?”

Edelgard sighed, took the comb, and started taming Hapi’s hair. “Let me know if this hurts,” she said, raking the comb through it. She’d never tilled a field before, but she imagined this was what it was like to till one that was rocky and barren. Hapi’s scalp produced a forest of matted, stiff, oily, tangled hair, and judging from the smell alone one could only wonder when she’d last had a chance to wash it. The Knights of Seiros probably hadn’t bathed her in her captivity, and washbasins were hard to come by when one was a fugitive.

“I’ve gone through worse,” Hapi said, her voice still hoarse from lack of use.

“This is going to need a thorough washing before we can dye it,” Edelgard informed Claude, who’d been eagerly tossing a jar of black hair dye up into the air over and over again since he’d arrived. His idea had been to dye Hapi’s hair as part of a disguise so that she wouldn't be recognized if somebody stumbled upon her.

“Shame. I should’ve known.” He set the dye back in his bag. Why he’d just happened to have hair dye lying around, one could only guess. Perhaps one of Claude’s great secrets was that he was going very, _very_ prematurely gray.

“So, when we’re done with this,” Hilda said to Hapi, sitting back and watching Edelgard do all the work, “how do you want your hair styled? Ooh! I’ve got it! You can have a cute pair of pigtails, like me!”

“That would be a great look, if we wanted to disguise her as a child,” Edelgard said.

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s childish. It’s a _childish_ hairstyle.”

 _“Childish?”_ Hilda scowled. “Excuse me? And what would you suggest? Put it in those grandma buns your future self wears?”

It was Edelgard’s turn to be outraged. _“Grandma_ buns?”

“Yeah! With your hair stark white and tied up like that, you looked like an old lady!” Hilda smugly ran a hand through the long, silky tresses of one of her bright pink pigtails. “At least I look young and sprightly and not like I’ve already outlived five husbands.”

“You,” Hubert said, glaring daggers at her, “are distracting Lady Edelgard. Do we not have more important things to discuss?”

“I’ve got an idea,” Claude said. “We’ve got a suspected ‘Death Knight’ and ‘Hurricane King’ roaming outside the monastery walls. Cap, how about you take Glenn with you on patrol, and…” He put on a hapless little shrug. “Whoops. Sorry. Bad guy came right out of the trees and snatched him right up. Nothing I could’ve done. He’ll be missed.”

“Hapi, what do you think? Cute, girlish pigtails? Or old lady buns?” Hilda asked. “How do you want us to do your hair?”

Hapi looked around the room and pointed to Jeralt. “Like that,” she said.

Jeralt furrowed his brow and let out a bemused chuckle. His hair was shaved down to short bristles on the sides and swept forward on top; to say the least, it wasn’t exactly a stylish hairdo. “Huh? Uh, no, you don’t want this, kiddo.” He seemed to be quite at ease around Hapi, Edelgard noticed; the young woman’s quiet and repressed demeanor probably reminded him of Byleth. “Anyway, Claude, as much as I like your idea, I’m not gonna be on patrol _all alone_ with him. When I’m out there in the forest, I’ll have at least two other knights with me at all times, and I’m not exactly keen on trusting them as part of our little conspiracy.”

“Perhaps we simply watch and wait,” Hubert suggested. “Soon the timing will be right. If we all keep an eye on Glenn’s habits and routines, one of us is bound to find an opening.”

“I don’t like the idea of waiting,” Byleth said, crossing her arms. “We don’t just need to kidnap Glenn, but also figure out how to remove that glamour of his by the time Rodrigue shows up again.”

“I’ve got something risky to suggest,” Claude said.

Hilda let out an exasperated sigh. _“Everything_ you suggest is risky, Claude.”

“Dedue slipped you that coded message earlier today, right?” he asked Edelgard. “He wouldn’t have done that if he’d thought we didn’t have a way to decode it.” He pulled out a slip of paper produced by the stolen decoding machine from his bag and read off the decrypted message Edelgard had given him. “‘In two weeks, a new face will arrive at the monastery, and in three weeks, it will take yours for its own,’” he recited. “I think he’s not as much of an ally to the No-Eyed People as they might think.”

Edelgard pensively bowed her head as she pondered his plan. Dedue had shown her that he was trustworthy on many occasions already, not the least of which being all the times he’d found her snooping around Those Who Slither in the Dark and interceded to keep her out of harm’s way. And if he knew that she had access to a decoding machine and yet had done nothing…

“It’s possible,” she said. “But he also might be lulling us into a false sense of security by turning a blind eye to us.”

“That’s true,” he agreed. “That’s why I said it was risky. Okay, how’s this? I say just snatch him out of his bed while he’s sleeping, then. If the No-Eyes sleep. Do they sleep?”

“No,” Hapi said.

“I’ve never seen one of them sleep,” Edelgard said. She’d run into Kronya enough times in the middle of the night to know that she, at the very least, seemed to get by just fine without any.

“What does Glenn do all night, then?” Hilda asked. “Does he just _pretend_ to sleep?”

“Well, he’s got his creeps to creep around with,” Jeralt said.

A wry, sinister grin split Claude’s face. “Well, we can _make_ him sleep, then. A little slow-acting poison, something to make him a little drowsy… or more than a _little…_ and then we just snatch him up.”

“Do you have a poison like that?” Jeralt asked. His face fell. “Dammit. I can’t believe I’m talking about poisoning a… how old is Glenn?”

“About twenty?” Hilda suggested.

“The person wearing his face could be much older, even,” Edelgard said.

He let out a relieved sigh. “Phew. Okay, I don’t feel bad about it anymore. Thanks.”

“I don’t have one _now,”_ Claude said, “but I could whip it up in a few days.”

The discussion lasted the rest of the short winter day, and by the time the sky outside the windows had turned pitch black, no better idea had been suggested, so Time Squad adjourned with its members instructed to watch and wait for opportunity to strike while Claude worked on his poison.

Edelgard was fortunate enough to return to her room just a minute before Annette knocked on the door.

“Hello, Edelgard!” she chirped, her cheeks pink, her smile broad. “Hope you had a nice, restful afternoon! Now how about dinner?”

Edelgard decided not to tell her she hadn’t. “Dinner sounds great, Annette.”

* * *

As she prepared for bed at the end of a long, exhausting day, there was a knock on Edelgard’s door; she half expected it to be Glenn coming to kill her. These sorts of thoughts—cowardly, anxious, catastrophic thoughts, the kind of hysterical fantasies that so often took hold of poor Bernadetta—had struck her far more often since she’d experienced death, and all she could do was shove them aside. After all, Glenn wasn’t stupid or impulsive enough to defy the terms of her blackmail so blatantly, was he? No, scratch that—if he was Kronya, then he most certainly was. There was a common misconception that evil was the doman of master schemers concocting labyrinthine plots, and while the world had more than its fair share of those, the vastly more common cause of suffering was simply idiots doing as idiots did best.

Fortunately, it was not Glenn at her door. Rather, it was her little brother Pascal, flanked by his retainer. “Um… hi, El,” he said, kneading his doughy hands. “Is this a bad time?”

“No,” she said, inviting him in, “I was only just about to go to bed. As she stepped back and he stepped forward, shooing his retainer away as the door swung shut behind him, she found herself eyeing the letter opener resting on her desk. A good impromptu dagger if this Pascal turned out to be a changeling in disguise—

No, she couldn’t allow such ridiculous paranoia to take control of her mind.

“Justine won’t apologize to you,” Pascal said. “So… I’ll just have to apologize to you for her. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, Pascal,” Edelgard said, though inside she felt gutted. Before Pascal had said those words, she’d felt the rich and hearty weight of a bowlful of stew filling her belly, and now she felt as though everything had been flushed out. She sat down on the side of her bed. “Have a seat, if you’d like.”

Pascal sat down beside her, still fidgeting anxiously. “She and Gerlinde would be so mad if she knew I was here with you. But…”

A wheezing sob burst from Edelgard’s chest, as sudden and unexpected as a hiccup, and though she clapped her hands over her mouth, the damage had been done. She felt tears well up in her eyes. She’d remembered so little about her siblings, and least of all she’d remembered how petty and vindictive her eldest sisters had been sometimes. She’d only remembered them all as simultaneously strong, towering over her like statues of the saints before the experiments had broken them all down, and pathetic, begging for help that never came and deserving infinite sympathy for their suffering. She hadn’t remembered how bossy they’d been, or the times they’d bullied her over even little things, like the time when she’d been six and she’d wanted to let Hubert play pretend with them even though none of the other retainers did and Gerlinde in particular had made a big fuss over Hubert wanting to be a pegasus knight because only girls got to be pegasus knights and it had just been so _stupid_ and _petty,_ the way children so often were _—_

“El?” Pascals asked, taking her hand. Worry creased his soft, moon-shaped face. “I’m sorry. Did I, um—did I say something to upset you?”

“Pasc,” she choked out, sniffling, laid low and reduced to a blubbering mess by the cruel reality that the long-dead girls and boys she’d lionized for so long—because to do anything else was to dishonor their memory, to spit on their useless sacrifices, their senseless wastes of life, the tragedies that had cut their lives short so, so early—were not always lions. “Pascal, I—”

She balled her hands into fists, fingernails biting into the meat of her palms nearly hard enough to draw blood, her teeth finding her bottom lip and gnawing it to bloody ribbons, and forced it all down. For a while, she was silent, hard at work taking all that pain and heartache and compressing it, shrinking it down to a pebble she could hold in her heart without breaking it.

“El, are you okay?”

“It’s fine,” she said. “I’m fine.” She wiped her tears on the sleeve of her nightshirt. “It feels like a lifetime since I’ve seen any of you—long enough that it hurts.”

There was a morose look on Pascal’s face. “Why is Anselm doing this to us?” he asked, his voice cracking. “Doesn’t he realize how much he’s hurting us? How much he’s hurting _you?_ Why is he doing this? What did we ever do to _him?”_

“I don’t know what he wants,” Edelgard said. Part of her suspected that perhaps Anselm had been replaced by Those Who Slither in the Dark, but part of her believed that perhaps this was just the kind of person he was. Either way, she had no way of knowing. “But he must believe in something, and when one has strong ideals, one must sometimes work to pursue them… no matter the cost.”

“Is that it? He just… believes in something, so it’s okay?”

“To him? Yes. He’s certainly justified it to himself. Wherever his path leads, he’s decided that it’s the best path—perhaps even the only path. No matter how many people he hurts along the way or how much resistance he faces, he’ll pursue it.” Perhaps it had only been natural that he had been her closest brother, and she his closest sister; or perhaps she was simply projecting what she knew of herself onto him. But one thing she knew for sure: if he continued on that path alone, he would become a coldhearted, wicked person, just as Edelgard had always feared she would be.

Pascal was silent for a while.

“That’s a disgusting way to think,” he said, the venomous sting of his words striking Edelgard in the heart.

“I know,” she said.

“You’ve changed, El,” he said after another long pause. He sat hunched over, shoulders bowed, ringlets of his curly hair spilling over his brow as his gaze fixed itself on the floor. “You’re so distant and cold, the way you talk… and Anselm went here last year, before he started doing all this. Is _that_ what this place does to people? Hedy and I were so excited to enroll here, but now…”

Edelgard tried to muster a smile. “Everyone who comes to this academy changes, Pascal. Most of them change for the better. It all depends on who you have to guide you.”

“So… Professor Hanneman’s that bad of a teacher, huh? Should I apply for the Golden Deer if Miss Manuela is still teaching them?”

Somehow, she nearly managed to laugh. “Do what you believe is right, Pascal. There’s nothing else worth doing.”

Pascal let out a weak smile and wrapped his arms around her. “Thank you, El.”

Edelgard hadn’t felt his embrace for over twelve years. Pascal had been one of the last to die, and he’d died in his sleep, cradled in her arms, because at that point she had been the only big sister he’d had left. He had died in her sleep, too, his last breath obscured by the oblivion of a dreamless slumber—warm one moment, cold as stone the next. She found her tears dampening his shoulder as she murmured the same words she’d said then:

“Don’t be afraid, Pascal,” she said. “It’ll be over soon. I’ll protect you.”

* * *

Pascal didn’t die in her arms while she slept. He woke her up as he slipped away from her, telling her that he didn’t want to make his retainer wait outside her door all night or make any of the other Hresvelgs worry about where he was, and Edelgard laid awake and alone in her bed for what felt like hours more, wishing she’d tried to convince him to stay while the dry, cottony feeling in her mouth left over from her short nap faded away.

Later in the night, she heard a ghostly wailing from down the hall, bleeding through the walls. It sounded like Dimitri, wandering the monastery like a lost spirit as he sometimes did, as Edelgard remembered herself doing on occasion (though she’d usually kept quiet about it).

Lighting a candle, she ventured into the hall, easing the stiffness from her arms and legs, and followed the ethereal sounds. The cold air cut through her pajamas to nip at her skin and stung her lungs as it settled in her chest. In the distance, far down at the end of the hall, a silvery pinprick twinkled in the dark, lit by the last few vestiges of candlelight.

She found Dimitri curled up there under the windowsill, shivering from the cold as he wrapped a fur stole over his shoulders. _“Father,”_ he moaned. _“Father, please… Father…”_

Edelgard crouched down beside him, holding the candle over him so its light fell on his face. His eyes were squeezed shut, cheeks glistening with streaks that might have been tears. “Dimitri. It’s me.”

His eyes cracked open. “El…”

“Were you having a nightmare?” she asked.

He blinked, opening his mouth as if to speak before shutting it again, gaping like a fish. “I saw him. Father…”

She rested a hand on his cheek. He was freezing. “You’re having a nightmare.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No, no, El, he was here… in my room. Standing there, his head in his hands, offal dripping from the bloody stump of his neck and staining his cloak and armor, dripping onto the floor. He said… He came out here and he said…”

“It’s just a dream, Dima,” she assured him. “You’re cold. I’ll take you to your room,” she said, and she took him by the arm and struggled against his weight to pull him to his feet.

“My father’s spirit in arms… he speaks and I am bound to hear, so I am bound to revenge…”

Edelgard helped him into his room and set him down on the bed, plying him with blankets as he weakly struggled to pull himself out.

“He was there,” he protested. “He said…”

“There are no phantoms,” she said, “but the ones that haunt your mind.”

Dimitri relaxed a bit and curled up under his covers, warding off the pervasive chill. “My father… my mother… they speak to me. Their words cling to me like… like chains. Father… What of Rodrigue, Father? What should I do? Please tell me…”

“Is something worrying you about Rodrigue?” Edelgard asked.

He seemed to ignore her, only to continue holding a conversation that existed only in his mind, his pleas degenerating into feverish babbling without rhyme or reason. It was unsettling—it reminded her of those who had died in the dungeons of fever.

“Dimitri.” She rested her hand on his head, running her fingers through the snowdrifts of his hair, and pressed her palm to his forehead. It was cool to the touch, though slicked and clammy from sweat. “I’m here for you. It’s okay.”

He fell silent.

“El,” he said. “It’s you.”

“You were having a waking nightmare,” she told him. “About your father.”

“Ghosts fill my head. Their lingering regrets, the wills that fled their bodies with their last breaths… nothing else.”

“It’s okay. I’m here now. You can sleep.”

He sat up, the blankets sloughing away from him. Edelgard put them back over his shoulders. “They’ve never haunted me like this before. I _saw_ him, El. I saw my father, as though he were standing right there,” he said, gesturing to a dark corner of the room. “As real as you or I.”

“A trick of the shadows, nothing more,” she assured him. “Your eyes and your mind play tricks on you sometimes. Once, I woke up to find myself paralyzed, and swore that a demon was sitting on my chest and squeezing the air from my lungs. My thoughts moved in frantic circles, my mind racing in place, for what felt like hours before I was released. These things happen at night. They aren’t the work of spirits, but of stress and fear, and the occasional indigestion or fever eating at our minds.”

“You think so?”

“What is causing you stress, Dima? Tell me what troubles your mind.”

“You seem so alone,” he muttered.

“Not when I’m with you,” she said, putting an arm across his shoulder and leaning against him. “Tell me… are you worried about Rodrigue? I know Felix and I have expressed our misgivings about him to you, but I’d like to know what you truly think of him. As I recall, you seemed quite fond of him until after Remire, then suddenly you couldn’t seem to stand him.”

Dimitri sighed. “I… I suppose… but you cannot repeat anything I tell you, El. I need you to swear it.”

“I swear, Dima,” she said. “I won’t tell a soul.”

He took her hands. His were icy, strong, hard and cold as stone. He could crush hers with a twitch of his wrists. “Swear it.”

“I do swear,” she said. “I won’t speak of anything you say about him.”

His grip loosened. “When I was imprisoned after the attack in Duscur… when I was subjected to those accursed rituals and torturous experiments, I… My memory is foggy, but I remember, when I was the only one left, I somehow managed to free myself,” he said. “I remember the light of the sun burning my eyes after what seemed like an eternity of darkness. It was like being born. Everything from before that, the moment I felt the cool air in my hair and the warm sun on my cheeks, felt like a distant dream. I didn’t know where I was; I barely knew _who_ I was—only that I had to run. But I was weak, it hurt just to walk, and my blood burned like poison. The monsters who had imprisoned me—those men in their priestly robes and knightly armor—chased me. They would have easily caught me and dragged me back into the darkness if not for…”

He stopped.

“If not for what?” Edelgard asked, almost dreading the answer.

“Him,” Dimitri said, his voice cracking. “Rodrigue. My father’s dearest friend, Rodrigue. He appeared before me and struck down the wicked men. He saved me. He took me in, brought me back to civilization, and he and Lady Cornelia nursed me back to health. In many ways, he and Cornelia… they became the parents I had lost.”

“Your father loved him dearly.”

“As only a Blaiddyd and a Fraldarius could. A bond stronger than anything in the world tied their souls together. To know Lambert was to know Rodrigue; to know Rodrigue was to know Lambert. Only death could shatter those bonds.”

“I see.”

“When I had recovered and regained my wits and my strength, Rodrigue took me aside one night and told me of the secret society he belonged to—one which he’d hoped to bring my father into, had his life not been cut short. It was an ancient and clandestine brotherhood he called the Men in Black. For a thousand years, they had secretly opposed the subtle tyranny of the Church of Seiros. I owe them my life, as does Dedue—if not for their intervention, he would have died in the same pogroms that took his family. He asked me to do what my father would have done, and join him in his crusade.”

Edelgard had to hide her disgust. Thales had certainly done quite a lot more to ensure his hold on Dimitri than his counterpart in her world had to ensure his hold on her. If he had done that to her—never dropped his disguise as kindly Uncle Volkhard, set himself up as her savior and protector—she might have truly been his slave. It was almost as though this world’s Thales had taken great pains to correct the other world’s Thales’ hubris-borne mistakes. “So… what drove you apart? Remire?”

“Rodrigue has many partners among the Men in Black. Mages, scientists, spies, assassins. Solon… _he_ was one of them,” Dimitri spat. “But he went rogue. Those monstrous deeds at Remire were his doing, and Rodrigue has insisted, over and over again, that Solon was a traitor for the Church of Seiros— misusing our resources for his own perverted goals.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I will,” he said darkly, “when I hunt down Solon and rip the truth out of him along with his still-beating heart.”

“So for right now, you only _want_ to believe. That’s why you were so furious at him after Remire. That’s why you refused to tell him and Cornelia about your plans to return to the monastery after your coronation—because you’ve lost your faith in him,” Edelgard said.

Dimitri nodded slowly, hesitantly, fearing to voice the sentiments that had burdened his heart with so much guilt. “I want to believe. For Father. My father would never have loved a wicked man. But…”

“If you find Solon and capture him, how do you know he will tell you the truth?”

“I will _make_ him.” He gave her a piercing look. “That reminds me. At Fhirdiad, you said you believed the Church of Seiros had been framed,” he said. “Why do you believe that?”

“I believe they _might_ have been framed,” she corrected.

“What evidence do you have?”

“It’s not so much evidence as a lack thereof, and not so much _that_ as simple logic. Anybody, given enough resources, can wear a priest’s robes or a knight’s armor. You can’t take what your enemy tells you or shows you at face value, especially if their aim is to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate. If the true culprits wished to keep their identities a secret, it would do well for them to wear another faction’s colors. Consider for example that in war, soldiers and spies may fly the colors of their own enemies to sow confusion or conceal themselves.”

“What are you saying?”

“Remember what I once said to you,” Edelgard said, “about gathering your allies and striking down your true enemy. I don’t think someone as kind as you can shoulder the weight of such guilt if you find yourself misled into making the wrong decision and allowing true evil to stalk this world while you chase phantoms. But I will help you find the truth… wherever it leads us.”

A hint of a smile brightened Dimitri’s face. “El… if there is one thing about you I find myself most thankful for, it is how… _deliberate_ you are. You think about situations from so many different angles and see everything from afar—it’s a skill I have never had much strength in.”

“It’s as carpenters say,” she said, returning his smile. “Measure twice, cut once.”

* * *

Over the next few days Edelgard, like her brothers and sisters, found themselves drawn as if by compulsion to the monastery’s rookery, at once both hoping and dreading to find a messenger owl or pigeon bringing news from Enbarr. On the occasions she ran into Justine and Gerlinde there, they were frosty toward her, piercing her with dagger glances and turning their noses at her if she even tried to get a word in edgewise against their cloying silence; Joachim and Heidemarie, ever the middle children, offered muttered milquetoast apologies on their behalf, but only as long as they weren’t in earshot, and only when they weren’t preoccupied with Hedwig and Pascal, whose spirits waned more with each passing day.

Dedue was a consistent visitor to the rookery as well, checking on the messenger pigeons at odd hours of the day. No one found his presence suspicious, though there were more than a few knights who made snide comments wondering who he had to send messages to and expressing facetious amazement that he knew how to read in the first place; a stern glare from him typically silenced them quite effectively, but not enough for the lesson to sink in the next day. As Dimitri’s retainer, of course, it was expected that he was sending and receiving messages on his behalf, but Edelgard knew that he was likely communing with Those Who Slither and wondered if he knew anything about what was happening in Enbarr.

As she left the rookery empty-handed yet again, she found Cyril, Archbishop Rhea’s servant boy, waiting for her at the foot of the stairs.

“Hey, Edelgard? I’ve been looking around for you,” he said, his blunt way of speaking somehow making Edelgard feel as though she were somehow morally at fault for not being immediately available. “Lady Rhea wants to meet with you.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Edelgard said, carefully managing her attitude so that she wouldn’t sound sardonic or sarcastic. “I suppose I shouldn’t keep her waiting.”

Cyril led her through the monastery, and while Edelgard stared at the back of his head and the whorls of his wiry, curly black hair, she thought of the young man he would grow up to die as. Throughout the war, he’d never left Rhea’s side, devoted single-mindedly to her—she had taken him in and spared him the sad fate that awaited so many orphans of the battles between Fódlan and Almyra, trading a life of servitude in House Goneril as a prisoner of war for a life of servitude at Garreg Mach and teaching him to see that as kindness even though he had simply traded one captor for another. He and Catherine had been the last line of defense between Rhea and the consequences of her tyranny, and Edelgard wondered if he had set any of Fhirdiad ablaze himself. Could he be blamed for it? Rhea had probably never allowed him to know what it really meant to be free, just as she had never arranged to teach him how to read and write despite the resources at her disposal. Perhaps he had never been given the chance to think he had a choice.

He was the same age as Pascal was now, she realized. The same age as him, yet in a few month’s time, or whenever Faerghus’ forces attacked the monastery, he would be fighting tooth and nail for his Lady Rhea, whether she deserved it or not.

Edelgard found herself soon enough ascending the stairs of the monastery’s central building behind him. Keys jangled as Cyril leafed through the ring on his belt for the door to the third floor. The third floor was strictly off-limits to all except those closest to Archbishop Rhea, though Edelgard was well-acquainted with it nevertheless due to the time she’d spent using the monastery as a base of operations. On the third floor was a lovely rooftop balcony from which one could see nearly the entire balcony at one end of a short hallway; at the other was Rhea’s bedroom. Going there now to meet with Rhea made Edelgard feel as though she were sticking her head in a wyvern’s open mouth and waiting to see if it would bite down.

“Here you go,” Cyril said, ushering her through the door and closing it behind her. The door slammed shut with an ominous finality.

Rhea was waiting for her in the hall. “Thank you for answering my summons, my child,” she said, and with a pleased smile and a crook of her finger she beckoned Edelgard to the balcony. “There is much I would like to discuss with you; we have been quite overdue for afternoon tea, haven’t we?”

“We have,” Edelgard answered, following her out the breezy double doors onto the terrace overlooking the monastery’s snowcapped courtyard. A fresh dusting of snow covered the stone railing that ringed the balcony, though the ornate marble tiles under her feet were clear and dry. “You must be quite busy.”

“Yes,” she sighed. “With Seteth away, I’m afraid I have had to take over more and more administrative responsibilities within the church… and the academy, as well. The work simply keeps piling up… It feels as though I have not spoken to another human being in months.” Her emerald gaze scanned the grounds below, drawn to and fro by the bustling of students, faculty, priests, monks, and knights crisscrossing the snowy paths. “It would be nice to walk among them, if only my circumstances would permit it. You understand, do you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” Edelgard said.

“I believe you do,” Rhea countered, her sweet tone belying her confrontational answer. “Even from afar I can see the loneliness in your eyes; the barrier that lies between you and those around you; the distance you keep from the world.”

“Is that so?” Edelgard was unsettled. It was as though Rhea could see right through her. Not the same way Byleth could—when Byleth saw through her, she saw inside all that was good in her; when Rhea saw through her, Edelgard could only imagine she was seeing nothing but ugliness.

“I think we are quite alike, my child,” Rhea said. “Young Edelgard. Strong, passionate, kind… _lonely.”_

Despite being surrounded by cold, brisk, thin mountain air, Edelgard suddenly found the air around her hot, thick, stifling, and stuffy, like her office in the Imperial Palace in the middle of summer with all its windows shut.

“You could probably free up some time for yourself if you had someone else to handle paperwork,” Edelgard suggested. “What about Cyril? He seems quite dedicated to you.”

“Oh, he isn’t fit for that sort of work,” Rhea said, “and I would rather not burden him with it when he does so much for me already. But I have not brought you here to discuss such things,” she said, bringing her hand to her mouth as she quietly and daintily cleared her throat. “I wish to speak to you about what is happening in Enbarr.”

“To me?” Edelgard crossed her arms. “With all due respect, Lady Rhea, if you wish to speak about the turmoil in the capital, I believe all of my siblings should hear it. We are all suffering. Your guiding light could do so much for those of us mired in despair.”

“I will speak to them,” Rhea assured her, “but I wish to speak to you first and foremost, my Goddess-blessed little one.”

Edelgard felt a mounting dread seize its icy talons around her heart. “Why?”

“First, do you know the state of the Southern Church?”

Even though she knew it would make her look like an idiot, Edelgard shook her head. In her world, the Adrestian Empire had disbanded the Southern Church about a century ago as punishment for a massive uprising it had fomented across imperial territory. House Varley had been appointed to fulfill its duties and maintain the imperial state’s relationship with the Church of Seiros, though as the distance between emperor and archbishop had grown, House Varley had become more involved with matters of the judiciary. In this world, she had no idea how that relationship might differ.

“How strange that you do not know. I suppose your education in civics must have been quite lacking as a ninth princess.” Rhea sighed. “For centuries, a series of regional churches has allowed even the most distant parts of the land to maintain a close relationship to the Central Church, and thus to the Goddess. You are familiar with the Western Church, surely.”

“Of course I am. They had ties to Lonato’s rebellion and the plot to assassinate you.”

“And other wicked deeds,” Rhea said, an iron bite seeping into her voice. Edelgard watched her long, slender fingers visibly struggling against the urge to curl into fists. “The Southern Church once managed local parishes and the southern branch of the Knights of Seiros, working to assure that all followed the teachings of the holy scriptures. However, one hundred years ago, the Southern Church was denied the right to continue operating as an independent body and was placed under the oversight of House Varley, its standing army disbanded and deported to Garreg Mach. Soon, the church was abolished altogether and all of its duties were placed under the Ministry of Religion.”

Edelgard felt like an idiot. That was indeed _exactly_ how it had happened in her world. Except, of course, Rhea hadn’t said anything about the bishops inciting open revolt against the state. If she recalled, it had had something to do with the growing preference away from Crest-based inheritance and toward inheritance based on primogeniture among the nobility, as well as a wide range of pet issues among the clergy.

“The Southern Church is gone. The Western Church is undergoing extensive restructuring as a result of the poison pervading its leadership, and it may be a long time until it is restored to its former influence. The Eastern Church in the Leicester Alliance, like the Southern Church, has been weakened severely by the nobility and does not even have its own military force anymore; I fear that in a few years it may go the way of its brother to the south,” Rhea said, her voice sounding sadder and heavier by the second. “Our sphere of influence is shrinking. I fear that soon those on the periphery of Fódlan will lose their faith in the Goddess without our regional churches to maintain order.”

The horrible irony struck Edelgard that if not for Those Who Slither in the Dark and her accursed diminished lifespan, she might have been able to simply sit back and wait for the church to diminish itself. Then again, of course, Rhea was likely simply fishing for sympathy and exaggerating the church’s woes. “That’s too bad,” she said, trying not to sound too gleeful at the prospect of her hated enemy decaying into irrelevance. “But might I ask what this has to do with my brothers?”

“I received a letter from Prince Anselm just this morning detailing his aims as emperor,” Rhea said. “His primary goal, should his bid for the crown prove successful, is to re-establish the Southern Church and restore it to its former glory, allowing it direct control of local parishes and its own standing army…”

While Rhea rattled off a few more of Anselm’s promises no doubt designed entirely to woo her into supporting him, Edelgard had to keep herself composed, though the very idea of the church having a military presence in her empire made her want to fly into a rage. That was _her_ territory, _her_ home, and this beast in human guise dared to think she could dominate it with soldiers and priests? She hid her hands behind her back, where she could clench them into tight fists all she wanted, and kept her face blank.

“That’s quite a lot of promises,” Edelgard said when Rhea had finished recounting the letter’s contents—for the most part, though, everything past the first point had fallen on deaf ears in her silent and hidden rage. “I would say there is no way he can make good on all of them. In fact, they might all be empty promises.”

“Do you think so?”

“He _is_ a politician,” she said. “First and foremost, re-establishing the Southern Church would mean divesting House Varley of their duties as liaison between church and state, and I cannot see Count Varley taking that sitting down; that would be one fewer noble of the six great houses whose favor Anselm can curry. He only wishes for your support at the present moment so he can overpower Prince Burkhart.”

“And you support Prince Burkhart?”

“What I support is the law. Burkhart is crown prince by law, and a contested will cannot change that. Even my father’s dying wishes, even if he spoke them with his last breath, do not have the power of legislation. Not anymore, at least.”

“But is not the Goddess’ law higher than man’s law?”

Edelgard wondered if Rhea was attempting to goad her into showing her true feelings. “I don’t think the Goddess would want the Empire torn apart like this. May I speak freely, Lady Rhea?” Her polite words, carefully measured and just as carefully parceled out, burned her tongue. Half of her wondered if this entire incident had been arranged not by Those Who Slither in the Dark as she’d assumed but by the Church of Seiros itself, and that suspicion burned in her heart like the fire that threatened to leap from her palms.

“Speak freely, my child,” Rhea said.

“The people of the Empire do not need more turmoil so soon after my father’s death. And clearly Anselm alone is instigating this turmoil. Don’t you think the people might connect the hardship they suffer as a result of this political upheaval to the Church of Seiros, especially if you grant Anselm your explicit support? Your actions would simply serve to turn an already alienated people even further against the Goddess’ light. For that reason, I would implore you to support Burkhart and put a stop to this nonsense. Make yourself a bringer of peace, not strife.”

Rhea turned away and looked down on the people milling about below, a pensive furrow to her smooth alabaster brow. The wind picked at her mint-green hair and plucked at the tassels of gold thread adorning her ornate headdress.

“I know that Burkhart may not have promised you the moon and stars,” Edelgard continued, “but if you offer him your support, you can extract concessions from him. You can revitalize the Southern Church without risking that the Adrestian Empire would be once again ripped in two.” She knew her words would fall on deaf ears—Archbishop Rhea, Saint Seiros, the Immaculate One, did not care a whit for human life. This was the beast who had condemned a city full of innocents to hellfire simply because she had refused to live with defeat. She would watch Adrestia burn to the ground from Nuvelle to Hrym and not bat an eye at the suffering. But Rhea had to keep up appearances, and so did Edelgard.

“Forgive me for speaking so frankly, Your Holiness,” Edelgard said. “But I cannot bear to see my people suffer, and knowing that you have the power to put an end to it, I have no choice but to speak my mind and dissuade you from your current course of action.”

As she spoke, she swore she could see a faint smile form on Rhea’s face.

A soft, light _giggle,_ of all things, escaped Rhea’s lips, and she fixed her penetrating gaze on Edelgard with a broadening smile curling her lips and crinkling the corners of her eyes. “Oh, my dear little Edelgard,” she cooed, her voice soft and breathy.

She reached out and laid her hand on Edelgard’s cheek, softly caressing her skin, and with a motherly touch she used one finger to tuck a stray strand of her hair behind her ear. Edelgard had to suppress every urge she had to strike her across the face for it. The cold air had chilled her cheeks, just as it had chilled her hands down to the bone, but Rhea’s palm was warm as fire in spite of the weather, and a part of Edelgard could, to her horror, feel herself melting.

“My dear little Edelgard,” she repeated. “Since your revelation so many months ago, you have grown so strong. So _wise…_ I can see her within you now, blessing you with her divine insight.”

Edelgard almost wanted to be afraid, but her body disobeyed her at every turn. As Rhea set her other hand over her other cheek, she felt her pulse slow to a languid crawl, her breathing ease, the ice gripping her heart thaw, the vise compressing her chest open up. It was soothing—but the last thing she wanted was to be _soothed._

“I never would have imagined,” Rhea continued, “that she would come to me again within _you_ of all people. But yes, I am certain now, though I know not how…”

Her hands grew warmer, and Edelgard felt an electric tingle run down her spine and through her body all the way down to the tips of her fingers and toes. The world swam around her.

“Be not afraid, Edelgard.” Rhea kept talking to her, her voice barely more than a whisper. “All these years working with that stone, and yet in spite of that, her light brightens _your_ eyes…”

At the worst possible time, a seizure struck her. The world spun and flickered, two monasteries overlapping, as another tear in the fabric of time split her in two. Edelgard felt her legs give out under her, muscle reduced to jelly. But Rhea didn’t let her fall. She merely shifted her grip with unparalleled grace and in an instant was cradling her in her arms. A hand slipped into her hair and combed its way through, fingers brushing against the back of her neck with bone-chilling frisson as silken locks flowed through them.

“Rhea,” she moaned. Her tongue felt fat and heavy in her mouth. “Rhea, I…” She slowly became more aware of her surroundings and what was happening to her. Rhea was—her _enemy_ was—

“Oh, poor thing. You are so very tired,” Rhea said to her, continuing to stroke her hair as she carried her down the hallway and into her bedchambers.

“Am I drugged?” she slurred, struggling futilely against her captor. Her eyelids felt heavy now, too, threatening to clamp shut over her eyes no matter how she struggled to keep them open. The thought occurred to her, spinning in drunken circles around her mind, that perhaps Rhea was capable of excreting some sort of toxin through her skin, as the brightly colored frogs found in the jungles of Brigid and Dagda did.

Rhea’s laughter sounded like bells. “There is no need to be so paranoid, my child. It was simply a fainting spell; you need only to lie down for a bit. Here. Sleep a while on my bed…”

Edelgard felt herself lowered onto Rhea’s bed, too weak to protest or do anything more than sluggishly attempt to lift her arms and legs. She sank into the thick, luxuriously plush duvet and the soft and yielding mattress underneath. What would Rhea do to her? Kill her? Or worse? She’d been a fool to concern herself solely with Those Who Slither in the Dark when her true enemy was right here in front of her…

Her thoughts swam sluggishly in her head. Darkness beckoned. And through the darkness, as she fell deeper into sleep, she could hear singing.

_“In time’s flow… see the glow of flames ever burning bright… On the swift river’s drift, broken memories alight…”_

* * *

She woke up alone. No time had seemed to pass at all; to her, Rhea had vanished like a phantom in an instant. Instead, in Rhea’s cavernous bedroom, she found Cyril in the corner, dutifully sweeping the floor.

No longer so fatigued, Edelgard’s mind raced while she laid in Rhea’s bed and stared up at the canopy above her. Part of her felt just a little relieved that she didn’t seem to be locked up anywhere or in the throes of some eldritch ritual, but most of her felt confused by that very same thing. Had Rhea really been taken in by that little lie about the revelation from the Goddess all those months ago so completely that she believed that _Edelgard_ was a vessel for the Goddess and not Byleth?

Cyril finally noticed she was awake and lifted his head. “Hi, Edelgard. You’re awake?”

She nodded.

“Okay. Lady Rhea had to leave to take care of some business. If you’re all rested, can you go back to class or whatever? I gotta make her bed.”

Edelgard nodded, still quite disoriented, and climbed out of the Archbishop’s bed. This wasn’t the first time she’d slept in it, but it was certainly the strangest. She almost felt as though she were moving on her own as she headed for the door.

“Thanks,” Cyril said as he continued to tidy up the room. “I’ll let her know you left.”

Edelgard found herself at the bottom of the stairs before she knew it, as though she’d walked down to the great hall in her sleep. She only had more questions now about the turmoil in Enbarr. If Anselm considered himself an ally to the church, whether in earnest or for purely opportunistic reasons, then why would Those Who Slither in the Dark be propping up his bid for the crown? _Were_ they even behind this at all? Or was this all merely the result of Anselm’s ambition—a factor Edelgard couldn’t have possibly known about or anticipated—taken to its logical conclusion?

Glenn was waiting for her outside of the great hall, a shadowy blot against the gleaming snow.

“Hello, Edelgard,” he said.

“Glenn,” she said, mustering a polite smile.

“I heard you were having an audience with Archbishop Rhea.”

“I was.”

“She does like to talk to you.”

“I’m afraid she does.”

“You were with her for a very long time.”

“She is very long-winded,” Edelgard said, still forcing her smile.

“You spend too much time with her. But when she summons you, you can’t exactly refuse, can you?” Glenn asked, returning her smile. A little chuckle peeled his lips back from his teeth. “I wonder what you two talk about up there… high above us mortals, standing together at the apex of the world…”

“It’s dreadfully boring, actually,” Edelgard said. “Keep this between us, but the archbishop only ever wants to make small talk, but she has no idea how to act sociable around people. It’s as though she isn’t even human. I’d rather be at the training hall than wasting a morning with her.”

She tried to step past him, but he deftly stepped in front of her. “Really? That doesn’t sound like her.”

Edelgard rolled her eyes. “Perhaps we should have this sort of conversation in private.” The sooner the opportunity came to make this idiot disappear, the better; if she was fortunate, perhaps that opportunity would come _very_ soon.

“You’ll never turn Dimitri against us,” he told her, his grin a wicked leer. “No matter what you do to him or say to him, no matter how upset he is at us, no matter how much he hates us… at the end of the day, we’re still his family. The only family he has. And family sticks together through thick and thin.” His eyes wandered; Edelgard followed his roving eyes as they scanned the courtyard. Volkhard and Justine were cutting across the courtyard with purposeful strides; Glenn eyed them with a hungry look in his eyes. “But _you_ wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Edel?” he whispered gleefully, his threatening smile crinkling the corners of his eyes.

Edelgard’s smile turned genuine. Those Who Slither were forgetting that _she_ was Dimitri’s family, too, and their hubris would be their downfall in this world just as it was in her world. She would make sure of it. “I think I know more than you think.”

“Okay. Then you know that you’re going to tear that poor boy apart,” he said, and with that he sauntered off.

Edelgard made her way through the courtyard, Glenn’s taunting words ringing in her ears in spite of herself. Part of her had watched these monsters get away with everything for so long that her victories against them seemed hollow to her, and their eventual defeat at her hands as distant as the shores of Dagda.

Hilda and Claude slipped into the courtyard, too, heading to the great hall. Or, to be more accurate, Hilda was heading for the great hall and Claude was following her, half trudging, half being dragged along.

“Hilda,” Edelgard said, intercepting her. “Is something wrong?”

Nothing seemed wrong with Hilda, but Claude wore the most melancholy face she’d ever seen. His hangdog expression drooped in a way that was almost frightening; his furrowed brow, his lidded eyes, the slackness of his jaw and the frown curling over his chin were all unnervingly ill-suited to his face. Even his handsomely tousled rat’s-nest of black hair seemed to wilt like a plant that hadn’t gotten any sunlight or water for a week, and his tanned, olive skin had an ashen pallor to it. There was no brightness to his emerald eyes.

“Oh…” he said. His voice was hushed and his tone funerary; he sounded like he was doing a spot-on impression of Marianne. “Edelgard. Hello. I’m sorry. Everything is wrong. Everything is wrong, because everything is wrong with me.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“So,” Hilda said, wrapping an arm tightly around Claude’s waist before he could slump over and turn himself into an amber-caped puddle on the grass, “that little _thing_ Claude was making kind of, uh, didn’t work.”

“He tested it on himself?”

“Of course he did! He always does! That’s why he only makes nonlethal, uh… things.” She rolled her eyes. “He was asleep all day yesterday. At first, I thought that meant it worked, because that was exactly what we’re looking for! But now he’s like… this.”

“Oh. You look horrible,” Edelgard said to Claude. “Do you need to go to the infirmary?”

“No, no, see, that isn’t even the best part about this. Follow me,” Hilda said, and without further ado she dragged Claude to the gazebo, and Edelgard followed.

As soon as Claude set foot in the gazebo, his demeanor completely changed. His posture straightened, his shoulders un-slumped themselves, a perky sparkle returned to his eyes, and a relieved smile lit up his face. “Oh, thank the gods,” he sighed, gingerly massaging his brow as though to ward off a headache. “I should just… I should just stay here for a while. In the shade. Where it’s safe. Yep. I’ll just take the afternoon off and lie down here until the poison wears off; I think that’s a sensible way to handle this. Oh! Or maybe you could go get me a parasol, Hilda, then I wouldn’t have to worry about—”

Hilda grabbed him by the arm and yanked him back out of the gazebo. He stumbled down the steps and as soon as the sunlight kissed his brow, he became lethargic, plodding, and morose again.

“The sun,” he moaned. “Never mind. This is my fate now, and all I can do is grin and… well, all I can do is bear it. Sun… deserts… endless cloudless skies, clear as crystal… I can never go home again—as if my parents would want a worthless mutt like me back anyway…”

The fact that Edelgard had never seen Hilda so giddy with glee before as she did now made her very, _very_ worried that she might find Claude’s ‘failed’ poison in her food or drink some time in the near future. “Hilda,” she said sternly, “go get him a parasol. I’ll look after him while you’re gone.”

Claude tugged on the little braid that hung over one temple. “Hilda, get me a little paring knife so I can cut this off. Failures don’t deserve ceremonial braids.”

“Okay, fine, but you _have_ to let me show him off to Lorenz first,” Hilda said.

He let out a deep, forlorn sigh as heavy as the invisible weight that bowed his shoulders. “Lorenz… yes, let him see me like this. He’s won. The Alliance will be his. Goodbye, Riegan dukedom. Goodbye, Alliance roundtable. Goodbye, King Khalid. Goodbye, _Prince_ Khalid, even. It was a stupid dream anyway…”

Edelgard smiled.

“Yes… take pleasure in my misery,” he said, both looking and sounding as though he was ready to burst into tears any second, “and you’ll be happy for the rest of your life.”

“I’m not taking pleasure in your misery,” she assured him.

“Well, that makes two of us.”

“I’m taking pleasure in the thought of our target moping inconsolably while we interrogate him.” She briskly rubbed her hands together. “This poison is a total success, Claude, beyond any of our wildest dreams. Now we just need to find an opportunity to slip it to him.”

“I… did something right?” he asked, so astonished that a smile broke through his gloomy facade. It vanished almost immediately. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“And Hilda,” she said, glaring daggers at Hilda while she stifled a fit of manic giggles, “if I should ever find this poison used against me, no matter how severely it affects me, I will find you and I will kill you. And this time, I’ll kill you twice so I know you aren’t playing dead.” She put her hands on her hips. “Now go get Claude a parasol. _Now.”_

As Hilda scampered away, Edelgard took Claude by the arm and brought him back into the shady sanctuary of the gazebo.

“You know, Edelgard,” he said, as chipper as his old self again, “when you’re right, you’re right. I think this just might be the single greatest poison I’ve ever invented.”


	22. The Red and the Black

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard defends a friend from a bully, Hapi learns something about herself, and a mission to the heart of the Sealed Forest goes horribly wrong.

While many of her peers considered it a pain, Edelgard was glad for formation and battalion drills in winter. The thin, cold air may have stung her chest like a thousand needles filling her lungs, but the constant motion in the fields enclosed by the monastery’s walls kept her blood pumping and her body warm; it was certainly preferable, no matter how numb the tips of her ears and nose became, to doing the drills in midsummer and having to suck down hot and soupy air while sweating like a stuck pig through as few layers of clothing as she was allowed to wear. Still, though, on the way back to the common room she was already relishing the thought of shutting herself inside a warm room and poring over a book for a change, and her growling stomach whined in anticipation of a hot supper.

Annette marched beside her. “So, Edelgard,” she said, “I was thinking, we’re both working on the same subjects, right? Reason and axes? And we’re both going for warlock certification next week, right? So if the two of us study together tonight, we’ll finish twice as quickly and we can use the rest of our free time to relax together!”

“I’ve got some ideas for how you two can ‘relax together,’” Sylvain butted in before Ingrid took him by the scruff of his neck and dragged him back. “In fact, if you’ve got room for one more— _ow! Ingrid!”_

“Maybe tonight we could go to the sauna after hitting the books?” Annette continued, ignoring Sylvain.

“I suppose that would be relaxing,” Edelgard agreed.

Annette smiled. “It’s just the thing for a cold, dry day like today, isn’t it? Oh! Or maybe we could—” She looked back at Byleth, leaned in, and lowered her voice. _“We could sneak out into town and…”_

“Just think, Ingrid,” Sylvain added through gritted teeth while Ingrid tweaked his ear, “that could’ve been _you—”_

“If you keep encouraging my Ingrid to be unfaithful,” Glenn said to him with malevolent cheer, “I might have to do some unsavory things to you, Sylvain.”

Sylvain laughed it off, not realizing that Glenn probably didn’t mean it as a joke. “Why don’t you start with Her Highness?” he chuckled.

“Don’t give him any ideas,” Edelgard muttered under her breath. She felt in her pocket for a vial of Claude’s rather unique poison (which he had insisted had worn off but still seemed quite attached to his parasol when it was sunny out). Tonight at supper, perhaps, she might have the opportunity to slip it into his food or drink…

Thoughts of plotting and poison left her head rather abruptly, though, when the class reached the common rooms. There was a commotion outside the Black Eagles’ classroom—first and foremost, Edelgard noticed the students gathered in a loose cluster around the incident, many no doubt questioning whether to intervene.

Past the ring of paralyzed bystanders, Dorothea lay in the snow and Justine stood over her with one foot firmly planted on the small of her back while one hand held a fistful of her long hair taut and lifted her face out of the snow and the other grasped her wrist and twisted her shoulder behind her back. None of the spectating students seemed willing to step in and end the cruelly one-sided fight, given the pedigree of one of its combatants. Ferdinand was holding Caspar back to keep him from doing something stupid, and Petra was very obviously struggling to keep herself restrained.

A furious sneer crossed Justine’s thin, bladelike face, the wiry curls of her jet-black hair waving in the wintry breeze like a nest of vipers. _“Had enough yet, you commoner bitch?”_ she snarled, yanking painfully at Dorothea’s scalp and twisting her arm. _“You’ve had this coming for a week, you stuck-up, upstart, filthy whore—”_

With her free hand, Dorothea scooped up a handful of snow and tried to throw it at Justine. It hit her in the shin and broke apart into pieces.

“Now, now, Your Highness, Lady Justine,” Ferdinand said, stepping forward, “if you would just excuse Dorothea—I will see to it that our professor disciplines her myself!”

 _“I’ve got no excuses for this wretch!”_ Justine yanked on Dorothea’s hair again, jerking her head back. “Graham, give me your dagger.”

Her retainer was at her side in an instant. “Lady Justine, as the Aegir boy says, this is a matter for the faculty—”

“Graham, the dagger.”

He gave her a dagger, and Justine exchanged Dorothea’s wrist for it. With both arms free, Dorothea tried to pull herself out from under her, but Justine only pressed harder against her back. “You’re not going anywhere,” she said. “I’ve endured your insult and injury for almost two weeks now; it’s high time you gutter trash learned your place! What should I do with this dagger first? Cut off all this silky brown hair of yours? Or maybe put a few scars on that pretty face deep enough that no amount of makeup can hide them?”

Edelgard was sickened to the point of nausea, not the least of which because she was currently considering using her vial of poison on her instead of Glenn. That was her _older sister,_ and she was behaving like the most disgusting and vile examples of nobility toward the woman who, in another world, was one of her dearest friends. She shouldn’t have been surprised to know that at least one of her siblings, if they had lived, would have grown up to be everything she despised, but seeing it for herself hit her like a blow to the gut.

The Blue Lions watched in horror along with her. “Edelgard, isn’t that your sister?” Annette gasped.

“Oh, Goddess,” Ignatz whispered, his voice quavering, “somebody should do something!”

Raphael, who was somebody, and due to his size much more _somebody_ than most people, stepped forward, but Ingrid held him back. “Careful, Raphael,” she said against his protests. “It’s horrible, but not all nobles are as permissive as Dimitri or Edelgard,” she said to him. “Commoners can’t simply do as they please to them without consequences.”

“That fool will be lucky if the princess doesn’t slit her throat,” Felix said. “What did she expect, carrying on like she was?”

“I will put a stop to this,” Dimitri said. “Uncouth behavior is uncouth behavior, whether—”

“I think it’s best if _I_ handle this, Dimitri,” Edelgard said, recalling the rather strong anti-Faerghus sentiment among some of her siblings and especially the one currently threatening to mutilate her friend. She strode past her classmates. “Excuse me, Justine,” she called out, her voice ringing like a bell across the lawn. “I would ask that you put a stop to this.”

“I will,” Justine said, “in just a few seconds.” With a flick of her wrist, a lock of Dorothea’s hair floated to the ground.

 _“Do your worst,”_ Dorothea hissed at her through gritted teeth, though her eyes were wide with horror at the sight of the snipped strands of hair that had fallen before her. _“I’ll still be prettier than_ you, _you emaciated cow!”_

“She does not mean that!” Ferdinand spoke up, dropping to his knees and bowing his head in deference to the princess. “Lady Justine, I beseech you, release her and I assure you on my honor as son of Duke Aegir that she will apologize for everything.”

“As much as Dorothea might have earned it,” Hubert muttered, his voice carrying just enough that Edelgard could hear it (and probably so could Justine), “surely Lady Justine has better things to do than take matters into her own hands?”

“Put a stop to this,” Edelgard repeated, _“now,_ Justine.”

The other teachers had emerged from their classrooms now along with the rest of the students. “Good heavens, Justine!” Hanneman cried out, his monocle nearly popping off of his face. “I know I am no longer your professor, but I would ask that you please don’t manhandle one of my students!”

“Come on, Dorothea, I taught you better than that!” Manuela cried out, pumping her fist. “Get some licks in!”

“You’re not helping, you old sow!” Hanneman huffed, giving her a dirty look.

“Why don’t I just pluck every hair off your scalp one by one?” Justine asked Dorothea, ignoring Edelgard. She gave her hair another painful yank. “Or maybe rip it all out at once?”

Edelgard strode up to her and slapped her hand away, flinging her retainer’s dagger to the ground where it sank into the snow with a soft thud. The back of her hand stung from the impact. “Justine. Answer me when I speak to you.”

Shocked by the sudden attack, Justine glared down her nose at her. “Who are _you_ to order me around, El? Get out of my face. This commoner is long overdue for some proper discipline!”

Edelgard’s eyes flitted downward, meeting Dorothea’s for an instant. Dorothea wasn’t the kind of person who crumbled under the pressure of hostile nobles—she’d broken plenty of arms, noses, and hearts of men who’d thought their money and social standing were _carte blanche_ for them to have their way with her—but she’d never gone up against a princess before. She looked as though she’d quickly realized that she’d had no idea what she’d gotten herself into. In so many words, she was afraid.

And in that instant, Edelgard remembered all the times Dorothea had protected her during the war, and all the times she had done the same for Dorothea, and the times she and Dorothea had comforted each other when the burdens of their bloodstained paths had proved too much to bear, and the way Dorothea had stood by her side when the pain of Byleth’s absence cut into her like a knife…

And in that instant, even this world’s Dorothea, whom she hardly knew, was more family to her than any of her siblings.

She punched Justine squarely in the jaw and sent her reeling. Justine’s arms windmilled as she took a lurching step backward, shock written all over her thin, sharp features. _“How dare you?!”_ she screeched.

It took Edelgard a second to fully parse what she had done—that the bully drunk on her own nobility she had just socked in the jaw was her own _sister,_ the very same Justine she had so often admired for having the courage to fight back when the monsters had dragged her away.

Instead of thinking about that, she crouched down and offered her hands to Dorothea. On closer inspection, she could see darkening bruises on her cheeks and around one eye, and blood dribbling down her chin from her lips and nostrils. Dorothea looked up at her, bemused, and took her hands.

“Now we’re even,” Edelgard said to her, helping her up. Dorothea was shivering, her teeth chattering; the front of her uniform was soaked through from the snow, and given how cold it was she was sorely in need of a change of clothes before she caught a cold or worse.

“What the _fuck,_ Edelgard?” Justine snarled, wiping her lip on the back of her hand and staring in horror at the blood smeared across her skin.

 _“Language,_ Justine!” Joachim called out, arriving at the scene with Volkhard. “El, what in the Goddess’ name is going on here?”

“Are you looking for a fight, you little traitor?” Justine spat at Edelgard. “That’s rich! Need I remind you that I was at the top of my class in combat skills? And what are _you_ best at here, _Lazygard?”_

“A fight? I think that’s an excellent idea, sister,” Edelgard said, stepping in front of Dorothea as Manuela rushed to her side with her hands already aglow with healing magic and her ermine cloak slipping off her shoulders. Petra was quick to follow her. “But we’ll do it like civilized people: a proper duel, no hair-pulling or blows below the belt. What do you think?”

Justine licked the blood from her lips. “Do you remember three years ago when Uncle Volkhard took you to see me at Gronder Field?”

“No,” Edelgard said, hoping a snappy quip would quell the growing horror inside her as she realized what she was doing. “Care to remind me? Here are my terms. If I win, you won’t raise a hand or your voice to Dorothea ever again. If _you_ win, you can take every last hair on my head. Even the eyebrows.”

“You’re probably the only person who’s ever attended this academy and gotten _dumber,”_ Justine said, laughing as she stood up and loomed over her with a confident swagger. “Alright. If you say so. I’m fine with those terms.”

“Um, El?” Joachim asked. “What the _fuck?”_

“Language,” Volkhard chided him. “El, are you feeling well today? Do you need to lie down?”

“Lady Edelgard, I must protest,” Hubert said.

“I must agree with Lord Joachim, Lady Edelgard,” Ferdinand said. “Though… not in his verbiage.”

“Your retainer, uncle, brother, and fiance are right, Edelgard,” Dimitri said. “What are you doing?”

“Putting a spoiled brat in her place,” Edelgard answered. “The training hall. Wooden axes. Would you prefer to do it now,” she asked Justine, “or do your poor little fists need a rest after what they did to my friend’s face?”

“Now’s fine,” Justine said, cracking her knuckles. “Now’s just fine. I still need to finish my workout, after all.”

Edelgard looked over her shoulder and saw Byleth staring at her with her usual piercing gaze. The professor gave her a slow, approving nod.

They took to the training hall, armed themselves, and squared off. The teachers stood by to make sure nothing got out of hand, and a few of the students who would normally be doing their own training here after the morning classes crowded around to watch.

While she hefted her wooden training axe, Justine looked to the crowd and spied a handful of Blue Lions. “Wow,” she said to Edelgard. “You’ve sure got a lot of people to disappoint. Are you sure you’re willing to do this all for a rude little commoner girl who slept her way into the academy?”

Edelgard felt queasier and queasier by the second, but dropped into a combat stance, brandishing her axe. “Dorothea is a commoner, yes, but she is also my friend. And one of the bravest boys I ever knew was a commoner as well. I’ll teach you to treat them with respect and not spread such pernicious rumors. Now, which of us wishes to make the first strike? Shall I let you go first, as a handicap?”

Professor Hanneman stepped forward and put his outstretched hand between them. “On my mark. Ready…” He pulled his hand away and took a long step backward clear of the combatants. “Go!”

Enraged, Justine struck first with a forceful lunge, the blunt wooden head of her axe cutting through the air in a broad horizontal sweep. In a fight, the one who made the first strike had the advantage, but only if they led with their strongest and swiftest attack. And Edelgard could tell as soon as she felt the blunt wooden blade swoop overhead that Justine had just wasted her opening.

Slipping under the swing of Justine’s axe, Edelgard brought the head of her axe against her elbow, fracturing the joint. With her second strike, she drove the haft directly into her midsection just below the lowest rib on the right. Instantly, Justine doubled over and crumpled to the floor, her axe falling with her, and a rattling wheeze escaped her lips as she struggled for breath.

“Now you know your limits,” Edelgard said to her, tossing her axe aside. “Professor Manuela, if you would please take my sister to the infirmary?”

Justine looked up at her and shot her a hateful glare. She looked as though she wanted to say something, but was too preoccupied with trying to suck air into lungs that would no longer obey her. Edelgard turned her back on her, trying to force back the wave of nauseating revulsion that swept through her. Even though there were few sights more satisfying than a stuck-up noble getting what was coming to them, she’d hurt her sister… her own _sister…_

Thales’ voice haunted her mind. _‘I’m afraid your dear older sister expired on the operating table… The bruises she gave herself from fighting against your guards rendered her too weak to survive our tests. You would do well to remember that the next time any of you think about shunning the hospitality of your gracious hosts…’_

To distract herself, she focused on Dorothea, who was standing back at quite a distance from the duelists next to Manuela, Hanneman, and Petra. “Dorothea,” she asked, going up to her and taking her by the arm as Manuela and Hanneman rushed to tend to the injured combatant, “are you alright?”

Dorothea stared at her, jaw agape, eyes bulging. She was shivering, either from the cold, shock, or both; she’d had to remove her wet jacket and blouse and now had Manuela’s ermine cloak wrapped tightly around herself for decency’s sake and for some small modicum of warmth. “Edie…” A nervous chuckle escaped her reddened lips. “What the _fuck?_ If I’d known you could fight dirty like that, I wouldn’t have rescued you last week,” she said, putting up a cavalier front and a lopsided fear-smile.

“I couldn’t bear to stand up for myself against her then,” Edelgard admitted to her. She and Petra took Dorothea by the arms and swiftly led her out of the training hall. “But when I saw her mistreating _you,_ I had to step forward.”

“Edie, please. I’ve taken worse lumps than that from worse people,” she retorted with a pained smile. “Though, admittedly, not a princess.” Even with the bruises and swelling marring her face and the red rimming her puffy eyes, she was still beautiful. Edelgard put a comforting hand on her shoulder, fighting the urge to cup her cheek in her hand to gently soothe the blossoming bruise spreading across it.

Petra did it first. “I have much gladness that you are safe,” she told Dorothea, caressing her bruised and battered face. “It is my failure that I could not be helping you. But I could not hurt a princess without causing hurt to myself and Brigid as well.”

“I understand, Petra,” Dorothea said, taking her hand tenderly and guiding it to the sorest parts. She knew just as well as Edelgard that Petra was a hostage of the Empire, and to intervene could have put her entire homeland in an even worse situation, especially given the current political turmoil.

“Since you’re not too badly wounded, and Justine will be in the infirmary,” Edelgard said to her, “you should rest up in your room. Petra, I’m sure I can trust you to get her there?”

Petra nodded. “Yes, I am worthy of your trust. I have gratitude, Edelgard.” She helped Dorothea to the dormitories.

After Petra and Dorothea had left her, Ingrid, Ignatz, Felix, and Raphael caught up to Edelgard. “Nice going, Your Highness!” Raphael said, slapping her on the back. “You kept your hair!”

“I’ve never seen you destroy someone so quickly,” Felix said, his arms crossed as he glowered at her. “Next time we spar, I expect you not to hold back.”

Ingrid was not so congratulatory. “Edelgard,” she said, frowning sternly and crossing her arms, “what in the Goddess’ name possessed you to do that? I’d expect that kind of behavior from—”

 _“Edelgard!”_ Volkhard’s voice cut through the chatter as he pushed past her classmates. His face was discolored as though he couldn’t decide whether he was livid or aghast. “Edelgard, what has gotten into you? You just broke your older sister’s arm!” he exclaimed, echoing Ingrid’s sentiments.

“How could I not, with the way she was carrying on?” Edelgard retorted.

Volkhard shooed her classmates away. “El,” he said, lowering his voice. No matter how calm and kindly his voice sounded, the way he loomed over her was far too much like Thales, and Edelgard felt herself tense like a coiled spring. “I know that you are in a very difficult situation—we _all_ are—but can you not see that you are only making things worse for all of us? Your brother has already split this family apart, and—What would your father think if he could see you now?” The eyes beneath his furrowed brow became warm and glistening; the frown creasing his mouth threatened to deepen. Edelgard couldn’t remember ever having seen that face crumble in such an earnest way—Thales had stolen from her that possibility and even those memories. “Or your _mother,_ El?”

Edelgard felt the fire leave her. Her heart stuck in her throat.

“You are a grown woman now, Edelgard,” he said, phlegm sticking at his throat and gumming up his voice, “and your choices are your own, but I would ask you to to apologize to your sister for what you have done. Please.”

She forced her heart back into her chest. “I suppose I should have gone easier on her, but I did the right thing. I won’t apologize for defending my friend.”

He sighed. “I never thought I would need to explain this to you. I thought for certain Ferdinand would have taught you this, at least. While I am certain that commoner girl _is_ indeed your friend, and I respect that, you must understand that when nobles allow commoners to simply do as they please to them, it lowers their standing among their peers.”

“Excuse me?”

“I know you’ve never been much of an ambitious person, but you need to at least _try_ to see things from Justine’s perspective. She has been far too lenient toward that girl for the past two weeks already given her deplorable behavior, and if word of that reached Fort Merceus, Immanuel or Dagmar would almost certainly be appointed general of Count Bergliez’s forces over her. She had no choice but to overcorrect for past insults and injuries, and now _your_ conduct has further damaged her ambitions by humiliating her in front of her peers—including the second son of Count Bergliez himself no less! Never mind that you yourself are bound to suffer ill effects to your reputation, which _you_ may not care about, but…”

Edelgard stared at him, aghast, as he continued to lecture her. She could hardly believe what she was hearing. And beneath his words, she could hear her own mind supply quite a different script, hearkening back to the days when she had done Thales’ bidding. She could hear Thales using Volkhard’s deep, strong voice to sneer at her, ‘ _You were not as helpful as I had thought you would be. Oh, are you sorry? Ha! I am not_ criticizing _you. The failure is my own for thinking you were capable of more.’_

“At least apologize for breaking her arm,” he concluded. “I know you and Justine have never gotten along, but can you at least do _that?”_

“And why should I apologize when I was in the right?” Edelgard spat defensively.

Volkhard’s hands fell to her shoulders. “El… What’s happened to you? What has happened to my darling niece, El?”

“You could never understand,” she said through gritted teeth, wrenching herself free of his grasp, her heart hammering against her chest. He looked as though he had been struck.

Edelgard felt hollow on the inside, thin-skinned, like a delicate vase teetering on the edge of a platform. A vast, yawning chasm stretched before her, the gulf between herself—an impostor, alien, occupying a hole in the world that did not match her silhouette—and the family she was meant to know and love. These people were strangers to her, strangers to her as much as she was to them. They had no history to her, no past she knew of, as though they had simply appeared out of the ether one day. She had no way of relating to them, and they had no way of relating to her.

This family disgusted her. The world swam around her as she set off and put distance between herself and her uncle, and she barely made it halfway to the dining hall before falling to her knees and vomiting into the snow.

Dimitri caught up with her. “El!” He crouched beside her as she spat out a few last dregs of bile, her throat and nostrils burning and eyes watering. “Are you alright? Perhaps… something you ate at breakfast did not agree with you?”

“It’s nothing so serious,” she said, forcing herself back onto her feet before he could offer to help her up. As thin and hollow as she felt, she felt heavy, too, but it was likely only the weight of her own conscience bearing down on her.

“It seems your conversation with Lord Arundel just now was quite one-sided,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve seen anyone, even Professor Byleth, dress you down like that. Then again, I’ve never seen you beat one of your siblings into the ground,” he added, a very slight accusing tone weaving into his voice.

“Should I have done something differently? Perhaps settled things more diplomatically?” she shot back, her voice embarrassingly hoarse due to the bile that had scraped her throat raw. “I needed to bring that situation to a swift end. Now that she knows what I’m capable of, she will think twice before brutalizing one of my friends.”

Still, the image of Justine curled up on the floor of a dungeon, bruised and battered and beaten, ragged and threadbare clothes soaked by stagnant water and sweat and unmentionable fluids, whimpering and breathing shallowly before the guards picked her up and dragged her away, forced itself into the forefront of her mind, and she almost vomited again right then and there.

“I suppose so,” he said. “Well… it is in the past, and it is time for lunch. The dining hall is serving chicken soup, I hear.” With his hands resting on her shoulders, he gently nudged her in the dining hall’s general direction. He was certainly getting better at being gentle and keeping his monstrous strength at bay—Edelgard supposed spending time with Bernadetta and Marianne was helping him with that.

“Thank you,” she said, “but I’m not hungry…”

“As Dedue and Mercedes have both told me one thousand times each, _now_ is precisely when you need food the most. I am sure Raphael would tell you the same,” Dimitri insisted. “If your stomach has not yet settled, at least drink the broth and I will take care of the remainder.”

The image of Dimitri carefully picking out bits of meat, potato, and carrot out of her soup for her brought enough levity to Edelgard’s mind that she managed to laugh, and she allowed him to choose his direction.

“I know,” Dimitri said as he guided her along, “this has been a terrible time for you. I actually feel guilty that you have taken the trouble to be with me in my times of need, like the other night. As long as we are taking care of each other, though, I suppose it is fair.”

“It is.” Edelgard allowed herself a faint smile. “Looking after you is the whole reason I’m here, Dima.”

* * *

It was the middle of the night. The waxing crescent Guardian Moon hung at the top of the sky, shining with a silvery glow and turning the snow blanketing the ground into fields of glittering steel-blue. Edelgard stood just outside the monastery’s eastern wall with Byleth, Jeralt, Hilda, and Hapi, hiding in the shadows where no wandering knights would see them.

“I’ve given some thought,” Edelgard announced, “to what might have triggered that beast to attack the chapel after I came back from Fhirdiad.”

“Monsters show up when I talk,” Hapi mumbled, so quietly it was as though she were trying to make sure she couldn’t be heard.

“That’s what Cornelia claimed, but I’m skeptical. You have talked plenty of times before without summoning any manner of dangerous creatures,” Edelgard told her. “I believe it must have been something else—something you did far less frequently that day.”

“She only had one mug of cocoa,” Jeralt suggested.

“I’ve never had cocoa before,” Hapi said, still mumbling.

“From what I recall,” Edelgard continued, “there are three things you only did once when we met in the chapel. Cursing, laughing, and sighing.”

Hilda looked at her with a skeptical arch to her eyebrows. “You think she might summon monsters… by swearing?”

“It’s a theory. And I’d like to test it out here, where it’s safe.”

“Not for _us.”_

Edelgard looked to Byleth. She’d filled her in on the plan in private. As soon as a monster showed up, she would use Sothis’ power to undo the inciting event and that would be that. No one would get hurt, and if anybody _did_ get hurt, it would be made to not have happened. But now, as the time came to put her plan into action, she felt horribly nervous. What if another tear in the fabric of time stopped Byleth from using Sothis’ powers, like in Remire?

Byleth gave her a reassuring nod, and Edelgard took a deep breath and steeled herself. Death had certainly brought out the worst in her—brought all sorts of instincts she had long since suppressed into the forefront of her mind. “Alright, Hapi,” she said. “Let’s try cursing.”

“Okay.” Hapi cleared her throat. “Fuck.”

She let the word hang in the air for a few minutes.

“Shit. Damn. Hell. Bitch. Ass. Motherfucker.”

Nothing happened. In the frigid midnight air, the minutes that passed by felt like hours.

“Okay,” Edelgard said. “Swearing, obviously, does nothing. How about laughter?”

“Alright. Here goes.” Hapi took a deep breath and exhaled through her nose. “Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha.”

“Fake laughter probably wouldn’t count,” Hilda said. She put a hand to her chin thoughtfully, cocking her head to the side. “Are you ticklish anywhere, Hapi?”

Hapi crossed her arms. _“Absolutely not.”_

“Alright, I’ve got this,” Jeralt said. He pointed toward the monastery wall, where a stepladder was propped up against it underneath one of the sconces that kept the path around Garreg Mach’s perimeter lit. “You see that? That’s my stepladder.”

Hapi’s gaze followed his finger. She nodded.

“I never knew my real ladder.”

Edelgard had heard that joke enough times from Alois, botched delivery and all (he always laughed through the punchlines too hard to make Jeralt’s jokes land), that it wasn’t funny anymore even with Jeralt’s perfect deadpan delivery. But for Hapi, it was perhaps one of the first jokes she had heard in years, and she burst out laughing, doubling over and clutching her gut. Her laughter was a dusty wheeze that called to mind the cobwebby attic of a long-abandoned manor.

Eventually, she stopped laughing and composed herself, and then the wait began.

More interminable minutes passed by.

Nothing happened.

“So,” Edelgard pronounced, “laughter doesn’t do it, either. I think we’ve narrowed it down to sighing—”

“Okay, we’ve narrowed it down to sighing, we can stop,” Hapi interjected.

“But,” Edelgard continued, “in the interest of untangling this mystery with reason and rationality, it would behoove us to check and make sure we haven’t overlooked something. Hapi, please sigh for us.”

Hapi grimaced and sucked air through her teeth, nodded worriedly, and exhaled in a deep, long sigh. It hardly took more than a minute or two before the ground began to shake. Jeralt readied his lance, Byleth her sword, Hilda her axe.

“Nice going, Edelgard!” Hilda chided her. “This is exactly how I wanted to spend midnight in the middle of the Guardian Moon, freezing my butt off and fighting a monster instead of sleeping in a nice, warm bed! You’re my best friend and I love you!”

“Thank you,” Edelgard said as the ground burst open and a trio of colossal serpentine creatures rose from the depths of the earth, their bodies segmented like worms, not scaled like snakes, and covered in thick layers of chitin. Their gaping mouths were lined with razor-sharp teeth.

“Perhaps it is not sighing that attracted them,” Sothis suggested, hovering at Byleth’s side as she eyed the monstrous worms. “Perhaps the poor girl simply must learn to walk without rhythm.”

Byleth glared at her.

“Oh, right. You wish for me to turn back time. Of course,” Sothis said, and the world froze and burned away.

Edelgard spent a fine two minutes in her bed back in her world’s Garreg Mach before waking up on the ground, half-sunk in a layer of snow.

“You okay?” Jeralt asked, helping her and Hilda to their feet.

“Yes,” Edelgard said. “I don’t think there’s any need to continue the experiment from here. By ruling out the alternatives, we’ve figured by inductive reasoning that Hapi summons monsters when she sighs. That’s enough for me.”

“That’s a relief,” Hapi said. “Can we go somewhere warm now?”

“Sure thing,” Jeralt said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I’ve got to get back to my post anyway, so I might as well bring you back to your tower, princess.”

Hapi gave him a sour look at the sound of the epithet he’d chosen for her. Edelgard supposed her situation wasn’t quite unlike that of some fairy-tale princess, though. A wicked surrogate mother, a horrible curse, a life confined to a tower… all that was missing was true love.

“And you, By,” he added, turning to Byleth, “you’ll be fine with your brats?” Only he could turn the word ‘brat’ into a term of endearment. “Alright. Good night.”

They went their separate ways. Hilda went off ahead as soon as the dormitories came into sight, leaving Edelgard and Byleth alone—or, well, as alone as they could be with Sothis trailing behind Byleth on an intangible tether.

“It’s nice out tonight,” Byleth said, looking up at the moon. “Well, except for the cold.”

“It’s beautiful. Winter would probably be one of my favorite seasons,” Edelgard admitted, “if it wasn’t so unbearably cold. As long as I’m properly dressed, I find I don’t mind the cold as much as the sweltering heat. One can always add more layers in winter, but there are limits to how little clothes you can wear in summer.”

“That is not how you felt when your teeth were chattering so hard you bit your own tongue that one night in Faerghus,” Sothis said.

Edelgard crossed her arms. “I didn’t tell you that so you could use it to mock me,” she huffed, though she was unable to hold back a smile. “In fact, I didn’t tell _you_ that at all.”

“Yes, you told Byleth, but that is the same as telling me,” Sothis replied. “I am privy to all that she sees and hears, of course, and sometimes more.”

“As long as you’re not sleeping,” Byleth said.

“Privy to all she sees and hears, are you?” Edelgard wondered aloud, feeling her cheeks turn red. Did that mean in her world, Sothis had heard everything she’d said to Byleth, too? Everything from the stern statements and evasive answers she had thrown up to guard her heart to the declarations of loyalty and love she had spoken to her with all her heart?

“Oh, look at you!” Sothis teased her, grinning and clapping her hands, delighting in her discomfort. “I suppose with the Byleth in your world, you were quite the sap.”

“I-I’ll have you know,” Edelgard mumbled, “that romantic gestures are not often meant to have an… _audience.”_

Byleth, much to Edelgard’s relief, decided to change the subject. “How are you feeling, Edelgard? Does your eye still hurt?”

“It stings a little,” she admitted, “if I feel too anxious or worried.”

“In the light, it looked a little red. You should probably stop rubbing it,” Byleth told her. “Maybe you should ask Professor Manuela if an eyepatch would help.”

“An _eyepatch?”_ Edelgard almost laughed. “An _eyepatch._ Professor, do you think I would… Do you think it would suit me?”

Byleth shrugged. “I can’t say that. I just think it would help.”

“I’ll think about it,” Edelgard said as she and Byleth continued on their way to the dormitories. She suddenly realized how light she felt—how _free_ she felt. Even though it was the middle of the night and she had class tomorrow, even though she’d just been skulking around in the dark and indulging in conspiracy and subterfuge, she didn’t feel the burden she had felt when she had done these things in her own past. She could even set the unpleasantness with her family out of her mind, if only for a moment.

Perhaps it was satisfaction over helping Hapi figure out the curse that had been placed on her; perhaps it was the time spent with Jeralt; perhaps it was seeing Byleth and Jeralt together, taking advantage of time they had never had in her world. Perhaps it was because the silvery moonlight fell on Byleth’s face in such a beautiful way. Perhaps it was because as obnoxious as Sothis was being, Edelgard could feel some sort of genuine affection underneath all that teasing. Whatever it was, Edelgard felt that she could give herself a brief respite from everything. That was how Byleth had always made her feel.

“What is going on in that head of yours?” Sothis asked Edelgard, putting her hands on her hips. “It is not like you to smile so girlishly. You are not thinking of falling in love with yet _another_ Byleth, are you? Surely one is enough for you! Besides, this world’s Byleth only has eyes for—”

“That’s enough, Sothis,” Byleth interrupted.

Edelgard laughed. “No, no, it’s just that… I’d never imagined the great progenitor god Sothis could be such pleasant company.”

“Excuse me?” Sothis narrowed her eyes. “And why not, pray tell?”

“I’ve told you what happened to my family in my world, haven’t I?” Edelgard answered. “My siblings all died when I was very young. Their deaths were horrible and traumatic, and I was powerless to do anything but watch. The whole time, I prayed to the Goddess to save them with all of my heart.” She struggled to speak her next words; her mouth turned dry, her throat tightened, her tongue turned leaden and rebelled against her. She rubbed her knuckle against her eye. “If I had known what you truly were, that you had been asleep in the heart of a girl nearly as young as me and that nothing could have been done to wake you, I might have understood.”

Sothis looked crestfallen. “I see,” she said, sounding unusually humbled. “Hundreds of thousands of people probably pray to me every day. To my knowledge, not a single one has reached me. I am not quite sure what I am, but if I truly am a goddess, I suppose I must be a poor excuse for one.”

“Well… it’s hardly your fault that the church exists. Many of those prayers are from people yearning to escape the very same conditions the Church of Seiros upholds. But it’s a moot point,” Edelgard replied. “I learned from my world’s Byleth that for all the wrong that is done in Sothis’ name, the power of the Goddess can truly help people.”

“You’re rubbing your eye again,” Byleth pointed out.

Edelgard pulled her hand away.

“You need that eyepatch,” she added.

“Thank you, Professor. I’ll ask Manuela tomorrow.”

“It’ll make you look tough. Everybody looks tougher with an eyepatch.”

“Do they? Perhaps you should wear one, then, Professor.”

“Well,” Sothis said, folding her arms over her chest and smiling, “if you remain touched by time when you return to your world, perhaps you will be able to tell that to your world’s Sothis. I am sure she will be very happy to know that you enjoy her company.”

“Perhaps,” Edelgard said. “In truth, when I first became aware of your presence, I assumed I would not see you in my own world. After all, my world’s Byleth no longer has the Crest of Flames or the Crest Stone in her heart. But if she really can still control time to some degree, then it’s possible—”

Byleth blinked and stared at her. “The what in my what?” she asked, bemused.

“The Crest Stone in your heart. I suspect it was implanted in you by Rhea soon after you were born. It’s the reason why you have the Crest of Flames, the reason why you can wield the Sword of the Creator, the reason why your heart doesn’t beat, and, I assumed, the reason Sothis is connected to you in the first place…”

Edelgard trailed off as Byleth stared at her, mouth hanging agape like that of a fish. She blinked a few more times. Edelgard had to ask herself for the umpteenth time how a mercenary could have such lovely and luscious eyelashes.

Fortunately, she had reached the foot of the stairs to the second floor dormitories. “Er… It’s so late; why don’t we talk about this some other time?” she asked, sidling up the stairs. “Good night, Professor Byleth. Thank you so much for escorting me back to my room at this hour. I shall see you in the morning.”

“Um… Good night,” Byleth mumbled as Edelgard hurriedly ascended the rest of the way up the staircase.

* * *

The next morning, Volkhard held another ‘family meeting’ in the Black Eagles’ classroom, a grim look on his face as he stood in Professor Hanneman’s usual spot at the podium. Edelgard found herself avoiding eye contact with her siblings, especially Justine, whose arm was still in a sling while the residual traces of Manuela’s magic did their work; nevertheless, she felt all eyes on her, some of them hostile.

“I received letters from both Burkhart and Anselm the other day,” Volkhard said. “It seems battle lines are beginning to be drawn between the six noble houses.”

“W-We’re already at war?!” Bernadetta cried out.

“One of the heads of the houses,” Volkhard continued in spite of the outburst, “has already pronounced his allegiance. Duke Gerth has come out in favor of Anselm, according to both letters. As for the others, Burkhart claims to have Count Bergliez and Count Varley while Anselm claims to have Count Hevring, but I have heard nothing from those men in particular to verify either side’s claims. Duke Aegir and Marquise Vestra have yet to speak on the matter.”

Petra shifted uncomfortably at the mention of Duke Gerth, who had been the one responsible for arranging her extradition to the Empire and enrolling her at the Officer’s Academy. Obviously the thought of what might become of her and Brigid over this succession crisis weighed heavily on her mind.

“What a bother,” Linhardt said, leaning back in his seat. “I’d like to just wake up and know who our emperor is already.”

Pascal raised his hand. “Uncle Volkhard, if half of the six great houses side with Burkhart and half side with Anselm, does that make you the tiebreaker?”

Volkhard chuckled darkly. “Oh, Pascal. Were it so simple. I’m afraid it has much to do with which house chooses whom. Assuming Anselm is speaking truthfully, both the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of Domestic Affairs are considering aligning with him, and that has considerable weight. However, the Minister of Military Affairs is quite powerful in his own right—”

“Yeah,” Caspar spoke up. “Like I’ve always said, my dad can beat up Linhardt’s dad!”

“Noted,” Volkhard said. “As well, the Minister of Religious Affairs has a great deal of influence into the judiciary and other matters of the interior and frequently butts heads with Count Hevring as a result. That said, if the noble houses truly reach an impasse, then yes, I will have to intervene on Burkhart’s behalf.”

Bernadetta started shivering, no doubt wondering whether that meant she and Linhardt were rivals. Edelgard sensed that the dividing line between Anselm and Burkhart’s factions seemed to hew to old rivalries and grudges—obviously, each house was hoping that if their side emerged triumphant, they would be able to exact punishment on the houses that had wronged them in the past. And there were more than just the six great houses to consider. There were plenty of other lesser noble families in Adrestia (Ochs and Rusalka and Essar and so on) that had weight of their own to throw around, albeit not as much, and would all be looking to use what influence they had to enrich themselves and diminish their rivals. And though they had much less influence than the great houses, Burkhart and Anselm would be foolish to ignore them.

“Well said, Lord Arundel,” Ferdinand said. “Again, let me remind you all that whoever my father chooses, the other houses will fall in line behind him. And he will most certainly choose the crown prince, of course. We have nothing to worry about, and certainly not something as ludicrous as a civil war!”

“I’d imagine,” one of the Hresvelg siblings’ retainers spoke up, “that the Marquise Vestra will abstain from this conflict as best he can. To choose a side would mean choosing between his nieces and nephews.”

Edelgard examined the scowl on Hubert’s face at the mention of his father, and the thought just occurred to her that although there was not much resemblance between them, each of the retainers serving under her siblings must have been a distant or not-so-distant cousin of his, many likely members of cadet branches of House Vestra. This was as much a family reunion for him as it was for her, and he seemed to be enjoying it just as much.

“I’m sure he cares about us all equally,” Hubert said, his voice dripping with venomous disdain. Even in this world, he still had a chip on his shoulder about his father’s actions during the Insurrection of the Seven, even if the whole thing had gotten a more amicable resolution. After all, Edelgard remembered what he had told her in her world about how he’d felt when she’d been spirited away to Fhirdiad.

“I’m afraid that is all the news I have for this morning,” Volkhard said. “I know it is quite a quagmire, but on the bright side, the situation has not yet gotten measurably worse from what I can tell. Professor Hanneman, thank you for agreeing to let me use the classroom as a meeting place. I’ll let you resume your teaching and let the students return to their classes. But first, Edelgard, don’t you have something to say?”

Edelgard stood up by reflex alone, turning every head her way. The sidelong sneer from Justine made it clear she was expecting an apology, although Volkhard had never informed _her_ of that.

Fortunately, she _did_ have something to say. “Archbishop Rhea spoke to me the other day. According to her, Anselm sent her a missive requesting her endorsement. Fortunately, I managed to convince her that it would be better for the Empire and Fódlan if she supported Burkhart instead and hopefully put an end to this crisis.”

Her siblings stared at her, mouths agape.

“A-Archbishop Rhea _speaks_ to you?” Gerlinde asked.

“Oh, right,” Linhardt said, “the whole ‘revelation from the Goddess’ thing.” He looked at Edelgard’s astonished siblings and her even more astonished uncle. “What? Didn’t you tell them?” he asked her.

Volkhard sighed as he tried to recover from his shock. “Thank you, Edelgard. If this situation doesn’t resolve itself soon, we can only hope the Church of Seiros can put things right.”

The Hresvelg siblings left the Black Eagles’ classroom, but as Edelgard and Bernadetta parted ways and headed for the Blue Lions’, Gerlinde swiftly flanked them both and slipped in front of Edelgard, blocking her path. “Hello, Ellie,” she said, mustering a frail, fraught smile that didn’t quite suit her strong jawline and sturdy demeanor. She twirled a lock of her golden hair around her finger. “I suppose an apology is in order for calling you a traitor against Burkhart. And please allow me to apologize on behalf of Justine as well.”

“Apology accepted,” Edelgard said, trying to sidestep her. “But I do need to get to class, Lindy—”

“Wait,” Gerlinde said, putting a hand on Edelgard’s shoulder and wrenching her back. “El, darling, my sweet baby sister, I would like to know how _you_ of all people have formed a personal relationship with the Archbishop herself.”

“I wouldn’t call it a personal relationship, per se,” Edelgard said, spying out of the corner of her eye Bernadetta rushing away from the burgeoning family drama at full tilt and dashing through the snow toward the Blue Lions’ classroom, which apparently was a far more preferable environment than anyplace within six yards of more than one imperial princess. “In all honesty, it’s—”

“How did you do it?” Gerlinde asked. “Burk and I worked ourselves to the bone—or, well, _I_ worked myself to the bone—the point is, _we_ achieved the highest marks and honors in _generations_ of Hresvelgs here and the only time Archbishop Rhea so much as _spoke_ to us was at her commencement speech. And you just… have teatime with her? _How?_ You’re _Lazygard,_ you don’t have _ambitions—”_

Edelgard brushed her hand off her shoulder. “It’s a long story, I’m afraid,” she said, “and I _do_ need to get to class.”

“Right, right. Well…” Gerlinde sucked air through her teeth. “Actually, I’m _very_ proud of you. Perhaps when next you speak to Her Holiness, you could introduce me to her. You can do that for me, right, El?”

“Of course I can put in a good word for you, Lindy,” Edelgard said, relieved that, while a bit neurotic and a consummate social climber by the looks of it, Gerlinde didn’t seem to bear any more ill will toward her beyond a smidgen of jealousy.

Gerlinde patted her on the head as though she were a well-trained puppy. “Oh, thank you. Burk and I will have to start calling you ‘Not-So-Lazygard’ from now on!”

“My name will do just fine,” Edelgard said, recoiling from Gerlinde’s hand. “Excuse me, sister dearest. I have class to attend.”

She hurried to the Blue Lions’ classroom, where the rest of her house was waiting, apologized for her tardiness, and took a seat.

Class proceeded as normal, though Edelgard’s mind was elsewhere. Mainly, it was on Glenn, who was sitting right up front with Dimitri. It was very likely he knew he was being tailed from how low of a profile he was keeping; whenever Edelgard saw him, he hewed close to the prince for protection, and whenever he was not by his side, it was as though he had simply vanished. Hilda, Claude, and Hubert all had vials of their own of Claude’s new poison, just like Edelgard, but for all four of them, Glenn was being more guarded than usual. Hubert was probably the weak link, as much as it pained Edelgard to think it. He hadn’t so finely honed his mind for spycraft in this world. In her world House Vestra ruled the shadow, but here it had not such a broad domain.

Byleth’s lecture was just wrapping up when the door swung open with a gust of bitter cold wind and Captain Jeralt stepped into the classroom. Claude and Hilda followed behind him; Claude was unusually wrapped up in a hooded rain cloak with the cowl pulled over his head (the sunlight seemed to still be bothering him).

“Hi, Dad,” Byleth said, not minding the intrusion at all. “What’s up?”

“We’ve got the Hurricane King, Death Knight, and Solon pinned down in the Sealed Forest,” Jeralt said, “but they’re a bunch of squirmy little dastards. Can you and your class help us take ‘em down?”

“All of us?” Byleth asked.

“The more the merrier,” he replied. “The other knights have formed a perimeter around them and cordoned them off in a section of the woods, but we need more strength to fully subdue them. And since your class and I work so well together…”

“Of course we’ll help. I see Claude and Hilda have volunteered, too?”

“The more the merrier, right, Teach?” Claude said, grinning his usual confident grin. “You can never have too many allies.”

“Alright, everyone,” Byleth said to the class, “put your learning things away and meet up at the armory. Edelgard, I assume you’ll want to go grab Hubert?”

Edelgard nodded. “Of course,” she said, and without further ado the Blue Lions began to prepare for battle.

“Actually, Professor,” Glenn said, “I’ve felt horribly queasy all morning; I may just sit this one out and go to the infirmary—”

“You’ll be perfectly safe, kid,” Jeralt said, resting a hand on his shoulder with a slightly-too-strong pat that forced him to stoop over. “You’ll ride with me. I wouldn’t let anything happen to Lord Fraldarius’ eldest.”

Edelgard watched the color drain from Glenn’s face. As satisfying as the sight was to watch, though, if Glenn was wary enough to suspect Jeralt of being in on all the stalking, then abducting him may prove difficult.

* * *

The Death Knight was the first of the three to fall. Clad in his spiny black armor and death’s-head helmet, he cut an imposing figure even when brought to his knees with his arms shackled behind his back and Catherine and Shamir flanking him with swords resting against the sides of his neck. He was silent, his labored breathing distorted by the device in his helmet that deepened and disguised his voice into a monstrous death-rattle.

“Now let’s see who this Death Knight really is,” Alois said, and with a confidence that belied his crippling fear of ghosts, he reached down and pulled off his faceplate. A collective gasp arose from the Blue Lions.

Edelgard, though, wasn’t the least bit surprised to not see Mercedes’ face.

“I have no idea who this is,” Jeralt said as the man behind the mask—a perfectly unassuming young man, a bit thin with sandy brown hair and a peach fuzz beard and a face that more or less seemed to vanish into a crowd even when there was no crowd for him to vanish into—blinked against the sunlight.

“It’s a moot point,” Felix grumbled, stepping forward. “It’s not the same Death Knight. That’s just a cheap costume.”

“Really?” Dimitri asked. “How do you know?”

“For one, he hasn’t killed any of us,” he said. His armor was stained red in places from the battle, but he insisted they were only flesh wounds, and he’d waved off Annette’s offers for healing. He gestured to the fallen bodies of the soldiers clad in blue and black armor that had identified them as the Hurricane King’s soldiers littering the woods. “His men put up a better fight than he did.”

“I think you’re onto something,” Sylvain added. “Look, his armor doesn’t have that glowing underlayer to it we saw at Remire. He didn’t even use magic.”

Alois looked relieved for a second, then realized that meant the _real_ Death Knight was still at large and hurriedly backed away from his captive, aghast.

“I suspect the same of our Hurricane King,” Edelgard said, “so he’ll prove easy enough to take down as well. The real trouble will be Solon.”

“Still, I’m sure he’ll have a lot to tell us about who he’s working for,” Catherine said. “Come on, Shamir, let’s bring him in.”

Edelgard studied the fake Death Knight’s face as Catherine and Shamir dragged him to his feet. His eyes were glazed over as though he’d been hypnotized. She doubted the Knights of Seiros would get many answers from him.

“Um… Where am I?” the man in the Death Knight’s armor finally spoke when the knights began to drag him away. “And, uh… What am I doing here? Wait, you’re the Knights of Seiros, right? What are _you_ doing here? And also, uh, who am I?”

A streak of light shot above the snow-glazed forest canopy and sparkled in the midday sky, drawing all eyes to it and following its trajectory. “That’s Gilbert’s signal. He’s intercepted one of the others,” Jeralt announced. “Byleth, let’s split up the class and flank them. Edelgard, Claude, Hilda, Hubert, you stick with me and Glenn. Byleth, you and Alois take the rest of the Lions and approach from north-north-east. Got it?”

Byleth nodded and the class divided itself along those lines. Edelgard kept an eye on Glenn, who seemed notably more nervous, his cold eyes a little wider, his skin a little paler, the slightest tremor in his hands. He was going to try and run for it at some point. She could tell.

“Captain Jeralt,” Glenn said, “I think I would be better suited in the other team. I’m not accustomed to working with Lady Edelgard or these other students.”

“Good,” Jeralt said. “Then it’ll be a learning experience. Right, Byleth?”

Byleth nodded.

Felix rolled his eyes at Glenn’s whining. “Suck it up, Glenn,” he scoffed. “I thought you were supposed to be our old man’s golden child.”

The impostor Death Knight let out a hoarse, ragged scream and crumpled to the ground, shuddering violently as Shamir and Catherine inspected him. Edelgard could see even at a distance that his face had turned deathly pale and his skin was so slicked with sweat that it gleamed and glistened in the sunlight like freshly fallen snow. He convulsed, his legs kicking and arms struggling to break their bonds, wearing a divot in the well-trod snow and mud, wet and sickly gagging noises escaping from a gaping mouth.

Edelgard knew exactly what was going on. _“Catherine, Shamir!”_ she shouted out. _“Get back!”_

The man let out a bestial bellow and his skin burst open, revealing ribbons of black and gray muscle fiber and fascia that quickly expanded far beyond the bounds of his simple human form; his fake Death Knight armor sloughed off of him in chunks as talons burst through the toes of his boots and a long, thick, lizardlike tail ripped itself free of his backside. His splayed-out fingers extended into long, spindly spiderlegs joined together by thin sheets of membrane, forming into batlike wings; his jaw split open to an inhuman degree and out from the gaping cavity of his mouth and throat burst a new head, a blunt, snubnosed muzzle with a single cyclopean eye burning red atop an impossibly wide mouth that capped a long and snakelike neck.

The demonic beast took to the air with a flap of its new wings, letting loose an earsplitting screech as inhuman as its form. Shamir picked herself up off the ground, already nocking an arrow to her bow in spite of the black bloodstains blossoming on her teal jacket; Catherine tossed her sword aside and drew Thunderbrand from its sheath on her hip.

“What the fuck?” Jeralt exclaimed. “Alois, Byleth, you guys deal with that beast! I’ll head after Gilbert! Follow my lead—”

Glenn dashed into the woods, putting as much distance between himself and Jeralt’s group as possible and vanishing into the undergrowth as he bounded away like a spooked deer.

“Shit. After him!”

 _“Bernadetta, Ignatz, bows ready!”_ Byleth barked, ordering her half of the class into action. _“Ingrid, Dimitri, move to intercept! Felix, Sylvain, Dedue…”_

Feathers and scales flew through the air as Ingrid took to the sky on her pegasus and Dimitri on his wyvern. Leaving Byleth’s half of the class behind to take down the demonic beast with Catherine and Shamir, Jeralt led Edelgard and the rest of the Time Squad after Glenn. The metallic screeches and squawks of the airborne demonic beast and the thunderous flaps of its wings faded into the distance behind them as they hurried through the woods.

“Shit,” Jeralt repeated, clearing a path through the underbrush as he led the way. As a seasoned mercenary, he was well equipped to discern the path Glenn left in the snow. “We must’ve come on too strong. Squirrelly little dastard.”

“He must have known that was going to happen,” Hubert said, looking back at the aerial battle in the distance. “I will admit, turning one of your allies into a monster is quite a novel tactic, albeit not one I’d care to try anytime soon.”

“Same. If he’s smart, the first thing he’ll probably try to do now is ditch his clothes and dress up like one of those soldiers,” Claude said. “Most likely a mage, for the mask. We’ve got to catch up with him before he has a chance to do that.”

A rustle in the underbrush—Edelgard grabbed hold of Hilda and threw her to the ground as an orb of black miasma sailed past, and an ambush team of raven-masked mages burst from the forest to do battle on both sides. Claude wasted no time nocking and shooting an arrow, nailing one of the mages through the eyehole of his beaked mask; Edelgard returned fire with a fire spell, sending up a cloud of steam as a wave of heat boiled the snow and ice glazing the pines. One of the mages reeled back, consumed by flames; another fell with a javelin of ice embedded in his chest.

Thankfully, there were only a few of them remaining after their disastrous opening volley had been met in kind; the subsequent whirlwind of chaotic battle lasted only a few split-second instants before Edelgard and Hilda’s axes found nothing left to cleave.

Claude started pulling the masks off of the half-dozen corpses scattered in the clearing. “It’d be a shame if we’d just accidentally killed him here,” he commented as he checked their faces to make sure Glenn’s wasn’t among them.

“His footprints go on past here,” Jeralt said. “He must’ve not known about these mages. Or the idea of disguising himself just didn’t occur to him.”

“Both distinct possibilities,” Edelgard said, nudging one of the corpses with her foot. “Hubert, I have an idea. How comfortable are you wearing one of these uniforms?”

Hubert looked down at one of the corpses, a wan grimace on his face. Clearly, the idea of wearing a dead man’s clothes didn’t quite appeal to him. “Black is my favorite color, Lady Edelgard,” he said, setting aside his own discomfort.

She undressed the cooling mage’s body and threw the hooded robe and mask over to him. She hoped that Hubert’s academy-standard jodhpurs and boots wouldn’t give him away; with any luck, the robe would cover them. “Put these on and run ahead of us, following Glenn’s trail. Hopefully you’ll meet up with him before we do.”

“And if you should mistake me for the enemy?” he asked.

“Don’t worry,” Claude told him. “We’ll be shooting to wound from here on out.”

“Wonderful,” Hubert said as he dressed himself. The mask slipped on, and in an instant he had been replaced by a figure from Edelgard’s nightmares. “I feel much reassured,” he added, the mask muffling his voice. He took off, and Jeralt and the others followed at a distance.

Eventually, Hubert slipped into the underbrush and became invisible, and Jeralt and company pressed onward until they caught up with Glenn.

Glenn looked inordinately happy to see them. “Oh, you’ve come all this way? You idiots! You’ve fallen right into my trap!” He threw out his arms. “Welcome to the forest of death! Enjoy your stay!”

Three assassins, black-clad with pale skin, leaped from the trees from all directions, their cloaks billowing in the cold air and daggers gleaming steel-blue and silver-white in the sunlight. Hilda felled one with a lucky strike of her axe—the assassin’s boot slid on a patch of ice hidden beneath the snow and sent him face-first into the blade—as Claude loosed as many arrows as he could in rapid succession to draw away the two remaining assassins.

“Thales can’t blame me for killing you if it’s self-defense, right?” Glenn called out with a sinister laugh, drawing a dagger of his own. “That’s it! That’s what I’ll tell him! It was you or me! I feared for my life!”

Edelgard narrowly dodged the wickedly-curved black blade of Glenn’s dagger and swung her axe at him, only for him to leap out of the way with astounding dexterity. Hilda’s attacks likewise met thin air. She swore under her breath. “Edelgard! Your professor taught him too well!” she whined. “Why couldn’t she have trained him wrong as a joke or something?”

A spear of ice shot out from behind the trees and nailed one of the two remaining assassins in the shoulder. Undeterred, he pressed onward, and Edelgard felt the swing of his dagger nick her armor. An inch higher and a hair deeper and it might have slit her throat. She threw out her arm and conjured a fireball, aiming for the icicle embedded in his shoulder; a plume of hot, humid steam exploded from his shoulder and scalded his face, turning his corpse-pale skin lobster-red as he let out an inhuman screech.

One of the assassins scored a hit on Jeralt, driving a dagger into his side; Jeralt simply grabbed him by the wrist, held him in place, and gored him with his lance. “That does it for you,” he said, wrenching the bloodstained blade free and turning it on Glenn.

“What are you gonna do, Captain?” Glenn taunted him, weaving around the strikes of Jeralt’s lance. “You can’t hit me! You’re just a pathetic old man!”

Edelgard called out for Hilda and the two of them flanked Jeralt, catching Glenn in a pincers movement. Claude struck him in the hand with an arrow, disarming him, and Edelgard and Hilda’s synchronized attack forced him to stumble and beat a hasty retreat.

“Don’t let him get away—” Jeralt fell to his knees, his lance falling with him, and clutched the wound in his side. Blood seeped through his fingers and reddened the snow. “Dammit…”

“Goodbye, you stupid little rats!” Glenn taunted them, all but skipping away as Edelgard rushed to Jeralt’s side. “I’d love to kill you now, actually, but Thales will be ever so happy if I stick to his stupid plan!”

Edelgard pried away Jeralt’s hand from his wound. Her chest caught in a vise at the sight of it. The same dagger the assassin had used to viciously skewer Jeralt’s kidney had been used in another world by Kronya to stab him in the back. It was a wicked Agarthan blade, and its poisoned metal imbued the wounds it created with a potent resistance to healing magic and a tendency to heal slowly. She only had to hope that this wound would not prove fatal, but her memories—and the thought of witnessing Jeralt’s death once more—troubled her all the same.

“Just a scratch,” Jeralt wheezed through gritted teeth. “Don’t worry. Just a scratch.”

Claude nudged Edelgard to the side and dropped to his knees, tearing a length of cloth off the hem of his cloak for use as an impromptu bandage. “Let me see. You and Hilda, go after him! If we don’t capture him, this’ll have all been for nothing!”

As Glenn retreated, a lone masked mage emerged from the trees to greet him, much to his delight. “Perfect timing! Hey, let’s switch clothes,” he said. “It’s time for Glenn Fraldarius to disappear!”

“I couldn’t agree more,” the mage said, and with a wave of his hand he froze Glenn’s feet to the ground. Glenn could barely manage to sputter a shocked outburst before the mage shoved a vial of clear liquid into his mouth.

Once he’d forced every last drop of the poison down Glenn’s throat, Hubert removed his mask. “As for my clothes, you can have them; they’ve outlived their usefulness to me,” he told Glenn with a sinister smile. “But _you_ haven’t.”

As Hubert let out his best wicked cackle (he sounded more and more like the Hubert Edelgard knew every day), Glenn crumpled down to the ground, rendered unconscious by Claude’s poison.

“Nice work,” Jeralt said, wincing as Claude tightened the makeshift bandage he’d placed on his wound. “He’ll be out for a solid day, right?”

“He should be,” Claude said, “but I wouldn’t count on it. We don’t know how the No-Eyed People react to poison. Anyway, how’s the wound feel?”

“Like I got stung by a hundred angry hornets all in the same place,” Jeralt gasped. He fished around in the bag slung over his shoulder for a metal flask, his fingers trembling as he struggled to uncork it. “Little help here…”

Edelgard helped him pop the cork off, and Jeralt lifted the flask to his lips, threw his head back, and gulped down mouthful after mouthful of whatever potent liquor was inside for what felt like a minute straight.

He let the flask fall from his hand. Nothing spilled out of it, so he’d likely drained it of every last drop. “Okay,” he said. He burped. “Now it feels like, um… twenty hornets, maybe. Thanks, kid.”

Hubert stripped himself of his mages’ clothes and came to Jeralt’s side. “Allow me to have a look, Captain,” he said, laying a hand and casting healing magic on the wound.

“It might not heal properly,” Edelgard said, scooping up the dagger. The black blade glistened with blood. Fortunately, it only seemed to have sunk in two or three inches. “Blades like these are poison.”

“I can feel the wound closing on the surface at least,” Hubert said. “The bleeding is stopped.”

“Seventeen hornets,” Jeralt grunted. “Alright. Manuela can take it from here.”

“What do we say about Glenn?” Hilda asked, eyeing Glenn’s unconscious body as he lay on the ground. His legs were bent comically due to the ice slick that kept his feet and ankles rigid and upright.

“The bad guys got him and he’s unconscious. That’s all they need to know,” Claude said. “Manuela will see him to the infirmary, and while he’s sleeping tonight we’ll bust in and smuggle him out. Then the fun begins.”

 _“Captain Jeralt!”_ Alois’ voice cut through the crisp air as he and Catherine emerged into the clearing. “There you are! Are you alright?”

“Oh, hey, Alois.” Jeralt tried to stand on unsteady legs and Edelgard took him by the arm to keep him from toppling over. “Just a little ambush. One of the kids got knocked out, but the rest of us are fine.”

Catherine hacked away at the ice on Glenn’s feet and threw him over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. “Got him. Alois and I will bring him back to the monastery. Captain, maybe you should come back with us.”

Jeralt waved off her concerns. “I’ll be fine,” he said.

“You really should,” Edelgard told him as she helped him prop himself up. “We can take care of ourselves from here.”

Jeralt rolled his eyes and smiled. “Oh, alright, kid. If my health and safety is so important to you…”

“It is,” she told him.

* * *

Edelgard, Claude, Hilda, and Hubert pressed onward and stuck to the plan—follow Gilbert’s signal deeper into the forest and rendezvous with the Blue Lions. They met scattered pockets of resistance along the way, but nothing beyond their capabilities. The signal they had followed brought them to a clearing deep in the heart of the Sealed Forest, and as they emerged from the woods from the west, Byleth’s faction emerged from the east. Their reunion, though, was overshadowed by the sight awaiting them.

In the center of the Sealed Forest was a sight Edelgard knew well. A stone platform with four intricate pillars erected at its corners stood untouched by time beneath the edge of an overhang, and on the overhang’s rocky wall was an orb embedded in the stone that glowed with a soft yet bloody light. The orb was engraved with the Crest of Flames, looking for all the world like a genuine Crest Stone, albeit hundreds of times larger. Angry red tendrils sprouted from it like the roots of a tree, rooted in the rock. In her world, Hubert, Linhardt, and Hanneman had examined it dozens of times but had never figured out what it was or how it had gotten there; the three of them assumed it was a leftover from one of Rhea’s many experiments but had never learned anything more.

In the center of the arena stood Solon, surrounded by a dozen of his own soldiers and a dozen more fallen knights scattered around them like toys strewn about by a bratty child.

Solon looked to his left and to his right. “Reinforcements, eh?” he sneered. “A pity. You’re too late to save these wretched souls!” He lifted his hand, and one of the fallen knights rose into the air as though suspended by an invisible noose. Edelgard recognized the shock of carrot-red hair streaked with gray—it belonged to Gilbert, one of the most venerable knights in the church. “Oh, except for this one… Unless I snap his neck right now—”

 _“Father!”_ Annette screamed, her voice choked by tears.

Ingrid took to the air, her pegasus’ wings blotting out the sun as they unfurled. _“You’ll pay for that, Solon!”_

 _“Strike him down, but let him live!”_ Dimitri shouted, his wyvern following her mount. _“I will be the one to tear his heart out!”_

“Spread out and attack,” Edelgard ordered her faction. “Claude, Hubert, stand back and provide ranged support. Hilda, with me and break away on my mark. We’ll flank him.”

“If I didn’t have five extra years of combat experience—” Hilda grumbled.

“Yes, yes, this would be suicide,” Edelgard said. “Attack!”

Byleth’s sword burned red as she and her class charged forward. _“For Remire!”_ she shouted out. _“For Ashe!”_

Gilbert’s body dropped to the ground and hit the stone tiles with a mercifully dull thud as Solon wreathed himself in tendrils of black miasma and violet flame and levitated off the ground, and his soldiers met Byleth’s students in a tempest of swords and shields.

Byleth lashed out with her blade unfurled to its full length, and Solon cackled as he floated deftly out of its range. “Ah, Fell Star… you come here leading an army of whelps and brats? Lambs to the slaughter! I shall show you how well suited you are to a shepherd’s life!”

Arrows and spells flew through the air as the cacophony of swords and axes clashing against each other and against shields grew to a deafening roar. Edelgard weaved through the battle, striking where she could and felling whatever soldiers she could on the way, until she and Byleth were side by side.

“Be careful, my teacher,” Edelgard told her. “Solon will be targeting you specifically. Killing you—and Sothis—will be quite a feather in his cap.”

“Future knowledge?” Byleth inquired.

Edelgard nodded. “Future knowledge.”

“How’s Dad?”

“He’s fine. He’s got Glenn with him.”

Sothis hovered behind Byleth, keeping her intangible back pressed against her host’s. _“Byleth! Behind you!”_ she warned, and Byleth whirled around just in time to chop a charging soldier’s lance in half and cut a bloody gash into his chest, armor and all. Edelgard realized that all the times she had thought Byleth had had eyes in the back of her head, she’d been right all along.

As the Blue Lions gained ground against Solon’s men, Solon waved his hands and spread a cloud of black mist across the battlefield; when the mist cleared mere seconds later, the dead bodies of his men and the slain knights twitched, pulled themselves upright, and lurched into battle as though controlled by the strings of a marionette. Curly wisps of black smoke trickled from their mouths and eyes.

“What dread sorcery is this?” Sothis gasped. “Must we end these men’s lives twice over before they can rest?”

Hilda chopped down one of the soldiers she’d just killed only a few seconds ago. “Oh, come on!” she whined when he started to get back up again.

 _“S-Stay away from me!”_ Bernadetta squealed as she shot three extra arrows for good measure into the chest of an undead knight she’d just killed. Annette rushed to her father’s side, flanked by Sylvain and Felix as the undead soldiers swarmed them; Raphael and Dedue formed a protective barrier around her and beat back the horde with axe and gauntlets. Sylvain’s Lance of Ruin swung in fiery arcs, scattering them, while Felix cut through them with a short sword in each hand. It was a frantic battle—one that seemed to have no end. Edelgard struck one of the freshly-revived soldiers across the throat, drenching herself in a spray of cooling blood, only to find herself fighting the same soldier what felt like mere seconds later. As long as Solon forced the dead to rise, the same enemies would vex them over and over again until they had been worn down.

A blast of black fire struck the wing of Dimitri’s wyvern, and though the wyvern narrowly dodged it, the sudden and violent change in its course threw Dimitri from his saddle. He hit the ground in a roll and sprang to his feet, cleaving one of the soldiers wearing the colors of his alter ego in twain with a sweep of his lance. “Die, Solon! I’ll make you see the last beat of your black heart!” he bellowed. “But before you die, tell me—what wicked master do you serve?”

“Didn’t doddering old Rodrigue tell you, boy?” Solon sneered. “What—don’t you _trust_ that old fool?”

“Dimitri!” Edelgard broke away from Byleth and rushed to him. “Don’t do anything rash—we’ll take him on together. Remember, we need him alive.”

“Oh, so confident,” Solon said, licking his corpse-pale lips. He darted away from Dimitri’s lance and Edelgard’s axe, gliding across thin air as one might skate upon a pond. “Pride, my wayward princess, goes before the fall!” He reached into his robe and produced a black orb.

Edelgard recognized that orb. In her world, she’d seen him rip it from Kronya’s chest and use it to fuel a spell of unimaginable power. The Forbidden Spell of Zahras…

An arrow struck him in the shoulder, and with a roar of pain, Solon fell to the ground, his robes pooling around him.

“I have you now!” Dimitri roared. “Die, villain! For Ashe, Glenn, Emile, Yuri, Father and Mother—”

Solon flicked his wrist and one of his puppeteered knights barreled into Dimitri, knocking him down. Instantly, another half-dozen undead knights were upon him, holding him down, their gauntleted hands clawing at him, fingers hooking around the edges of his armor. Dimitri’s screams of rage gave way screams of terror as the Knights of Seiros held him down, his mind spiraling around fresh memories of the Tragedy of Duscur.

Edelgard charged at Solon as the wicked mage regained his footing and hopped aloft, still brandishing the heart of black stone in his hand. “You won’t take the Professor!” she shouted out, aiming for his heart with each swing of her axe.

Tendrils of miasma rose to parry each of her blows. A toothy grin split Solon’s corpse-pale face as the pillars in the four corners of the ruined arena became engulfed in cold violet flames. “Your precious professor? Who said _she_ was my target?” He crushed the orb into dust in his fist.

Edelgard felt tongues of violet flame curl around her wrists and ankles tighter than the tightest shackles, each one feeling like a leaden weight on her limbs. The cold fire licked her body as it caressed her like vipers coiling around her.

“Edelgard von Hresvelg… Thales may think otherwise, but you’re too much of a thorn in our side to keep alive! He’ll thank me for this later. The time has finally come to unleash the Forbidden Spell of Zahras upon our enemies!”

As the flames consumed her, Edelgard found herself at a loss. She could barely move now, and the darkness soon to engulf her filled every corner of her mind. She still remembered what Solon had said in her world about this spell. A void of darkness awaited her, eternal and infinite in its scope and breadth, and to be swallowed by it was to drift in that darkness for all eternity with no escape, consumed by hopelessness. Only by fully realizing the power of the Goddess—the power of Sothis—had Byleth been able to escape, and in the process she had been transformed in the Goddess’ image.

But Edelgard did not have that power. There was no deity whose powers she could use to free herself. The Goddess had never been there for her to begin with. She would be lost to the darkness for eternity, consigned to an endless oblivion to die of hunger or thirst or madness brought on by despair, whichever broke her first. It would be like the dungeons again, except there would be no escape.

Death. Was this how she was to die? Never seeing her wife again, her family—her _true_ family, Byleth, Hubert and Ferdinand, Lysithea, Dorothea and Petra, Ashe, Ignatz, Mercedes and Annette, Marianne, Caspar, Linhardt, Manuela and Hanneman, and even Jeritza—she would never even be able to say goodbye. And in this world, her unfinished work, Dimitri, Ingrid, Jeralt… Hapi… Pascal and Hedy—

She screamed with a terror she hadn’t felt so strongly in twelve years.

 _“Edelgard!”_ Hilda cried out, rushing to her side to rescue her and grabbing her by the arm; the flames seized her as well, stranding her in the same mire. _“What are you_ doing? _Just run away alrea—What the—Hey! Let me go!”_

“Oh, look at that,” Solon sneered, cackling with wicked glee as he watched the two of them struggle. “Edelgard, you will have a friend with whom you may wander in the darkness for all eternity! In time, your hearts and minds will cease to be, but before then, you may weep into each others’ arms as ultimate despair engulfs you!”

Hilda, ignorant of the horror that awaited her, kept struggling to free herself and pull Edelgard out with her.

“Are you two prepared for the deaths you’ve earned, little girls?” Solon asked, his black eyes and rotting smile wide with sadistic glee.

Edelgard didn’t want to die. She’d long since forgotten when she’d stopped wanting to—yet to truly _long_ for life had been something she had not done until now, when there was nothing she could do about the death swiftly approaching her. It felt so inevitable, as inevitable as an executioner’s sword swinging down to meet her neck. This was a death she could not escape from. Not without a miracle.

And miracles did not happen to Edelgard von Hresvelg.

This was how she died. Without hope. Her lips moved silently, tracing words she had once dreamed would be her last many years ago.

A streak of red-orange light, bright and warm as fire, tore through the gathering darkness. Edelgard felt the weights leave her limbs, and then something slammed into her and threw her clear of the consuming flames. She tumbled across the stone tiles of the ruins, watching the ground and sky flicker before her eyes; the back of her head cracked against the stone tiles and stars exploded before her eyes. She came to a stop and looked up just in time to see the flames consume her professor and a mighty wind blow them away, leaving nothing in its wake but empty space.

 _“Byleth!”_ she screamed.

Solon grinned as he looked upon the empty space where Byleth had once stood. _“Begone with you, Fell Star,”_ he hissed.

Edelgard’s leaden eyelids fell over her eyes and engulfed her in a darkness of a different sort as she passed out.

* * *

 _“Give me back my professor!”_ Dimitri bellowed.

Edelgard woke up with Dimitri’s voice ringing in her ears and found her head resting on somebody’s lap. She glanced upward and found Hubert’s face greeting her upside down. It was his lap. At her side, Annette was tending to Gilbert, a forlorn look on her face as she rested a hand on his broad chest and hoped for a miracle.

She raised her head, eliciting whispered protests from Hubert, and caught sight of the battle still engulfing the ruins. Ingrid, now on foot, Felix, Raphael, and Sylvain formed a protective barrier between the enemy and the class and beat back the undead soldiers with lance and sword; about half of the enemy’s ranks had been felled permanently by way of being completely dismembered. The rest of the class, along with Claude and Hilda, tended to the wounded, of which there were many. Dedue was unconscious, both of the lenses in Ignatz’s glasses had spiderwebs of cracks running across them, and bloody rags encircled Bernadetta’s head as she lay at Dedue’s side.

And then there was Dimitri. Dimitri had eyes only for Solon, lunging and charging at the wicked mage with a lance that was so beaten and battered from use that it seemed it would shatter into pieces in his hands any second now. Blood drenched him from head to toe, matting his white hair into knotted snarls, and he moved with the fury and frenzy of a man possessed.

 _“Give back my professor!”_ he howled at Solon, striking again and again with all of his might but never hitting his target. _“Give back my Byleth! Bring her back! Or I’ll kill you! I’ll rip out your wicked heart and show it to you! I’ll chop you up into little tiny pieces and bury every peace in a different part of Fódlan so that your wretched soul will never know peace! You will know true pain before I finally allow you to die!”_

This was the boar Felix had so often spoken of with such disdain. There were no thoughts in Dimitri’s mind but an instinctual desire to hurt, maim, kill, destroy—a death drive turned outward. And yet for all his strength, the loss of his reason only made it easier for Solon to parry and evade his attacks with the dark magic at his disposal.

Solon threw one of his animated corpses at Dimitri; Dimitri cleaved the fallen knight in two, his lance’s blade shattering as it tore through steel armor, leather, skin, flesh, and bone with equal ease; a torrent of blood engulfed him, spraying from the bisected halves of the corpse. Solon threw another at him; reduced to a boar with no more tusks to gore his enemies upon, Dimitri grabbed the corpse, held it over his head, and ripped it apart with his bare hands, drenching himself in another shower of blood. Crimson flowers bloomed upon the white lion, dyeing hair, skin, armor, cape and all crimson and black. He was a sight terrifying to behold, a devil made flesh, scarlet as the flames of Ailell and furious as hellfire. More corpses came to Solon’s aid, and Dimitri tore each one apart with a savagery not even wild beasts could match, a ragged and hoarse roar tearing itself from his throat.

Solon carefully held himself out of range of Dimitri’s berserker fury and with a dismissive wave of his hand summoned a spear of black fire which struck and sent him flying clear across the arena to join the rest of his classmates. “How trite,” Solon sneered, mocking Dimitri. “But if you wish for pain, I shall oblige. If you prefer it so, you shall also be added to the ranks of the dead!”

Edelgard pulled herself to her feet and rushed to Dimitri’s side as he struggled to rise from the ground. Much of his armor had been warped and torn away in battle, either by the horde of the undead or the force of his own attacks, his stained-black cape was reduced to tatters, and nearly every inch of exposed skin from the neck down was either black from bruises or red from blood. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, filled with a bestial fury; his face was wet with sweat and blood and tears that rolled in two clear ribbons down his crimson cheeks.

Despite his poor condition, he forced himself to his knees, then to his feet, the veins in his battered arms and legs glowing a fiery red as he called upon the power of his Crests to sustain his inhuman strength. But all that strength without reason to guide it would prove futile against Solon’s magic—he couldn’t be overcome with brute force alone. Dimitri growled and hissed through gritted teeth as his legs threatened to crumple beneath him. _“Solon,”_ he hissed, _“I’ll kill you… I’ll kill you… I’ll kill you… I’ll kill you… I’ll kill you…”_

Edelgard took him by the shoulders and tried to speak some sense into him as she held him back. “Dimitri, calm down. Our professor is not yet lost.”

He shoved her aside. _“I’ll kill you… I’ll kill you…”_

“Dima,” she said, grabbing him again. “Byleth will come back. I am sure of it. Set aside your rage and have faith.”

The light returned to Dimitri’s eyes. “El… How can you say such a thing?” he snarled, his voice faltering. “I have seen it with my own eyes… our professor is—is lost… and this monster…”

“Because you and I both know that Professor Byleth Eisner is no ordinary human,” Edelgard said. “Now is no time for tears.”

Solon flung out his arms. The red light of the enormous Crest Stone behind him cast a ghoulish blood-red hue upon his face. “You think your dear professor will return?” He let out a laugh that echoed through the ruins. “The Fell Star no longer exists in this world!”

“Careful, Solon,” Edelgard said, stepping forward. “Pride, as you are so fond of saying, goes before the fall. The truth is, you’re a cunning man, and I’m sure you’ve devised many wicked snares in your life, but you’ve put something you shouldn’t have in this one.” She took another step forward. “There is one thing, Solon, that you never put in a trap. Don’t you know what that is?”

“Oh?” Solon cocked his head. “If you are attempting to buy time until reinforcements arrive, Princess Edelgard, I assure you that no amount of reinforcements can stop me from killing you all. Do tell. Which element in my magnificent snare is out of place?”

Edelgard took another step forward, and another, and another, knowing that there was nothing Solon could do to prepare himself for the reinforcements who would come to her aid. All she had to do was stall for time. “A very dangerous element; one you have no business toying with. The one thing you never put in a trap, Solon, if your life has any meaning to you, if you want to live to see another sunrise—the one thing you never, _ever_ put in a trap…”

“Out with it, girl,” Solon spat.

Between him and Edelgard, a glowing fissure rent the sky and a light as bright as a second sun blazed through the gash; as the light faded, a human shape coalesced within the gash in space, armed with a sword that blazed like living fire. Her hair was a pale mint-green, luminous as the full moon, and her eyes were gleaming emeralds. A stoic, blank expression graced her countenance as she descended from the heavens, a golden aura clinging to her body, to the piecemeal armor underneath her tattered gray jacket, to every strand of hair on her head.

Edelgard had once feared the sight of her, the sight of a Byleth transformed almost beyond recognition in the image of her enemy. But here, seeing this apotheosis for the second time and knowing what was to come, she only smiled.

 _“Her,”_ she told Solon.

 _“Professor…”_ Dimitri gasped, horrified.

Byleth turned around to face Solon. There was an eerie grace and confidence to her movements.

Solon sank to the ground and took a hesitant step backward, his black eyes wide and mouth agape. “You… What did you see in the darkness of Zahras? How can you stand before me? This should be impossible!” He continued to back away. “An emotion such as fear has no place within me, and yet… this feeling in my heart…” He thrust his hands forward. _“Die, Fell Star!”_ he screamed, a torrent of dark magic streaming from his outstretched palms to envelop her.

Byleth swatted the wave of miasma and fire aside with the Sword of the Creator.

Solon took another few stumbling steps back, glanced over his shoulder, and realized there was a sheer rock wall behind him. The bloody light of the massive Crest Stone embedded in the wall beat down on him. “I… I shall not beg for mercy from the likes of you. We who rule the shadows have more pride than that!” He conjured another torrent of magical energy—this time, one that weaved around Byleth and reared up before Edelgard and Dimitri like a cobra ready to strike.

Another swing of her sword, a fiery whiplash, and the coiling miasma broke apart into wisps of mist and fog that evaporated in the sunlight.

“Well, nevertheless,” Solon said, his voice and hands trembling like the legs of a baby deer, “I shall find some way to rid this world of you—”

The Sword of the Creator struck him with the suddenness of a lightning strike, throwing him off his feet. He collided with the massive Crest Stone behind him, shattering the image of the Crest of Flames emblazoned on it and dimming its bloody light. His lifeless body slid down the walls of the crater the impact had created, leaving a smear of black blood across the shattered stone. The moment the last dregs of his life ebbed out, the remaining undead knights collapsed and crumpled to the ground, their strings all cut for the last time, and at last those defiled corpses could rest in eternal peace.

With practiced grace, Byleth retracted the blade of the Sword of the Creator and wiped the blood off on her sleeve, then slid the sword into her belt. She turned around to face her students, staring ahead blankly at them. Her face was an impassive, stoic mask, dreadful in its emptiness. The aura of light still clung to her, bathing her in angelic radiance, but it soon faded, and a flash of recognition scrolled across her face as she gazed upon her class.

“Dimitri,” she said. “You’re, um… red.”

Dimitri stared at her, his face wrenched in abject horror. “Professor,” he gasped weakly, taking a fumbling step back. “Professor, no… not you, too…”

“Dima, it’s okay,” Edelgard told him, returning to his side. “I told you she’d come back. She’s safe now. Our professor is safe now.”

“No, no, no, no,” he continued to mutter, taking another step backward, and another, and another. “That’s not… You’re not… Professor… _Byleth…_ what have those monsters _done_ to you?” His voice cracked like a child’s as tears welled up in his ice-blue eyes.

“Don’t be afraid, Dima,” Edelgard reassured him, taking him by the shoulders. She knew how frightened he was at the sight of her—the spitting image of Archbishop Rhea, her hair and eyes transformed by grotesque ritual just as his had been. “It’s still her. It will all be okay.”

Byleth blinked. “Is there something on my face?” she asked, an unnerving flatness to her voice far beyond the usual flatness. Even though Edelgard knew she was simply still adjusting to the great power she had obtained, hearing her speak like that again—absent, aloof, as though her mind was so far above the world of humanity that everybody around her seemed as insignificant as ants milling around their hills—was frightening. The Byleth she had spoken to last night seemed to be a thousand miles away and a thousand years ago.

“Professor, no,” Dimitri repeated. “Oh, no, no, no, no…”

His weak voice trailed off and fell silent as his eyes rolled up and his legs gave out and he collapsed. Edelgard just barely managed to catch him before he fell, and as Byleth strode toward them, she knelt down and laid him gently to the ground.

“What’s upsetting him?” Byleth asked her, her voice deadpan.

Edelgard stared up into her emerald eyes. Archbishop Rhea’s eyes. Though she knew this was nothing to be afraid of—this was the same old Byleth, no matter what or who she looked like—she couldn’t help herself. “I’ll… explain later,” she said, knowing that there was no way Byleth could fully grasp the transformation she had undergone without the aid of a mirror.

“Okay,” Byleth said, nodding, and she dropped to the ground just as abruptly as Dimitri had.

 _“Professor!”_ Sylvain shouted out, rushing to her side. “Felix, get over here. I’ll take her by the shoulders, you take her by the legs.”

Edelgard felt warm hands take hold of her and lift her back up to her feet. _“Raphael, can you grab Dimitri for me?”_ Ingrid called out. _“We’ll need someone strong to carry him back to the monastery…”_

As Ingrid half-carried, half-dragged her to the rest of the class, Edelgard felt the last of her strength, the rush of energy and vitality that had propelled her to stand against Solon, depart from her as quickly as it had came. A cold wind began to blow through her; she started to shiver. The cold reached into her heart and mind. She found herself gasping for breath. The phantom pain in her eye stung harder and harder until she could do nothing but squeeze it shut and press her hand to it in an attempt to numb it and silence its screams inside her head.

“Are you alright, Edelgard?” Ingrid asked her.

She shook her head. Words had left her. She felt her hand latch itself onto Ingrid’s side, her fingers finding purchase on the edge of a plate of armor and hooking themselves into it with the desperation of a child that needed its mother.

“I know,” Ingrid answered. “That was terrifying.” She whistled for her pegasus and called it back to the ground. “Claude, can you take Dimitri’s wyvern? Between the two of us, we can ferry some of the injured back to the monastery.”

“It’ll take a few trips,” Claude replied, “but I can do that.” With a click of his tongue, the wyvern that had been circling overhead in the absence of its rider descended to the ground before him, tucking its wings to its sides just as its pegasus counterpart had done.

“Annette, how’s Sir Gilbert?” Ingrid asked.

Annette, still kneeling before her estranged father and tightly clasping his hand, shook her head. “He’s cold,” she choked out, sobbing, “and his pulse is weak…”

“He’ll be okay,” Ignatz assured her. “I hope…”

There was a flutter of movement in the trees surrounding the clearing; Edelgard tried to stand tall and prepare to fight, but only managed to drag Ingrid with her down to the ground. But what emerged from the forest were not more enemies. Alois, Catherine, and Shamir had arrived on horseback, and riding with them were Jeralt (a bit pale, but well enough to ride along), Hanneman, and Manuela.

But behind them, much to Edelgard’s horror, a fourth horse and rider emerged from the woods, and on that horse were Thales and Cornelia.

“Hello? Is everyone alright over here?” Alois called out, riding toward the ruins.

“I don’t see any enemies,” Shamir said, her eyes scanning the area as she nocked an arrow to her bow and drew the bowstring taut. “Looks like the kids cleaned up well. But stay alert.” She and Catherine let their professors tagging along with them dismount and began to circle the area, just in case more enemies presented themselves.

Cornelia dismounted from Thales’ horse. “Miss Casagranda, it seems our services are required,” she noted to Manuela. “How fortunate that Lord Rodrigue and I tagged along.”

Sylvain immediately dropped to the ground and clutched his leg. “Oh, fuck, my ankle!” he cried out. “I think I fractured my ankle! I need a healer!”

Hubert rushed to his side. “I can heal something so minor,” he said.

Sylvain tried to swat him away. “No, not _you…”_ he hissed. Felix rolled his eyes at him.

As Alois and Jeralt approached, Edelgard could see Jeralt’s eyes darting from person to person as he did a head-count. “Where’s Byleth?” he hissed urgently, all but throwing himself off Alois’ horse. A pained rictus crossed his face as he tried to run, his hand clutching the bandaged wound at his side. He found Byleth’s unconscious body, and when he did, his wan face grew even paler. _“Oh, Goddess, Byleth!”_ he gasped, falling to his knees before her and cradling her head in his hand. He let her discolored hair slip through his fingers as he held her. _“What the hell has she done to you?”_

Thales and Cornelia gazed upon Byleth’s unconscious body as Jeralt held her and, struck by her resemblance to their hated enemy, flinched. Though Thales quickly took control of his emotions and plastered a sympathetic frown on his face, the look of revulsion on Cornelia’s face—as though she’d just seen a rat swimming in her soup—lingered a few seconds longer before she forced it away.

“Captain Jeralt,” she said, her voice syrupy and cloying in its saccharine sympathy as she put on the guise of a caring and empathetic physician, “your poor daughter… would you mind if I give her a physical examination?”

“Excuse me, Lady Cornelia,” Hanneman said, mercifully distracting her, “but Professor Byleth seems relatively unharmed. Professor Manuela and I would be grateful for your help in treating Sir Gilbert instead—his condition is quite dire. And I believe several of the students may have concussions…”

Edelgard could tell that Cornelia was suppressing the urge to roll her eyes at him. “Oh, alright,” she sighed, turning around to follow him.

Thales approached Raphael, who was still carrying Dimitri, and examined the prince in his arms. “Good work keeping His— _Highness_ safe, young man,” he said to Raphael, reaching up to pat him on the shoulder. “What is your name? I’ll see you commended for this. Perhaps even knighted, if you don’t mind being a knight of Faerghus.”

“Raphael Kirsten, sir,” Raphael said, beaming with pride as he handed Dimitri over to him. “Nice to meet you.”

Edelgard wanted to throw herself between them, but she could hardly move, only watch in horror as Thales took Dimitri and held his unconscious body in his arms. Dimitri’s eyes fluttered open as he stirred and awoke, looking less like a devil given flesh now and more like a newborn infant still drenched in its mother’s blood and amniotic fluid. “Rodrigue…” he gasped.

“Don’t you worry, Dimitri,” Thales murmured to him, cradling him like a child. “I am here for you.” His eyes darted to the side and met Edelgard’s for a brief moment before focusing again on him. A wry, knowing smile seemed to cross his face, a sinister twinkle lighting up his eyes. “I will _always_ be here for you.”


	23. Blind Spot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Byleth adjusts to a new existence, Hapi gets a makeover, and Edelgard realizes that someone close to her has been acting pretty sus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, everyone! If you have worms in your stomach about election night or you're reading this after the election and need something to lift your spirits for whatever reason, I can only hope that this chapter gives you worms in your stomach for a completely different and far more enjoyable reason!
> 
> Take care of yourselves and stay safe!

It was a very rare occasion to find Professor Manuela’s infirmary full in peacetime. Students and faculty didn’t tend to become seriously injured in such high volume and so close to the monastery’s grounds to require it. The last time Edelgard had seen every cot in the infirmary filled, it had been in her world, just after the Knights of Seiros had been beaten back from an attempt to reclaim Garreg Mach—and the room had been more morgue than infirmary then, the dead quickly outnumbering the dying. She’d felt sorry for Manuela then, who had never dealt with death on such a mass scale before.

Thankfully, here and now, it didn’t seem that anybody wouldn’t pull through. Dimitri had bruises all over most of his body (the blackened splotches of discoloration on his skin, revealed in full once he’d been bathed and all the blood washed away, looked almost gangrenous in their scope) and had fractured his arm and both legs; Bernadetta had suffered a severe blow to the head and, while conscious now, was still being taken care of by one of Manuela’s assistants, who was making sure she could still recall her own name and count backward from one hundred; Glenn, of course, was unconscious from the poison and would likely remain that way well into the night; Gilbert, who was the most heavily injured, had stabilized and Professor Byleth was in perfect health aside from being unconscious. Despite his own injury and Manuela’s constant insistence that he lie down, Jeralt stood by Byleth’s side to watch over her, still eyeing with unease the new color of her hair.

Byleth had been transformed in the image of Seiros, just as she had been in Edelgard’s world. Jeralt was not the only person staring at her. Dimitri was awake and his gaze was fixed on her, eyes wide with worry and fear; Cornelia, too, was constantly glancing back at her and hiding her disgust while she helped Manuela treat the other patients. Edelgard wondered what this would mean for both herself and Byleth. How would Archbishop Rhea react? She’d had her heart set on the idea that somehow, Edelgard was the Goddess’ vessel. Would this revelation shatter that faith? What would she do to Edelgard when she realized she had been lied to and made a fool of?

“Something wrong with your eye, Edelgard?”

The syrupy sweet voice of Cornelia, mocking in its carefully practiced saccharine overtones, snapped Edelgard out of her troubled thoughts and led her to realize she’d been kneading her left eye quite painfully with her knuckle. She looked up. “Lady Cornelia. It’s nothing. I must have gotten dust in it.”

“Good,” Cornelia said, smiling. “I know just what to do about that,” she said, and without further ado she wrapped a length of gauze tightly at an angle around Edelgard’s head, covering her left eye and ear.

“Thank you. I was meaning to ask Professor Manuela about that,” Edelgard said, adjusting to the black spot that now consumed half her line of sight. “What brings you to Garreg Mach, might I ask?”

“For one, making sure His… _Highness_ arrived safe and sound. Lord Fraldarius and I were quite worried when he left with you so suddenly—and along the back roads to boot. You’re lucky you weren’t ambushed by bandits on the way. Secondly,” she added, “I believe that wayward daughter of mine is skulking around here, and I intend to help the Knights of Seiros bring her to justice.”

Edelgard kept a neutral expression. This was bad news for Hapi. If the Knights of Seiros redoubled their search efforts with Cornelia’s help, Jeralt’s careful manipulation of their routes and schedules wouldn’t keep them away from the wild girl’s hiding spot for long. “Good,” she said. “I hope she sees punishment for her role in the Tragedy of Remire.”

There was a flicker of recognition in Cornelia’s eyes and a mischievous quirk of her lip. “Is that what they’re calling it now?”

“It _was_ a tragedy, Lady Cornelia,” Edelgard said. “I lost a good friend that day. My entire class did. And that’s not taking account the innocent villagers who lost their lives in those explosions.”

Cornelia’s eyes seemed to be scanning her. “I’m sorry to hear that, poor girl.” She patted her on the head as though she were a dog. “Well, if you can manage to stand and walk, I’d advise you do so and free up your cot for someone who needs it. Do you need help?”

Edelgard shook her head and stood up. Her legs were still a little unsteady, her knees aching, and that was only a fraction of the soreness and weariness that pervaded her body. “I think I’ll manage, but thank you.”

She nodded to Jeralt to send a silent message to him— _keep Cornelia away from Byleth—_ and he nodded in assent. She headed for the door, only to feel something hook around her ankle and cause her to stumble. She caught herself, but felt a cold hand latch onto her wrist.

“Whoops,” Cornelia said, helping her steady herself. “You nearly fell there. Perhaps I should escort you back to your room?”

“I think I can manage.”

“Nonsense. Nobody wants you falling flat on your face and breaking that pretty nose of yours. Professor Manuela, I’m sorry to be leaving you,” she called out across the infirmary, “but this one cannot walk on her own.” Without further ado, she pushed Edelgard out into the hallway, and Edelgard could not help but feel as though she were being marched to her own execution.

Edelgard’s dread spiked, but was quickly alleviated by the sight of several of her classmates occupying the bench outside the infirmary. Annette sat in the middle, her slight and pixieish stature dwarfed by Ignatz on one side, whose face looked oddly naked in the absence of his glasses, and Raphael on the other. The three of them were plenty bruised and bandaged, but healthy and well. Hubert, of course, was also waiting outside. There was nothing Cornelia could do to her with witnesses—not so long as she had an image to maintain.

“Don’t worry,” Ignatz was saying to Annette, attempting to pat her shoulder but missing by a mile (he was blind as a bat without his glasses). “I’m sure Sir Gilbert will pull through. Between Professor Manuela and Lady Cornelia, he’s being treated by the best physicians in all of Fódlan.”

Raphael was much more successful in patting her shoulder. “Iggy’s right! He’s tough as nails to boot.”

Cornelia, of course, was easily distracted by anything that piqued her ego. “My, my, such effusive praise,” she said to Ignatz. “I’m flattered.”

Ignatz looked up, squinted, and realized that she was looming over him. “Oh! L-Lady Cornelia, I—I didn’t see you there. I’m sorry.”

“It seems to me like you’re having trouble seeing anything at all,” Cornelia said, eyeing the broken glasses sitting in his lap.

“Lady Cornelia, is my father going to live?” Annette asked, her voice an urgent rush of breath.

“It was touch and go for a while, but he’s on the mend,” Cornelia told her, crouching down to meet her at eye level while still keeping her hand clamped on Edelgard’s wrist. “If you hadn’t been there for him before I showed up, who knows what would’ve happened?”

“Thank you,” she sighed. “And one more thing. Is Mercie… okay? I’ve been sending her letters by owl, and a package with a few of her favorite sweets just last week, but I haven’t heard from her since she left Garreg Mach…”

“Oh, she’s fine,” Cornelia said. “Sickly, weak, but fine. I assure you she has received each and every one of your letters and reads them every day. She simply doesn’t have the energy to write back.”

Edelgard wondered how much of that was a lie. Mercedes had _looked_ fine when she’d seen her in Fhirdiad, but perhaps she was only afforded a scant few hours of mobility per day. She remembered how worn-out and tired Lysithea had been before the Crest-removal experiment (not that she’d been much more active during the recovery period). How could she keep being the Death Knight in her condition?

Annette mustered a weak smile. “Oh… that’s good. I hope she gets better soon. I’d like to see her again.”

“You’ll see her soon,” Cornelia assured her, patting her gently on the cheek. “Now run along. I’m sure you have places to be. My little Mercie always talks about how busy you are.”

“That’s okay, but I’d rather stay here until my father is well again,” Annette said.

“Then you’ll be here a very long time,” Cornelia said sharply. She stood up. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m escorting this girl back to her room, since she’s having trouble walking,” she said, jerking on Edelgard’s wrist like it was a leash.

“Excuse me,” Hubert spoke up with a scowl on his face, “Lady Cornelia, but I am _more_ than capable of escorting Her Highness.”

“Oh, I can help with that!” Raphael exclaimed, leaping to his feet. “Leave it all to me! Besides, you’ve got physician stuff to do, don’t you? You’ve gotta take care of Annette’s dad!”

Cornelia looked defeated. “I suppose you’re right,” she said, letting go of Edelgard with a pleasant smile plastered on her face to mask her ire. “I’ll let you know if— _when_ his condition improves.” She headed for the infirmary door. “Oh, and one more thing, Edelgard,” she said as she turned around. “I’m actually stopping by here on my way to Enbarr. You see, I’ve received a very interesting marriage proposal from a very interesting man.”

“Excuse me?” Edelgard blurted out, but Cornelia had already entered the infirmary and shut the door behind her.

Raphael immediately took her by the shoulders. “Alright, I’ve got you, Edelgard! Let’s head home.”

“Oh, I don’t need your help,” she said, Cornelia’s parting shot still stinging her ears as she lurched toward the infirmary. Raphael caught her, though.

“Sure you do, Your Highness! You almost fell over right there!”

“Allow me,” Hubert insisted for the umpteenth time, taking Edelgard by the arm. “I am her retainer.” Though he wasn’t as wide as Raphael, he just about matched him for height, and Hubert also had the unique ability to loom over people who were taller than he was.

“It’s no big deal,” Raphael said, letting go of her and acquiescing to Hubert’s demand. “We’re all going to the same place, anyway. Iggy needs me to walk him back to the dorms since his glasses are broken.”

“I’m sorry,” Ignatz said. He fiddled with the broken glasses in his hands. The frames were battered and warped, the lenses shattered in spiderweb patterns. “I don’t mean to be a burden to anyone, but I’m blind as a bat until I can buy a new pair.”

“One would think you would have a spare pair for this occasion,” Hubert muttered. Edelgard nudged him in the ribs.

“This _was_ my spare pair,” he said glumly. He sighed. “Fortunately, the lenses are standard. I’m sorry to ask, but if any of you can accompany me to town tomorrow…”

“You don’t even have to ask, buddy!” Raphael assured him, tousling his hair. “And Annette, since tomorrow’s Saturday, you can come with us!”

Annette shook her head. “Oh, no, uh—I-I’ll be here,” she stammered. “I’ve got to be here.” She kneaded her hands in her lap, her head bowed.

Edelgard eased herself out of Hubert’s grasp and motioned to the others for some space. “Excuse me,” she said. “Can I have some privacy with Annette?” she asked Raphael and Ignatz.

Of course, they acquiesced, and Edelgard took a seat at Annette’s side. “Annie,” she whispered, leaning into her and laying a hand atop hers. “You don’t have to stay here.”

Annette chewed her lip and shook her head.

“You _don’t,”_ Edelgard repeated, more emphatically. “You’ve done enough, and your father’s condition is out of your hands. Standing still here won’t accomplish anything.”

Annette looked up at her, but only for a moment before averting her eyes again. Her hands shifted and curled around Edelgard’s. “Edelgard, can I tell you something?”

“Anything.”

She swallowed a lump in her throat. “Father… His name isn’t really Gilbert Pronislav. It’s Gustave Dominic.”

“Of course,” Edelgard said, nodding.

“He changed his name when he ran away from home. He—he _ran away from home,_ Edelgard. After the Tragedy of Duscur he was—I don’t know _what_ he was, but he decided to just abandon us and join the Knights of Seiros! He said he was ashamed of himself, but when I first came here, he just—he pretended he didn’t even recognize me, like he was ashamed of _us._ And—And I don’t know if I hate him, or I love him, because—because no matter how many times he says he’s sorry, he still won’t write home to Mother and—and now he’s dying, and what do I _do,_ Edelgard? What do I do? How can I not know whether I hate him or I love him while he’s _dying?”_

Annette sank into her arms, sobbing. Edelgard held her in her arms and allowed her to cry onto her shoulder.

“And here I am,” she whimpered, her voice muffled, “asking _you_ to help me when—all this craziness happening in the Empire and your siblings and you haven’t even had a chance to mourn your own father yet…”

“Don’t worry about me,” Edelgard assured her, patting her on the back. “Dwelling on this will only hurt you, but it won’t do anything for your father, either for his body or his soul. Go to town with Raphael and Ignatz tomorrow. Take time for yourself. Take time to set this out of your mind. You must care about your own health, too.”

“Okay,” Annette sniffled. “Will you come with me?”

“Of course. We’ll all go together.”

She pulled herself away from Edelgard to reveal a fragile smile blossoming on a face still stained with tears and traces of blood. “Thank you, Edelgard.”

Edelgard had hardly had time to stand up before she found herself accosted by a brown-haired blur, and for the third time since she’d came to this world, Hedwig von Hresvelg nearly knocked her off her feet.

_“El!”_ Hedwig wailed, clutching her in a tight embrace. “Y-Y-You—Are you o-okay? I h-heard there was—there was a f-fight, and there were demonic b-b-beasts, a-and the Death Knight, and the H-Hurricane King, and—and revenants, and—Aah! You’re all b-b-b-bloody!”

“It’s alright, Hedy,” Edelgard assured her, struggling to ease out of her iron grip. “I’m fine. Very little of this blood is actually mine, I think.”

“D-D-D-D-Do you still have all your fingers and toes?”

“Yes, Hedy.”

“You eye! D-Did it get… g-gouged out?”

“No, Hedy.”

“C-Can you still h-hear out of that ear?”

“Yes, Hedy.”

Raphael chuckled. “Is this one of your big sisters, Edelgard?” he asked.

“Um, no, actually,” Edelgard began.

“I-I’m t-thirteen,” Hedwig stammered.

Raphael’s eyes grew as wide as saucers. “Wow! My kid sister’s about your age, and she’s tiny! You’re gonna be _huge_ when you grow up!” Suddenly possessed with self-consciousness, as though he’d just remembered poor Dorothea, he dropped to his knee and bowed. “Um… I mean, respectfully, you’re gonna be huge, _Your Highness!_ That’s amazing!”

“R-Really?” Hedwig asked, obviously quite self-conscious about her height.

“Hedwig, please stop attacking your big sister!” Joachim cried out, rushing to separate her from Edelgard. At that exact moment, Edelgard felt another pair of arms seize her from behind and whirl her around, and suddenly her face was pressed to Heidemarie’s shoulder.

“El, dearest, are you alright? Oh, your face! You’ve been so horribly wounded! And you’re covered in blood—”

“None of it is mine—”

Heidemarie pulled herself away and stared down in horror at a few pink blossoms on her white blouse that had transferred over from Edelgard’s clothes. “And now _I’m_ covered in blood!” she gasped. “Oh, but goodness, are you okay?”

“After that beating she gave Justine,” Gerlinde said, arriving on the scene, “it should hardly be a surprise that our little El can take care of herself.”

Swarmed by her siblings, Edelgard felt a churning rush of vertigo seize her. She backed away, the room spinning around her, only to learn firsthand the disadvantage of having such a massive blind spot as a cold hand clamped down on her left shoulder.

“Well, isn’t this a sweet family reunion,” Thales said, flanking her from the left. He wore Rodrigue’s face with a smile only Edelgard could tell was a sneer. “Lady Heidemarie von Hresvelg, what lovely hair you have. Lady Gerlinde von Hresvelg, the spitting image of your brother! Lord Joachim von Hresvelg. Oh, and little Hedwig von Hresvelg, my, how you’ve grown!”

“Lord Regent Fraldarius,” Gerlinde said, curtsying, “it is an honor to meet you.”

Thales shook his head. “Oh, no, no, the honor is all mine, Your Highness. I am but a humble noble.”

“‘Humble noble?’ You’re the lord regent of Faerghus!” she replied.

“Though I suppose you’ll be handing the reins to Prince Dimitri quite soon,” Joachim said.

“One can only hope!” Thales said, chuckling.

Edelgard felt her breath freeze in her chest. It was as though he were mocking her; as though he was the same Thales as the one who had tortured her and murdered her siblings and was now taunting her by making nice with them.

“Oh, um… hello, Lord F-Fraldarius,” Annette stammered. “Um… How’s your son?”

“Oh, Glenn is… deeply, deeply unconscious. Lady Cornelia suspects poison of some sort,” Thales said.”

“Um… I meant Felix, actually. How’s Felix?” she asked.

He was silent for a moment. “Oh, Lord Arundel,” he called out, grinning as Volkhard hurried down the hall toward him. “How nice to meet you! I’m surprised, though—given the upheaval, I was certain you’d be in Enbarr right now.”

“Well,” Volkhard said, mopping sweat from his brow, “Garreg Mach is uniquely positioned for me to quickly receive news from all of the farthest reaches of the Empire, which makes it quite a good place to keep abreast of things. Initially, I’d only brought El’s siblings here on her request, but…”

“It’s a terrible situation. I hope it doesn’t last.”

“You and I both, Lord Fraldarius.” A pained grimace crossed Volkhard’s face. “Edelgard, your face—are you hurt?”

“Just some minor irritation,” Edelgard said, scratching at the gauze covering one eye. “Nothing of concern.”

“Good.” The expression on his face eased as he took her by the shoulders. “It is just… one dangerous situation to another with you now, isn’t it? Perhaps I should have a talk with your professor.”

“Lord Arundel, please,” Hubert said. “It is my business to worry for Lady Edelgard’s health now. Trouble yourself with it no more.”

“Maybe you should worry harder,” Gerlinde said to him.

“I’m afraid Professor Eisner is unconscious and in this very infirmary right now,” Thales said. “Lord Arundel, what would you say to supper tonight… with your niece… and all her brothers and sisters here? I must admit my trip here has left me famished.”

“It may be a while before I feel ready to eat anything,” Edelgard said, excusing herself. “All that blood, you see. And the corpses. It was a charnel house.”

“And you would know about charnel houses?” Thales asked, and she could tell that he was trying hard not to leer at her.

“Oh, of course, El,” Volkhard said. “You take the time to rest. But I would gladly take you up on your offer for dinner, Lord Fraldarius.” He chuckled. “Dinner at the Garreg Mach dining hall. How many years has it been? My sister and I were students here just over twenty-five years ago.”

“As was I. I am sure the food has not changed a bit,” Thales said.

As he led Volkhard and the Hresvelg siblings away, he looked back at Edelgard and winked at her. Edelgard clenched her fists, wanting nothing more than to just rip her brothers and sisters out of his grasp.

He’d be exposed soon, she told herself. And then there would be no safe place in Fódlan for him.

The door to the infirmary swung open and Claude waltzed out with Hilda close behind. “… Really, _really_ need a bath,” Hilda was saying, uneasily running her hands through bits of blood that had matted her hair. “A _real_ hot bath. Not standing beneath a pipe of freezing water in the showers…”

“I know how you feel,” Claude said, itching at a shallow and mostly-healed scar that ran diagonally over his nose from cheek to brow. “Oh, hey, Edelgard. Hubert. All discharged?”

“Fortunately,” Hubert said.

“Fortunately is right,” he said. “I’m lucky the worst that happened to me was a snapped bowstring. There are some advantages to being a long-range fighter.”

“Rub it in, why don’t you?” Hilda grumbled.

“Now,” Claude said to Edelgard, “Cap and Teach will be meeting up with us tonight with their present, but since we have some unexpected guests, we’ve got to take care of that ‘happy’ little friend of ours first…”

* * *

Claude worked black dye into Hapi’s hair, stripping her mane of its brilliant scarlet coloration. “It’s a good thing we thought of this disguise plan. I’d hoped we wouldn’t have needed it so soon, though.” As he worked his gloved fingers into every last stand, Hapi sat with a faraway look in her eyes. The occasional blink or wince as he tugged on her hair was the only sign that she was alive. Since she’d heard that Cornelia was back in the monastery, she’d become as quiet as a mouse and as still as a statue. One of the many cats gathered around her, perhaps sensing her distress, had curled up in her lap while she’d had her hair done and was purring vigorously.

This meeting of the Time Squad felt empty without Jeralt and Byleth—both of whom had remained in the infirmary well into the evening (Jeralt wouldn’t leave his daughter’s side, of course). Edelgard could feel that Hapi missed them both, too—especially Jeralt.

“I’m worried a change of hair color might not be enough to hide her from Lady Cornelia,” Hubert said. “Her eyes are quite distinctive as well. Perhaps we can say that she’s been blinded in an accident and wrap gauze over them?”

“That might only attract further suspicion,” Edelgard said to him. “A pair of glasses with smoked lenses might help, though.”

“Maybe she can smell me,” Hapi said.

“Not after the bath we gave you,” Claude said. Hilda had used all her most fragrant soaps and shampoos on the poor girl.

“We’re missing the obvious, though,” Hilda said, “which is that _anyone_ is going to be suspicious of a girl living in an unused guard tower surrounded by cats.”

“As loath as I am to admit it, you’re right,” Edelgard said to her. “We’ll have to find her a new hiding place.”

Claude stepped back, stripped his gloves off his hands, and examined his handiwork, circling around Hapi to observe her new look and using a damp rag to dab away any bits of the dye that had stained her brow, ears, and the back of her neck. Her hair was pulled back and up while it dried. “Hmm…” He stroked his chin. “Hey, Hilda,” he said. “Does Hapi remind you of anyone now?”

Hilda leaned forward and looked at her. “Hmm… Cyril?”

“Exactly. With that dark hair and olive complexion,” he mused, “she wouldn’t look out of place in Almyra.”

“And that helps us… how?” she asked. “Claude, people here are, um, I don’t know how to tell you this— _racist.”_

“I know, I know,” he said. “Before you replaced this world’s you, you had some pretty… frightening statements to make about Almyrans yourself.”

Hilda crossed her arms. “I’ve learned and grown as a person since then,” she huffed.

“Anyway,” Claude said, “there’s an Almyran merchant staying in town. You could say I’m pretty good friends with him. In fact, you could say I’m the reason he’s gotten this deep into Fódlan. In fact, you could say he works for me.”

“He’s a spy,” Hubert surmised.

“Exactly. He keeps to himself, of course, on account of all the suspicious looks he gets from everyone else, so it’d be easy to have Hapi pass as his daughter and stay with him until Cornelia leaves—”

“No,” Hapi interrupted. “It’s dangerous enough having me here in the monastery. I don’t want to summon any monsters in that town. People could get hurt. Or killed.”

“I’ve already picked out a name you can use for your disguise,” Claude said, barreling right on through. “Nasrin. It means ‘wild rose.’ I think it really suits you.” He sounded as though he’d already put a lot of thought into this plan and didn’t want it to go to waste.

“Nope. Not doing it,” Hapi insisted, gritting her teeth and setting her jaw. “I don’t want to drag some innocent guy into this and then accidentally flatten his house when I sigh. Besides, I don’t know anything about Almyra.”

“Behnam can take care of himself,” Claude said. “He’s fought plenty of battles in his day. At least meet him and give him a shot.”

Hapi rolled her eyes, took a deep breath, and stopped, carefully clamping her mouth shut and exhaling through her nostrils. “You all saw what I just did there, right? I almost sighed. I could’ve just killed us all.”

_“Almost_ means you _didn’t,”_ Claude pointed out. “Edelgard, Hubert, you agree with me, right? Hapi can’t hide here anymore, and we should make use of what we have.”

“Are you sure we can trust this Behnam?” Edelgard asked.

“Yes. He works for me.”

“I repeat Lady Edelgard’s previous question,” Hubert said.

“Oh, very funny.” Claude rolled his eyes. “He’s my guy. I’d trust him with my life. And,” he added, looking to Hapi, “I’d trust him with yours, too.”

“It’s not _him_ I don’t trust around me,” Hapi said. “It’s _me_ I don’t trust around _him.”_

The argument was interrupted when a familiar set of knuckles knocked on the door in a familiar rhythm. Claude opened the door and brought Jeralt and Byleth into the guard tower.

Jeralt was tired. Dark gray shadows curved under his eyes, tracing his weariness. He hadn’t stopped watching over Byleth in spite of the dagger wound that persistently resisted Manuela’s strongest healing magic and still dribbled blood on his bandages. Byleth looked better in some ways—her skin had a healthy, almost _too_ healthy glow to it, devoid of any signs of scarring or bruising—but worse in others; there was an even blanker, flatter look to her eyes and her face that made her seem almost doll-like. If Edelgard recalled correctly, it would be a day or two more before she got a handle on the incredible transformation that she had undergone and loosened up. As she was now, it seemed as though she were a wall of ice holding back a raging inferno.

“Kept you waiting, huh?” Jeralt growled, terser and tenser than usual. He and Byleth hauled a human-shaped bundle wrapped in a cloak onto the table; the cloak fell away from it to reveal the face of Glenn Fraldarius, so placid in his slumber that it was hard to believe he’d been trying to murder them earlier that day. “Special delivery, one creep. So, what’s going on here?”

Claude repeated his plan to him. Jeralt nodded along patiently all the while.

“Well, you’re right about one thing,” he said once Claude had finished. “The girl’s got to leave the monastery, and if you trust this Behnam guy, then he’s as good as any other. But it’s risky. If she summons a monster to the middle of town, lots of innocent people could get hurt.”

Hapi nodded with a satisfied, if bitter smile.

“What about Abyss?” Byleth asked.

Claude leaned forward, an excited gleam in his eyes. “Abyss?”

“So you’ve heard the rumors, too?” Jeralt sighed. Edelgard couldn’t help but notice the cold distance between him and his daughter. “First off, if the Knights of Seiros knew a way in, we’d have cleaned the place out decades ago. Second, it’s filled with thieves, murderers, and rapists. We can’t just leave a girl down there at their mercy.”

“I can take care of myself,” Hapi said, as she was roughly Byleth’s age even if her lack of life experience out from under Cornelia’s thumb belied it.

“The same catacombs Flayn was found in might make a good haven,” Hubert suggested, “if a bit morbid. Or we could stuff Glenn down there and let him stew in his fear for a while.”

“I’m of two minds about Claude’s plan. On the one hand, there’s obvious danger in hiding Hapi in town,” Edelgard said, “but there’s obvious danger in moving her at all in the first place. At any rate, I’ve got a prior engagement there tomorrow morning, and so if Cornelia and Thales have their eye on me—and I am certain they do—I can draw their attention while you sneak Hapi to Claude’s… guy.”

“Check this Almyran guy out and see what he’s made of,” Jeralt decided. “If he doesn’t seem up to the challenge, we’ll go with plan B. Edelgard, you’ll run interference.” He looked down at Glenn as he slept on the table. “Now how much longer is this little fucker gonna stay asleep for?”

“Not much longer, probably,” Claude said.

“Well, let’s get him tied up before he wakes.” Jeralt made his way to the corner of the room, took a few coiled lengths of rope from the pile of supplies stored there, and with the swiftness of a man who had tied quite a few people up over the course of his career, bound the prisoner, first tying his wrists together behind his back, then binding his arms to his sides, then tying his ankles together.

It was at that point that Glenn began to rouse himself from his slumber, his eyelids flitting groggily as Jeralt tied the last knots. He jerked his leg and nearly pulled it free just before Jeralt cinched the bonds tight.

“Uh… Wha… Hey,” Glenn mumbled, eyes darting around the room and meeting each of his captors’ gazes in turn as he laid on the table trussed up like cattle. He tried to wriggle his way to freedom, but couldn’t move more than a few inches to one side or another. “Edelgard! Hello!” he said, his voice full of mock cheer. “I had no _idea_ you were this kinky! Voyeurism and bondage, my favorite! What’s next? Hot wax dripped down my chest? Knife play?” He looked down at himself. “Although… shouldn’t I be undressed first? Or does the school uniform turn you on?”

Hubert stood up and loomed over him. “You’re being interrogated, you blithering moron.”

Glenn grinned. “By whom? _You?”_ He let out a laugh. “A bunch of blubbering, blathering, gibbering beasts? Do you know who you _are?_ You aren’t even fit to lick my boots clean! You walk around on the surface so proud, so high and mighty, but you don’t even know what a fucking _latrine_ is! You still use chamber pots! And _you’re_ going to interrogate _me?_ Ha! Nothing you could do to me could make me talk. Not a single thing! And also, you have no idea what you’re getting into—”

“Some light, please, Hubert?” Edelgard asked. It still felt weird to ask him to cast light magic for her—a well-rounded Hubert whose studies of magic encompassed both faith and reason was one she still had to get used to.

“Of course, Lady Edelgard,” Hubert said with a sinister grin. He lifted his hand and a light as bright as the sun coalesced around it, formed itself into an orb, and hovered into the center of the room.

Claude pulled his hood down over his head and averted his eyes. “Oh,” he moaned, “this again. Why am I even here?”

The glee instantly left Glenn’s face. He stopped struggling against his restraints, and as he averted his eyes from the artificial sun beating down on him, his face wrenched as though he were trying not to cry.

“How do you feel, Glenn?” Hubert asked, still grinning. The light cast deep shadows across his face. “I always find myself quite invigorated by a bright and sunny day—”

Glenn started whimpering. Tears welled up in his eyes and streamed down his cheeks.

“Oh?” Hubert asked him. “Are you ready to answer us beasts’ questions _now?”_

“I’m a failure,” he whined, his voice like a pig’s squeal. “An utter failure. Outwitted by a bunch of talking swine. Is this the end of the so-called master assassin Kronya Number Six-One-Two? Seven hundred in my clone batch, and they flushed all of them except me.” He sniffled. “What a waste.”

Edelgard was delighted to hear Kronya whimpering like that. “Yes,” she said, “you are quite pathetic. Kronya, was it? Why don’t you show us that true face of yours?”

“I don’t deserve to show you my true face. I’m a worm crawling on my belly through the dirt. I’m lower than the cockroaches they mash up to make our protein bars. I deserve to be buried in a concrete cask for two hundred thousand years along with the rest of the spent uranium.”

Edelgard glanced over at Byleth. The professor’s expression was inscrutable, but Edelgard wondered if she might possibly feel conflicted about subjecting one of her students to this torment, even if he was a monstrous spy in disguise.

“Be that as it may,” Jeralt said, “we’d like to see it. How do we get this disguise off of you?”

“Why bother? We’re all going to die soon. At least I deserve it.”

“Why?” Byleth asked.

“What good is a spy who gets caught? Oh, who am I kidding? I’m a terrible spy. Of course I am. I’m meant to _kill_ stupid apes like you, not pretend to _be_ one of you. And I’m not even good at that. Just look at how many of you are still alive.”

“Do you mean they’ll try to kill you if they find you?” she asked.

“Of course! Wouldn’t you? Look at me. Worthless. Idiot. Pathetic. Outsmarted by beasts. What does that make me? A germ? An amoeba? A paramecium? A single-celled bit of pond scum swimming around in a puddle with its little flagellum is smarter than me. I had my chance to prove that I deserved to live and I have failed. Kill me now and spare me this torment… or Thales will do it for me. And he will be right to do it.”

Glenn-Kronya began to weep. This went on for a while.

“We’re getting off track,” Byleth said, squinting up at the artificial sun. “Hubert, maybe you should get rid of that.”

“Kid’s right,” Jeralt huffed. “This little turd’s too busy whining to answer any of our damn questions. Maybe we’ve done enough to soften him up.”

“Hubert,” Edelgard said. She nodded at him, silently relaying Byleth’s order to him.

“As you wish, Lady Edelgard,” he said, and with a snap of his fingers the dazzling sun extinguished itself, leaving only a lamp to light the room. Bright white light gave way to dim, flickering amber.

Glenn-Kronya snuffled up the last of his tears. “What the hell have you _done_ to me?” he gasped, horrified.

“Trade secret,” Claude said.

“Well, I guess you stupid, primitive monkeys do have some tricks up your sleeve.” His confidence hadn’t quite returned to him; he was shaken. “Professor,” he asked, staring up at Byleth and failing to mask the abject horror that struck him as he gazed upon the dreaded Fell Star, “you—you can’t be okay with this, can you? I mean—I mean, I’ve been your _student!”_

“You’ve been _pretending_ to be her student,” Jeralt clarified, giving him a stern glare. “And getting up to who knows what in the meantime.”

Glenn-Kronya looked to the other students, especially Edelgard. “Oh, and _you_ haven’t?”

“Is Thales really going to kill you?” Byleth asked.

“Of course, you moron! And whoever compromised my identity, of course. He’ll find me really quickly, too. And the rest of you along with me.”

“Do you _want_ him to kill you?” Hilda asked.

“Of course not, you stupid pink baboon! Every living creature has a biological imperative to live!”

“Alright. Then how do we hide you from him?” Claude asked.

“There’s a chip in my arm,” Glenn-Kronya said. “It transmits my location using low-level radio signals that the Immaculate One’s sorcery can’t—You have no idea what I’m saying, do you?” He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Stupid beasts. There is a tiny rock in my left arm that tells Thales where I am all the time, and you’ll need to remove it.”

“Fuck,” Jeralt said. With a suspicious squint leveled at the impostor, he took out a small hunting dagger and circled around the table to Glenn-Kronya’s left side.

“You won’t be able to see it as long as I’ve got my disguise on,” Glenn-Kronya said.

“How do we get rid of that?” Edelgard asked.

“Oh, I can just take it down myself—”

“Hubert, the light.”

“No, no!” Glenn-Kronya’s eyes went wide. “There’s a simple physical disengage. Back of the neck. Press down against the lowest cervical vertebra, the vertebra promenis. Base of the neck.”

“Turn him over,” Jeralt ordered, and he and Byleth rolled him onto his front. Hubert took his collar and pulled it down, exposing the back of his neck. Edelgard felt a hollow form in the pit of her stomach and a now-familiar twinge return to her eye. What was Kronya playing at? This was all too easy…

“Wait, no,” Edelgard said, stepping forward and grabbing Hubert by the arm. _“Don’t—”_

Hubert pressed against the base of Glenn’s neck. In an instant, the firstborn son of Rodrigue Fraldarius disappeared. In his place was a lithe, thin girl with skin as gray as rainclouds. A black teardrop ran across one eye and down her cheek like a scar. Glenn’s wavy dark hair gave way to a mop of loose carrot-red curls; cold blue eyes turned the same shade of red. Her face was gaunt, but lively, and the skin around and under her sunken eyes was nearly black. She was swimming in Glenn’s uniform.

And just as her uniform was too big for her now, so too were the ropes that had bound her; she slipped one leg free, kicked into the air, and rolled herself off the table, the ropes sloughing off of her as she hit the floor.

_“You idiots!”_ she cackled, freeing her arms. “I’m free! And now Thales won’t have to kill me, because it won’t matter what I’ve told you when I’ve killed you all!”

She stepped on the tail of one of Hapi’s many cat companions, producing an angry yowl from the trampled little beast and losing her footing. _“Hubert, light!”_ Edelgard shouted out as Jeralt, Byleth, Hilda, and Hapi rushed to restrain the assassin.

Dazzling light filled the room; Kronya’s demeanor lost its defiant fire in an instant, allowing Hilda and Hapi to tackle her to the floor and subdue her. Jeralt cut her left sleeve away, baring more of her gray skin, and inspected her arm while Byleth set to work tying her down again. Edelgard rushed to her side to help her, taking one of the lengths of rope and binding Kronya’s ankles together while Byleth worked on the wrists. Kronya writhed and scratched and bit at them, trying to break free in spite of her poison-induced malaise, but her efforts were halfhearted and proved futile.

Jeralt found a conspicuous white scar on Kronya’s bicep and dug the tip of his knife into it. Blood as black as pitch welled up from the wound. Kronya clenched her jaw and forced a scream through gritted teeth as he wiggled the knife to and fro and pried out from the wound a small black oblong not much larger than a sunflower seed. He dropped it to the floor, stood up, and crushed it under his boot, grinding it with its heel until it had been reduced to a powder.

As soon as she was finished tying Kronya down, Byleth attended to the wound, wreathing the small but deep incision in a green glow and watching it diminish to nothing.

“You’re _healing_ me?” Kronya mumbled, shocked.

“Of course,” Edelgard said. “We’re not barbarians.”

“Yes, you are. You are _by definition_ barbarians. And I was outwitted and overpowered by you,” Kronya said, “which makes me lower than a barbarian, undeserving of your senseless and foolish kindness…”

Jeralt double-checked the bindings keeping Kronya imprisoned. “Have you ever tied a knot in your life?” he asked Hapi, the furrow of his brow showing quite clearly that he was bewildered by whatever attempt she’d made to secure the rope.

Hapi shook her head.

He sighed. “Alright,” he said, undoing the rope around Kronya’s arms and waist and re-tying them. “Watch closely here…”

One instructive knot-tying lesson later and Kronya was completely subdued once more.

“I think we’ve gotten enough out of her for one night,” Jeralt said, standing up to admire his handiwork. Sweat beaded his brow and his expression was pained; Edelgard could tell from the way his hand kept gingerly grazing his side that he’d reopened his wound. “Hubert, you bring the chloroform like I asked?”

Hubert nodded and produced a rag and a bottle from within his cloak. “Of course, Captain.”

“Chloroform?!” Kronya gasped. “You still use _chloroform?_ What are you, _cavemen?!_ It’s carcinogenic—”

Deaf to her outburst, he gave the rag a thorough soaking and pressed it over her mouth. Her eyes widened with shock as she gagged on the cloth, but as she succumbed to the fumes her eyelids grew heavy and finally fell shut. He pulled the rag away as she slumped over, mumbling incoherent death threats in her sleep.

“Kids, go to bed,” Jeralt said. “I’ll find a new hiding spot for Kronya and we’ll see what more information we can get out of her later. Hapi, you’ll spend the night in my quarters. Tomorrow morning, we’ll go into town and check out Claude’s friend.”

“Oh, right,” Hilda said. She jerked Claude’s hood back, exposing him to the light. “Claude, what did you think of that plan of yours again?”

He blinked in the light, dazzled. “Out of all the stupid schemes I’ve hatched, it just might be the most asinine,” he admitted with a heavy sigh. Then, as though to shake the lingering dregs of his poison out of his system, he vigorously shook his head and swatted Hilda’s hand away as she giggled at him. “No, it’s a fine plan, actually. It’ll work out, I’m positive.” He pulled the hood back over his head. “Hubert, the light, please?” he snapped.

“I would,” Hubert said, “but I think I prefer you this way.”

“Hubert, get rid of it,” Edelgard said.

“Yes, Lady Edelgard,” he said, and with a snap of his fingers, the room returned to its normal dimness.

Resigned to finding a new home, Hapi began to collect a few of the blankets strewn around the room that Edelgard supposed must have been her favorites.

* * *

After they had parted ways with the rest of Time Squad, Edelgard and Hilda accompanied Byleth back to the dormitories. The waxing moon was high overhead, the sky black, and the snow glowed with a steel-blue light from the reflected moonlight.

“Professor,” Hilda said, “so… how are you feeling? In our world, I was never really close enough to ask you when… _this_ happened.”

“This happened in your world?” Byleth asked. There was no trace of shock or surprise in her voice, and Edelgard could only infer that it was there. She walked with her head far across the clouds now, with only scant threads tethering her to the earth.

“I’m afraid so, my teacher,” Edelgard admitted. “And your transformation was caused by the same event. Solon banished you to the darkness and you emerged with the powers of the Goddess… I had to admit, many of us were frightened to see what you had undergone.” Her hand traced a lock of her own hair, letting it slip through her fingers. She almost expected it to be white. “Most were frightened for you; some… of you.”

“I’m fine,” Byleth said, absentmindedly curling a lock of her almost-luminous mint-green hair around one finger. It caught the moonlight just like the snow did. “I think. I’m not sure if I feel anything right now. Or maybe I feel too much of everything.” Her tone was clinical, detached, emotionless. “I don’t know. But I’m not acting like myself, am I?”

“Why… would you say that?” Hilda asked her, furrowing her brow in mock surprise.

“When I woke up,” she answered, “Dad held a knife to my throat. He asked me so many questions… where he taught me to fish, what I’d said to him the night we’d met Dimitri and Claude, details about our missions with the Blade Breakers… he didn’t take the knife away until he was satisfied.”

Edelgard was aghast. She couldn’t imagine Jeralt doing such a thing to his own daughter. “He _what?”_

Hilda’s jaw hung open. “He didn’t!”

“He said he had to make sure I was still me,” Byleth said. “I think he’s still not sure. Neither am I.”

“I’m sorry,” Edelgard said. “Have you… seen yourself?”

“Yes,” Byleth said. She bowed her head. “I look like Rhea now.”

“Trust me, Professor, I know what it feels like to not recognize your own face in the mirror… to have one of your deepest and most familiar connections to your self stripped away from you without your consent. I know how much it hurts, and I am here for you.”

“This has something to do with the stone in my heart, doesn’t it?”

“I believe so. From what I knew in my world, Rhea implanted it in your heart shortly after you were born. You were intended to be a vessel for the Goddess.”

“That’s why he doesn’t trust her,” Byleth muttered.

“And he is right not to do so,” Edelgard said.

Hilda had stood by silently, digesting Edelgard’s revelations. “Does Rhea know about this yet?” she asked.

Byleth shook her head. “I haven’t seen her. She’s been busy these past few days; I’ve heard no one’s seen her since she met with you the other day. Someone has probably told her by now, though.”

“She has her own plans for you. As in my world, I assume she’ll lead you deep beneath the monastery,” Edelgard said, “and try to arrange a ‘revelation’ from the Goddess—or rather, use your body as a host for the Goddess’ consciousness. That’s what I believed the ritual was for, at least, from my limited understanding. But I don’t know how…” She trailed off, not sure how to say what she had to say next.

“Don’t know how what?” Hilda asked.

“It seems she has already come to believe that _I_ am a vessel for the Goddess. Now that I’ve been proven to be a fraud, I… I don’t know how she’ll react or what the consequences might be for me.”

The words had hardly left Edelgard’s mouth before Byleth spoke up again. “I’ll protect you,” she said.

“I know,” Edelgard said, her heart aflutter in her chest.

“The Goddess…” Byleth murmured. For the first time since she’d heard her speak today, Edelgard heard a trace of emotion slip into her voice. She sounded sad. “I think I know how I feel,” she said. “Lonely.”

Hilda took her by the hand. “Well, we’re here for you, Professor.”

“That’s right,” Edelgard said, taking her by the other hand. Byleth’s skin was hot, but not in a feverish way—more like there was a sun burning in her chest, its light radiating through her down to the tips of her fingers; as though if she were cut, she would bleed blinding light and not blood. “We are here for you. And my classmates, your students—some of them might be, er, _frightened_ now, or apprehensive of what you’ve become, but it won’t take them long to realize that you are still Byleth Eisner, no matter the color of your hair or the color of your eyes.”

“Will Dimitri?” Byleth asked.

Edelgard recalled the horror that had crossed Dimitri’s face, the tears that had melted his icy eyes, the anguish in his voice when he had first gazed upon Byleth’s changed face. He’d taken it even harder than she had. “He will, Professor. I know he will.”

“Thank you,” Byleth said.

Edelgard and Hilda walked her back to her quarters. She was silent the whole way until she reached the door to her room, and Edelgard had to admit, even for the notoriously laconic professor, it was an eerie silence. Something was missing from her, although she couldn’t put her finger on it.

“Is something wrong?” Edelgard asked her.

“Oh,” Byleth said. “Manuela gave me something for you.” She reached into her satchel and took out a black band and handed it to Edelgard. “So you don’t have to keep that gauze around it.”

Edelgard was grateful to strip the bandage from around her head and trade it for the much less restrictive eyepatch. “Thank you, Professor. I’m sure this looks much better.”

Byleth nodded. “It does.”

“Is something else wrong?” Hilda asked her.

“I’m still lonely,” she admitted.

“We’re here for—”

“It’s not that.” She was silent for a few moments longer, her lips cleaving fruitlessly as she tried to speak. Finally, she found her voice. “Sothis is gone.”

The words struck Edelgard with more force than she’d expected. At first, her mind simply rejected the assertion out of hand. “She’s gone? Do you really think that?”

“Are you sure?” Hilda asked. “Maybe she’s just sleeping.”

“Of course,” Edelgard said, shaken on multiple levels. “Of course. You know how she sleeps, Byleth. I am sure she is just… even more exhausted from this whole experience than you. Surely if I were to, for example, say that she was failing in her duties as your companion by sleeping while you worried about her well-being, she would instantly appear at your side to chastise me for my impertinence and assure you that…”

Her voice grew weaker and eventually trailed off altogether as she realized that nothing was going to come of it. Byleth just looked at her, impassive and inexpressive, yet with a subtle sadness in her eyes.

“Maybe it’s a really deep sleep,” Hilda suggested. “Like… how she slept before you met her?”

“She’s gone,” Byleth repeated. “Well… she said she would always be a part of me. But as an individual, with a will independent from mine… she no longer exists. She won’t ever talk to us again.”

Edelgard felt as though the ground had dropped out from under her feet, and found herself shocked not only by what Byleth had said but that it had struck her with such force in the first place. Surely she couldn’t _miss_ that little gremlin of a so-called deity.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She realized that Byleth must have suffered this loss in her world, too, and she’d been completely oblivious to it. No wonder Byleth had seemed so detached and dissociated from herself—on top of the phenomenal power invested in her, she was mourning the closest friend she’d ever had. “I’m so, so sorry, Byleth,” she said, wishing she could say it to her wife as well, even if it would be six years too late.

“Does that mean you can’t send us back?” Hilda asked.

“I don’t know,” Byleth admitted. “She said that both sides of time were revealed to me alone now… but I’ve never used her powers myself, only counted on her to use them on my behalf.” She shook her head. “She gave me everything, but I don’t know where to even begin.”

She opened her door. It was dark inside, the shadows turning it from a simple and spartan bedroom to something as deep and cavernous as imagination would allow, and she seemed hesitant to step inside.

“It occurs to me,” Edelgard told her, “that Hilda and I are the only ones besides you who knew her. The burden falls to us alone, then, to help you carry that weight.”

“Yeah,” Hilda said. “If you need anything, or want to talk about her… we’re here for you. Since, well… I guess we’re the only ones who can be. And the fact that I’m not pawning all the emotional labor off on Edelgard shows that I mean it!”

“Thank you,” Byleth said, the hint of a smile breaking through her cold facade and tugging at her cheeks. “Thank you, both of you. I’ll be okay, though. We don’t regret what happened. If I hadn’t rescued you two, you wouldn’t have had any way to escape that spell. I would have lost you both. I sacrificed us for you… and she sacrificed herself for me.”

She slipped into her room and turned to face her bed, but just before the door swung shut and closed her off from Edelgard, she dropped to her knees. Her shoulders shook and shuddered. Edelgard held the door open and rushed to her side, hearing as she approached the sound of quiet weeping.

“Professor,” she said, crouching down beside her, “I…” Her voice faltered. She felt almost afraid to lay a comforting hand on her shoulder. Had Byleth wept over her invisible companion in her world, too? And she had never noticed, never known… She shouldn’t have so quickly dismissed the times Byleth had spoken of hearing voices and having an imaginary friend. “I’m here for you. I swear it.”

Byleth held a hand to her face as tears trickled down her cheeks.

“I know you must already miss her terribly. To share your life so intimately with a person, and then be torn away from them so suddenly…”

“I don’t know who I am without her,” she said. “It wasn’t until she’d woken up that night in Remire that I started feeling like a person instead of the Ashen Demon. Every moment I felt something new, every time I felt myself open up, she was there.”

“That’s nonsense, Professor. I know how much this hurts, but you cannot believe that you are nothing without her. _I_ can tell you what you are.” Edelgard took her by the shoulder and looked her in the eyes. They weren’t Rhea’s eyes, she realized, but Sothis’, a symbol of the merging of her will into Byleth’s. Back then, when she’d been frightened by the first sight of those eyes, she hadn’t known what they had truly been: not proof that Byleth had been twisted for Rhea’s purposes, like the new color of her hair, but proof of the sacrifice her closest and in some ways dearest friend had made for her and for her students.

“Professor, you are an attentive and compassionate person,” she said to Byleth. “You study everyone you meet; you dedicate yourself to learning their skills and interests and hobbies, everything about them right down to the tea they prefer, not to outwit them or outmatch them but to _help_ them. You reach out your hand to everyone, even those who—who might feel they could never deserve it.” Tears stung her own eyes. “No matter how much Sothis has guided you, Professor—that is _you._ And from this moment on, as someone who knows your future, I can say that even without her, that is still the person you will be.”

Byleth looked away. “But what if Sothis made me that way?”

“I can tell you one thing for certain, Byleth,” Edelgard answered. “When you said you’d protect me just now, that was _you_ speaking and nobody else. Sothis did not make you care for your students. _You_ grew to care for them yourselves. What she gave you was the _power_ to look after and protect us even if it meant bending the universe itself to your will.”

She realized as the words left her mouth what she was doing—what she had become. In her world, Byleth had been her teacher, and her guidance had been a treasure beyond all the riches in the vaults of Enbarr. But she’d grown since then, too, and not as a student. Here, she was more experienced than her younger and less worldly teacher, more knowledgeable, and now that Byleth knew the truth about her, she could be a foundation for her in her time of need just as Byleth had once been for _her._

“In truth,” she added, “I didn’t feel like a person until I met you, either. And, if I may be so bold as to speak for him… neither did Dimitri. _We_ taught ourselves to be human, Byleth… we taught _each other_ to be human. It was not forced upon us by anyone else.”

“Well said, Edelgard,” Hilda chimed in, standing at a distance from them. “I’ve got an idea—maybe we can all visit the cathedral sometime to pay our respects. I suppose it’s the closest thing Sothis has to a grave.”

She was wrong, but Edelgard supposed it was a sweet gesture. “Well, Professor?” she asked, sniffling a bit. “It may be too late tonight, but perhaps some other time…”

Byleth nodded and dried her eyes on her sleeve. “Yes. Thanks, you two. I should go to bed now.”

“Will you be alright?” Edelgard asked her.

“I think I will be. But it will take a while before I’m used to…” She tapped on her forehead. “Nothing here.”

Edelgard managed to laugh. “Your own thoughts will have to prove company enough from now on, I’m afraid,” she said. “But you’ll manage.”

Byleth smiled. “Future knowledge?”

Edelgard nodded. “Future knowledge.”

She leaned in closer. She was so close to Byleth, and there was such a great warmth blossoming in her heart, and that look on Byleth’s face was so subtly vulnerable… she could kiss her right now. It would be easy, it would be wonderful, it would be—

_No,_ she told herself, pushing away her weakness. Yet she felt herself drawn closer, closer, though reason told her not to give in. Her wife, her true love, was a world away, not in front of her; to do this would make her unfaithful. But even so, how could she resist?

Her lips tingling with anticipation, she brushed aside the hair from Byleth’s brow and planted a soft, chaste kiss on her forehead. She pulled herself away, a self-conscious blush staining her cheeks, and stood up.

Byleth looked up at her. She blinked bemusedly and gently traced her forehead where she’d been kissed, as though in awe at the gesture.

“I-I’m sorry,” Edelgard stammered, stepping away. She should have contained herself for five more seconds, long enough to have walked away. But how could she have walked away from the sight before her? “I would hope you’ll forgive my indiscretion…”

Hilda grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back. “Alright, El, let’s not bother your professor anymore; she needs to sleep.”

“You could have done that earlier,” Edelgard said as she was dragged away, still feeling flustered. The blood that had risen to her cheeks felt like a bloodstain that no amount of scrubbing could wash away. “A few seconds would have done it.”

“And miss seeing you like this?” Hilda laughed. “Actually, that was really cute. What you said before that was, too. I would have had a speech of my own, but you know, she was _your_ professor.”

“Thank you,” Edelgard said. She furrowed her brow. “Wait a minute. Hilda, you said you wouldn’t pawn all the emotional labor off on me!”

“I had that idea to go to the cathedral, didn’t I?”

“Ugh. I _thought_ I’d forced you to be diligent. You were even brazen enough to say you’d pull your own weight and then _immediately_ stand off to the side while I poured my heart out to her! I can’t believe you!”

“Well, what _should_ I have done? I really didn’t know Professor Byleth all that well, so it was smart of you—her _wife_ —to handle all the talking,” Hilda said. “Actually, what you said there made me think.”

Edelgard decided not to make any suggestion that she found that to be a rare occurrence, and so the potential cutting remark sat on her tongue and burned a hole through it like acid.

“If this world’s version of you is so much like me,” Hilda continued, “then… if our places had been switched—if the No-Eyes had turned _me_ into the Flame Emperor or whatever they would’ve called me instead and just left you alone—I’d probably have turned out just like you. And if it wasn’t for Byleth, I’d have ended up pretty awful.”

“You really think so little of yourself?” Edelgard muttered.

“What I mean to say,” Hilda said, “is I’m glad that if it had to be you who got turned into, uh, _that,_ Byleth was there to help you be less terrible of a person.”

Her compliment was as backhanded as a slap to the face, but Edelgard couldn’t begrudge her for it. “I’m well aware that without her, I’d have been a monster.”

“I can tell. You’re really not as hard to read as you think you are.”

“Thank you, by the way, for trying to pull me out of that spell,” Edelgard said. “It was stupid of you, of course, and we _both_ nearly died in horrible agony because of it, but I do appreciate the gesture.”

The smile on Hilda’s face grew, and she looked beautiful in the moonlight. Jaw-droppingly gorgeous, in fact, the way the silvery moonlight reflecting off the snow lit her hair and her skin, the twinkle in her—

“Oh, no,” Edelgard mumbled. There was only one phenomenon in the universe that could make her feel like this toward Hilda.

Hilda stared at her, wide-eyed, ashen, silent, still as a statue.

“Um… Hilda?” Edelgard felt herself ask, her lips moving without her permission. “Is… something wrong?” She waved her hand in front of her face. “Hilda? Hilda? Hilda, are you alright?”

Hilda snapped out of it and pounced on her like a fox that had just spotted a tasty hare.

Edelgard felt strong arms wrap around her and tried very hard not to think about the hands sliding across her back, one reaching up to the nape of her neck and the other gliding down her spine to the small of her back, and she tried even harder not to think about what _her_ hands were doing on Hilda’s body in turn. But what she tried hardest to avoid thinking about was what her lips were doing, what _Hilda’s_ lips were doing, whose breath was tickling her cheek, the heat pressing against her chest and trickling into the deepest recesses of her body like hot and melted wax, and how Hilda’s hair smelled so strongly of strawberries. She tried to issue a stern mental warning to her counterpart to not, under any circumstances, involve her tongue in this horror show, which the other Edelgard promptly ignored. There it went. Her tongue was in Hilda’s mouth and there was nothing she could do about it.

There was one thing she did think about, though. Hilda was shivering, though not from the cold, and as they embraced Edelgard could feel hot, salty tears sting both of their lips—and they weren’t her own.

At last, they separated. Hilda was crying.

“At least _warn_ us before you do that,” Edelgard chastised their doppelgangers. She tried to wipe Hilda’s lipstick from her mouth, but the other Edelgard fought against every effort she made to raise her arm to her lips.

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry,” the other Hilda said, sniffling, “but I just died, so…”

_“You what?”_ the other Edelgard gasped.

“I don’t know,” the other Hilda quickly backtracked. “It was really quick, and suddenly I was looking up at myself and there was a lot of blood pouring from my neck and my head was gone and that’s when everything went all burning and I ended up here. I’m so glad to see you again—”

“Where were you?” Edelgard asked, wresting back control. “What’s going on?” She quickly realized, though, recalling how traumatized she’d been by her own death, that there was little chance of Hilda providing a coherent answer while she remained here, unless Byleth in her world had turned time backward a few hours and given her time to settle down.

“I don’t know,” the other Hilda said, embracing her once more and this time burying her face in her shoulder. Edelgard was thankful that her thick fur cloak gave her an ideal headrest, but didn’t relish the thought of washing tears and snot out of it later. “We had Thales cornered and then this old man came out of nowhere and he had a sword-whip thing and…”

Edelgard suppressed the part of herself that insisted on interrogating the poor girl. She’d have to wait until this world’s Byleth could arrange another visit to collect more information from her world.

“I’m so sorry,” the other Edelgard said, returning her embrace, and this time, Edelgard didn’t even try to put up a fight. “That’s awful, Hil. I hope the Professor can fix it.” They hugged for what felt like perhaps five or ten minutes, although it might have only seemed that way from how interminably awkward the whole situation was.

“Dying,” Edelgard told the other Hilda, “is a far more painful experience than not dying. I think most people are lucky it’s the last thing they ever do. You have my sympathies.”

“Don’t mind her, Hil,” the other Edelgard said immediately afterward.

“I don’t wanna die without you,” the other Hilda sobbed. “El… when we all go back to our own worlds, promise me we’ll get married.”

“Of course we will,” the other Edelgard said, obviously ignoring her engagement to Ferdinand. “We’ll elope.”

“Can we kiss again?”

They kissed again. This time, Edelgard was at least able to prepare herself and kept herself distracted from the very public, very wet, very messy display of affection by mentally rattling off the lineage of Adrestian emperors from Wilhelm I onward. She managed to get all the way to Lycaeon III before it was over.

Edelgard and Hilda both waited for their doppelgangers to pull themselves away before both independently realized, much to their embarrassment, that the other Edelgard and the other Hilda had both left some time ago and the two of them had kept kissing out of sheer inertia. They broke apart, both of their faces flushed crimson.

“Never again,” Hilda panted.

“Never again,” Edelgard agreed.

She felt a chill run up her spine and the hair on the back of her neck stand on end and realized that she was being watched. She glanced over her shoulder and saw that the door to Dedue’s bedroom was open just a crack. As soon as her eyes met the door, it shut itself.

On second thought, she decided, perhaps it was for the best that the two of them had been forced into this awkward situation. The sight of two lovers meeting for a tryst in the dead of night, after all, was far less worthy of suspicion than what Edelgard and Hilda had actually been up to tonight.

* * *

The next morning, Edelgard snapped awake from an unusual nightmare, her eyes flying open to meet the morning sunlight streaming in through her window. The details of her dream still clung to her mind—catching sight of herself in a mirror and seeing eyes of emerald, no longer pale lilac but a shining Sothis green; watching blotches of pale green take to her white hair (she always had white hair in her dreams) and turn it the color of fresh mint leaves before her eyes; Rhea’s hands falling upon her, caressing her skin, soothing her scars with a tingling warmth that made her feel like melting wax in her grip, all the while cooing in her ears, _“Mother… Mother…”_

Shaken, she forced herself to look at herself in her mirror, her heart still pounding and pulse still racing. She was almost too afraid to look. But there, reflected on the polished silver, were the pale purple eyes she had always had, as well as the natural light chestnut of her hair.

Her eye stung, and she forced herself not to touch it, instead rummaging through her drawer for the eyepatch she’d been given yesterday. The dark spot that took away the left side of her field of vision was still disorienting, but easier to get used to than she’d expected. And while it didn’t quite alleviate the pain, it at least kept her from rubbing at it.

With a relieved sigh, Edelgard set the mirror aside and dressed herself, then stepped out into the hallway, where the muffled sound of a distant argument had been bleeding through the walls. Instantly, she found herself blocked by a clot of people clustered in front of Dimitri’s bedroom. Dedue stood at the door as if guarding it, his arms crossed. Ingrid, Felix, and Sylvain were clustered around him, their voices blending together in a loud and cacophonous din.

“What’s going on?” Edelgard asked, joining the crowd. “Is something wrong with Dimitri?”

“Is something _wrong_ with him?” Felix scoffed, staring at her as though she’d grown a second head. “The boar’s shut itself up in its den. Now that we’ve all seen it for what it really is, it’s afraid to face us.”

“Shut up, Felix,” Ingrid scolded him. “How dare you talk about our prince like that? Ever since we enrolled here, you haven’t treated him with even an ounce of respect!”

“And now you know why. That creature we saw tearing corpses to shreds yesterday? That’s the Dimitri I saw back in western Faerghus. _That’s_ the real Dimitri. That’s the boar. And he’s better off in a cage.”

While Felix and Ingrid were bickering, Sylvain continued to harass Dedue. “C’mon, just let us in! Well, okay, not Felix. You can keep him out.”

“I don’t want to go in there anyway,” Felix huffed as Ingrid continued to berate him.

“His Highness does not wish to see anybody,” Dedue said flatly.

“Not even me?” Edelgard asked, raising her voice over the din.

“I tire of repeating myself.”

“Dedue,” Ingrid said, “if you keep standing between us and him, I swear I’ll—”

“You will what? Will you finish the job your fellow subjects started?” Dedue’s eyes were cold, his expression stern and immovable. “None of you shall pass. Not even you, Lady Edelgard. He does not wish to speak to you.”

“Bullshit,” Sylvain said, forcing his way past Dedue and rapping his knuckles on the door. “Hey, Dimitri! It’s me, Sylvain! Come on! We’re friends, aren’t we? We’ve known each other since we were six!”

Dimitri’s voice bled through the door, muffled by the wood but still forceful enough to ring in everyone’s ears. _“Leave me!”_ he snarled, his voice hoarse and raw but venomous. _“You all mock me with your hollow assurances! Dare not to look upon me!”_

“Don’t be such a drama queen!” Sylvain shot back as Dedue pulled him away from the door.

“This is all _your_ fault,” Ingrid snapped at Felix. “Now he’s internalized all of those hateful remarks of yours—”

“Good! Was the sun in your eyes all day yesterday?” he snapped back at her. “You are the _dumbest_ smart person I have ever met!”

“Well, you’re the dumbest— _dumb_ person I’ve ever met!” Ingrid retorted, her face red. “Edelgard, I’m right, aren’t I? Help me tell Felix off!”

“Perhaps we should respect Dimitri’s desire for privacy,” Edelgard said, which was not what any of the gathered Blue Lions except for Felix and Dedue wanted to hear.

“Princess is right,” Felix said, stepping away. “Fuck this.”

Ingrid grabbed him by the front of his shirt, hooking her fingers into his collar. “Oh, no you don’t. Not without apologizing—”

He ripped himself free and set off down the hall, and Ingrid stomped after him.

“And to think he’s going to be her brother-in-law in a few months,” Sylvain muttered. He looked to Dedue, gazed down the hall, and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his uniform jacket. “How the hell did _I_ end up being the voice of reason out of the three of us?”

“I know,” Dedue said. “It unnerves me as well.”

“Well, maybe he’ll be feeling better later in the afternoon,” Sylvain added. “I promised to have brunch with a girl from town this morning. See you all later.” With that, he took off down the hall after Felix and Ingrid.

Edelgard looked to the door. “Dimitri,” she said to it.

_“Edelgard,”_ the door answered. _“Whatever you have to say is meaningless to me.”_

“I want to talk to you about our professor.”

_“I do not wish to hear it.”_

“Dima.”

There was a muffled sound of something very heavy hitting the wall with great force beyond the closed door. _“Names such as those are not fit for beasts, Edelgard.”_

Dedue gave her a stern look and shook his head.

“You’re not a beast, Dimitri,” she said.

_“I am worse than a beast,”_ Dimitri answered. _“A failure of a beast. I am grotesque.”_

Before Edelgard could get a word in edgewise, Dedue took her by the shoulder and gently pushed her away from the door. “Nothing you say will help him,” he said to her. “This is a fever of the soul, and you are only adding kindling to it.”

Edelgard wondered what he might think she would say to him. What had he thought had gone on outside of Byleth’s room last night? “I understand,” she said. “But at the same time, he cannot quell that fever on his own. I think I know someone he will want to talk to.”

Nothing on Dedue’s face changed except for the subtle arch of his silver eyebrows. “Very well. Bring them here.”

Edelgard left Dimitri’s bedroom door, descended the stairs, and followed the path along the first floor of the dormitories until she found the one door that almost always had someone behind it. She knocked on it. “Bernadetta,” she said.

There was a clatter and commotion behind the door. _“Uh—Um… L-Lady Edelgard, is that you?”_

“Just Edelgard will do.”

_“A-Are you alone?”_

“Yes, I’m alone.”

_“Great! I mean—I mean, I-I’m not hiding from the Professor just because she looks different! I’m not! Who would even suggest such a thing? I’m just… not feeling well!”_

“You don’t have to be afraid of Professor Byleth,” Edelgard assured her, recalling that Bernadetta had felt just as frightened by her changes in her world. “I assure you that she is just the same as she ever was on the inside. Just give her time to adjust. But I digress. I’m not here to talk to you about her.”

_“Oh, no… Did I do something? Did I upset one of your siblings? It was Princess Justine, wasn’t it? Oh, Bernie, you’ve done it now! There’s no way Edelgard would step in to protect you like she did for Dorothea—”_

“I’m here to talk to you about Dimitri.”

Bernadetta fell silent.

“He refuses to leave his room, and shouts all manner of paranoid ramblings at anyone who tries to get in,” Edelgard said. “I’m sure such behavior sounds familiar. I think he might be put at ease if you try to visit him.”

_“What?”_ Bernadetta asked, incredulous. _“He’s… acting like… Bernie?”_

“Exactly. He’s worried that all of his classmates have become terrified of him. But I have an idea. You’re frightened by just about everything.”

_“Of course! I don’t understand how anybody_ couldn’t _be!”_

“Do you see where I’m going with this? If you, Bernadetta, can be brave enough to visit him, then he will see that he has nothing to fear from anybody else.”

_“V-Visit him? But he was really scary yesterday…”_

“Exactly. That’s why _you_ have to do it. Don’t think about yesterday. Think about the time you fixed his sleeve, and how happy he was. You should have seen the look on his face when I asked him who had done that wonderful embroidery for him. He was beaming.”

_“But—I can’t be that brave!”_

“Yes, you can be.”

_“I’m terrified of everything!”_

“That is precisely what _makes_ you brave. Do you know the word for someone who isn’t afraid of anything?”

_“Um… Courageous?”_

“No. The word for someone who has no fear is _foolish._ Courage is being afraid, but not letting that stop you. Every time you set aside your anxieties and leave your room, you’re showing as much courage as most knights do in their entire careers.”

Bernadetta didn’t answer.

“If you can do this for me, I’ll deliver an entire cake right here to your doorstep,” Edelgard said.

_“What kind of cake?”_

“Chocolate. With cherries.”

_“Okay… I’ll try. But if he kills me, I’ll haunt you! And I promise, I’ll be a really annoying ghost! Like the kind that never stops scratching at your doors and knocking things off your tables!”_

“Oh, there’ll be no need for that; I intend to own a cat.”

Bernadetta laughed.

The door to the room next door to Bernadetta’s swung open and Annette popped out. “Oh! Hey, Edelgard! Are you ready to go into town? I’ll go get Ignatz and Raphael and we’ll go together!”

“Just about,” Edelgard said. “I just need to see a few people first. Do you know where Marianne might be?”

“Hmm…” Annette thought for a moment. “Probably the stables or the cathedral? You might be better off asking someone from the Golden Deer, like Leonie or Lorenz.”

“Thank you. I’ll meet you at the front gate,” Edelgard said, and she hurried off.

As luck would have it, she found Lorenz enjoying morning tea in the courtyard with Ferdinand and Hubert (despite the awful cold), learned from them that Marianne was at the cathedral, and after a long walk across the academy grounds, found the girl kneeling before the altar with her hands clasped in prayer.

“Excuse me,” Edelgard said. “Do you mind if I kneel beside you for a moment?”

Marianne looked up at her, and for a moment there was a flash of nervous fear in her brown eyes. “Oh, um… Lady Edelgard. I’m sorry. Yes, if you would like.”

Edelgard knelt beside her, clasped her hands together, and bowed her head. Artifice devoted to the saints and to the Goddess loomed over her in every direction. Thinking of what Sothis might have thought about all this nearly brought a smile to her face, but remembering that she had missed her chance to hear it killed that smile before it could take root.

“So, mind if I ask what you’re praying for?” Edelgard asked. In her world, Marianne had spent much of her time praying for release from her so-called cursed Crest, whether by death or otherwise—until Edelgard had inspired her to fight for a new world. “This may sound strange coming from me, but I sometimes struggle to put my thoughts in order when I’m praying.”

“Oh… your class,” Marianne said. “The Blue Lions. Forgive me if it isn’t my place, but… I heard Prince Dimitri was heavily injured yesterday.”

“He was.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you for keeping him in your thoughts. I’d like to pray for him, too.”

It was a farce, though. The Goddess Sothis who answered the prayers of the devout had never existed; Edelgard had known that for half her life. The real Sothis had been sweet, charming in her own way (if a bit obnoxious), but she had not been a goddess. Nobody answered prayers.

Edelgard watched Marianne’s lips move, silently tracing the words of her pleas to the Goddess. Due to the eyepatch blocking her line of sight, she had to turn her head to properly observe her.

“We’ve asked for the Goddess to do her part,” Edelgard said when Marianne unfolded her hands and lifted her head. “But we, small as we may be, are not helpless. There are things we must do on our own.”

“What do you mean?”

“You and Dimitri… You two make quite a couple.”

“Do we? I’m sorry. If you’d like, I can stay away from him…”

“No, that isn’t what I mean. It’s clear that there is something beautiful between you two, and… I believe he needs you right now.”

Marianne’s eyes fell to the floor. “Do you think that?”

“I do. He’s as hurt spiritually as he is physically, and he’s locked himself in his room. Even I can’t reach out to him,” Edelgard said. “However, you, Marianne… I think he might take your hand, if only you offer it.”

A frown creased Marianne’s face. “I told him I was cursed.”

“No.” Edelgard shook her head. “He’s told me that every time he meets you, he feels blessed.”

There was a touch of color that sprang to Marianne’s cheeks.

“Give him your blessing,” Edelgard told her, laying a hand gently on her back.

She stood up and left the cathedral, emerging into the sunlight. As she crossed the bridge that hung over the ravine between the cathedral and the grounds of the Officers’ Academy, she wondered how closely Thales and Cornelia were tailing her.

She didn’t have to wonder much longer, because Thales and Cornelia were waiting for her at the other side of the ravine. Or, rather, they weren’t waiting for _her—_ they had Jeralt backed up against a wall. Edelgard noted, much to her relief, that Hapi was nowhere in sight—Jeralt must have managed to hand her off to Claude and Hilda and sent them into town before they’d cornered him.

“I assure you,” Jeralt was saying to them, “the Knights of Seiros will do everything in their power to find your children.”

“Pardon me if I’m not impressed by your assurances,” Cornelia sneered. “How long ago did my darling Hapi escape from your custody?”

“Glenn is my firstborn son,” Thales said as Jeralt clearly struggled not to roll his eyes, “and I love him dearly. He is also betrothed to one of the students here. This is a matter critical to the political state of the Kingdom, and I expect it to be resolved quickly!” He looked to the side and noticed Edelgard. “You! Lady Edelgard! Have you seen my son?”

“Felix?” Edelgard asked. “He stormed off from the dormitories earlier this morning—”

Thales furrowed his brow, irate. “No, not him! Glenn! He vanished from the infirmary in the middle of the night.”

“I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen him. But I’m sure you can trust Captain Jeralt to find him.”

“I wish I shared your confidence,” he said, sparing a withering glare at Jeralt, who haplessly shrugged in response. “But so far, I am not impressed with the performance of the great Knights of Seiros and this captain I have heard so much about.”

“If you’re dissatisfied with my handling of this issue, you’ll have to take it up with Archbishop Rhea,” Jeralt said gruffly. “Unfortunately for you, she’s been shut up in her chambers these past few days, so I really doubt even people of your stature would be able to get an audience with her.”

“Perhaps it was a mistake for you to cut your retirement short,” Thales growled at him.

“If your work becomes any sloppier, Captain,” Cornelia spat, “then you should be worried about other things being… cut short.”

Jeralt arched his eyebrows in a way that seemed to say, _‘give me your best shot.’_

“Lord Fraldarius,” Edelgard said, “surely you’re mature enough to know that you cannot expect overnight results, even from the Knights of Seiros.”

If looks could kill, she would have dropped to the ground dead right then and there. “Your uncle Volkhard told me,” Thales said to her, “that you’ve gained quite a penchant for rudeness, Your Highness. One would think that after our little talk in Fhirdiad, you would have learned to curb your tongue.”

“I hate to disappoint you,” she replied.

“Well, I hope that if you do happen to learn anything about where my boy Glenn might be,” Thales said, “you’ll be forthcoming with me. If he stays missing for long, there could be… many undesirable ramifications.”

“And the same goes for my daughter,” Cornelia said. “I’ll be quite satisfied when Archbishop Rhea metes out whatever punishment she is due, but…” She rapped her long, sharp fingernails rhythmically against her arm. “I would hope I get the chance to teach her a lesson first.”

“Spare the rod,” Thales agreed, “spoil the child.”

“I’ve got my top men on it,” Jeralt said. “We’ll find those little brats of yours before you know it.”

“I do hope so,” Cornelia said. “I have a marriage proposal to respond to.” She sniffed the air, her nostrils flaring. “Oh, and—Edelgard, Your Highness,” she added, her voice turning syrupy, “are you trying out a new perfume?”

“Yes,” Edelgard lied. She hadn’t lent much credence to Hapi’s offhand suggestion that Cornelia could smell her, but was it possible? Could Cornelia pick up traces of her escaped experiment’s scent on Edelgard’s skin and clothes, like a bloodhound tracking the scent of a fugitive from a scrap of cloth?

“It’s interesting,” Cornelia said. “A bit of an odd, earthy bouquet. I can’t say it doesn’t suit you.” She winked at Edelgard as she and Thales took their leave of Jeralt; Edelgard knew they wouldn’t travel far, though.

“A guy who’ll marry a woman with two grown children already, huh,” Jeralt muttered. “Must be a real catch. Hey, Your Highness. Lots of child-abducting weirdos out there. You planning on going anywhere today, kid?”

“Well, I was going to head into town and help Ignatz get a new pair of glasses—Oh, which reminds me, I really shouldn’t keep him waiting.”

“Well, stay close to your friends,” he told her. “Stick to the center of town. Safer there. Plenty of people. Hard to get kidnapped in a place like that.”

“Understood, Captain,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Just doing my job,” he said with a wink. “Oh, excuse me. I just remembered, I should take those noble pricks to my office or something and remind ‘em who’s in charge here,” he added, hurrying off.

“Wait.”

Jeralt stopped and did an about-face. “Yes, Your Highness? Something else I can help you with?”

“Byleth told me what you did when she woke up.”

Hearing the accusing tone in Edelgard’s voice, a sullen frown crossed his face. “She did, huh?”

“You held a _knife_ to her throat?”

“I had to make sure she was still herself. Don’t give me that shit, kiddo. You’re up to your neck in impostors, too, just like me.” Jeralt sighed. “Okay. Maybe I shouldn’t have threatened to slit her throat. But you don’t know how scary it is to look at my little girl and see… _her.”_

Edelgard decided not to point out that she did, actually, and she hadn’t resorted to threatening her beloved professor with death (though Hubert had wanted to).

He spoke in a low, conspiratorial voice, leaning toward her. “I told you her mom died in childbirth, right? That’s what Rhea said. The truth is, Rhea didn’t let me see Sitri’s last moments. She went in there when I had a living wife and a stillborn daughter, and when she came out I had a dead wife and a living baby girl. I don’t know what she did to trade one life for another, but it’s the reason Byleth’s always been… like that. Whatever she did, it sealed away her heartbeat and locked up her emotions. Rhea had plans for her. Big plans. Plans that, frankly, had me fucking terrified out of my mind. After what happened yesterday… I was afraid. Afraid that it was the next step in whatever the fuck Rhea wanted with her. For all I knew, Rhea had transferred her soul into her body or something like that. I had to know she hadn’t taken my baby girl away from me… like she’d taken Sitri.”

“I understand,” Edelgard said. Beyond her sharp emotional reaction to his actions, there was a sensible logic to them that she could recognize. “I don’t blame you for being suspicious or for taking action, but I can assure you that my professor is still the same girl you know and love. And you must apologize to her. She needs to know that you still trust her.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. You probably know more about Rhea’s plans than I do,” he added, giving her a suspicious squint. “Was I right? About the whole… vessel thing?”

“Rhea doesn’t intend to use her as a vessel for _her_ consciousness,” she said.

He shook his head. “I really fucking hate which of those words you emphasized.”

_“Captain Jeralt!”_ Alois’ voice rang out through the cold winter air like a church bell. “Captain Jeralt!”

Jeralt broke away from Edelgard as his subordinate skidded to a halt in front of him. “What’s going on?”

“I just ran into Hubert. He said he might’ve seen that Hapi girl skulking around that abandoned chapel earlier this morning. Permission to send a team there to investigate?”

“Permission granted,” Jeralt said. Hapi’s first hiding place, long since abandoned, would make for an excellent red herring. “I’ll catch up with Lady Cornelia and let her know we’ve got a lead. She’s been riding my ass all fucking morning. Nobles, huh?”

“You said it, Captain,” Jeralt said, offering a sharp salute. “Oh, hello there, Princess Edelgard. Is everything alright with you?”

“I could be better,” Edelgard admitted.

“Well, I guess—” Alois snickered. “I guess everything else looks _all right_ to you!” he said, completely unable to contain his laughter. He doubled over. “Everything else looks _all right_ to you!”

Jeralt sighed. “Alois. C’mon, we’ve been over this. Those jokes only work when you don’t laugh at your own punchline.”

_“But it’s so funny!”_ Alois gasped.

Jeralt rolled his eyes. “Let’s go. You take care, Your Highness,” he said, and he led Alois away.

Edelgard made her way to the gate and met Annette, Ignatz, and Raphael there. “Sorry to keep you all waiting,” she told them. “I got a little caught up in something.”

They left for town together. Edelgard resisted every urge to look over her shoulder or acknowledge any possible sign that she might have been tailed, feigning ignorance with all her strength every shifting shadow out of the corner of her eye—unfortunately, only her right eye. All manner of anxious fantasies manifested themselves in the blind spot of her left eye, and she forced herself to ignore them.

With any luck, once Thales and Cornelia or whatever unknown agent they’d sent to tail her realized that she wasn’t leading them toward Hapi, they would conclude that she’d drawn their attention as far away from her as possible and discount the possibility that their quarry could be hiding in town. It was never bad odds to bet on the hubris of Those Who Slither in the Dark.

* * *

While Ignatz had his frames fitted (Annette had tried unsuccessfully to get him to pick out a ‘stylish’ set), Edelgard and Annette explored the town square. It was a cold day, but the bakery was as warm as a summer afternoon, and Annette all but inhaled the aroma that hung in the hot, stuffy air. “What should I buy for Mercie this time?” she asked, studying shelves of candies of various shapes and flavors. “Ooh, these lavender drop candies are probably delicious. Or what about these little peppermint ones with the stripes? Edelgard, what kind of candies do you like?”

Edelgard smiled. Annette’s mood had much improved over yesterday, and she was once again as sweet as the candies she was salivating over. “Oh, for me?”

“Oh, you prefer chocolate, don’t you? You’ve always been asking me about chocolate,” Annette said while Edelgard examined a display of cakes and pastries. “Ooh, candied ginger! Edelgard, do you like candied ginger?”

“No, it’s too strong.”

“Mercie doesn’t like it either, but it’s good for you! I’ll get her a bag. What do you have your eye on?” Annette came over and peered over Edelgard’s shoulder. “I wish I could send a cake all the way to Fhirdiad,” she sighed.

“I promised I’d give Bernadetta an entire chocolate cake with cherries if she did something for me,” Edelgard said, “and I’m fairly confident I’ll have to make good on it.” She looked over the cakes. Some were chocolate, but she didn’t see any with cherries. She’d have to make a special request.

“Aw, that’s sweet. What kind of thing do _I_ have to do for you to get a whole cake?” Annette asked, curling an arm around hers. The smile on her face was infectious.

“Maybe you’ll find out.”

Once Edelgard had put in her order, she and Annette left the bakery in high spirits and plenty of sweets. Edelgard made sure to buy plenty of chocolate—just another little thing that would convince anybody tailing her that her path would lead them to Hapi.

“Do you think Iggy’s done with his glasses by now?” Annette asked. A satisfied sigh poured from her mouth as a puff of white steam as the winter air stung her cheeks. “Oh, and… thanks, Edelgard. I… I really feel a lot better now.”

“Think nothing of it. You’re a delight to spend time with,” Edelgard told her.

_“You’re_ a delight to spend time with.” She took a few skipping steps forward. “I could follow you around all day. We’re just two peas in a pod, aren’t we? We both like sweets, we’re both studying magic, we’re both good with axes…”

“I suppose we are. Although you’re in a different league altogether when it comes to magic.”

“Oh, don’t be so modest. You’re really good at it, considering how quickly you picked it up! It’ll take a lot of practice before I’m as good at swinging an axe as you. But I’ll get there! You’ll see!” She laughed. “You know, I haven’t worried about my father once since we came here.”

“You don’t feel guilty, do you?”

Annette shook her head. “Maybe I should, but like you said, it’s out of my hands. I know he’s getting better, and worrying won’t help anyone!” She sighed. “I hope I can be as mature as you someday.”

“Is that so? I think you’re already quite mature.”

“Me?” She let out a nervous, disarmed laugh. “No, not me. But you, you’re just… you’re strong, you’re pretty, and you’re just so _wise…_ I kinda think you’re everything I want to be.”

“Really?” Edelgard could feel herself blushing. “Well… I have plenty of negative qualities I keep hidden, I assure you, so I don’t think I could be _everything_ you want to be.”

Annette’s head turned with a snap and she let out a surprised gasp. “Ooh, hey! Is that Claude?”

Edelgard’s gaze followed the turn of her head and, just as she’d said, there was Claude, striding through the snowy streets, and at his side was a dark-haired girl draped in a heavy cloak that Edelgard realized after a moment’s study was Hapi. Her disguise, as little it changed her, was shockingly effective. It was incredible how much a simple change of her hair color had done, and with that mane tamed and tied up into a braided diadem crowning her head, she had been utterly transformed.

Still, Edelgard’s heart dropped into her stomach as soon as she realized who she was looking at. What was Claude doing with her this close to the center of town? Didn’t he know that Edelgard was trying to keep the eyes of Those Who Slither _off_ of him?

“Ooh, who’s that girl he’s with?” Annette was nearly bouncing up and down. “What if he’s on a date?”

“If he’s on a date, we should leave him alone,” Edelgard said, taking hold of her and dragging her back. “How would you like it if someone barged in on us while we were… out here?”

“Please?” She frowned. “That girl looks gorgeous! Actually, she kinda looks like him… ooh! Does he have a long-lost sister? Come on, let’s meet her!”

Edelgard’s heart dropped even further into the depths of herself, landing somewhere in her bowels. She stared Annette in the face, half expecting to see something wicked slither behind those bright eyes. All this time Annette had been clinging to her, spending time with her, studying with her, going with her to the sauna, going shopping with her, partnering with her on drills…

It couldn’t be. The agent that was tailing her… could it be _her?_ Sweet little Annette? Would Those Who Slither in the Dark be that cruel?

As soon as she asked herself that question, she knew the answer. Yes, the monsters who had tortured and killed her brothers and sisters one by one in her world were that cruel. Yes, the monsters who had trapped Dimitri in a web of lies were that cruel. Yes, the monsters who had turned sweet Mercedes into the Death Knight were that cruel.

That was not Annette.

Annette looked to Claude and Hapi as they crossed the street and vanished behind a boutique and then back to Edelgard, her brow furrowing. “Um… Edelgard, what’s wrong? Oh… you’re right. Forget about it.” She shook her head. “You’re right. I just got carried away. I’m sorry.”

Edelgard swallowed the lump in her throat. When would they have replaced her? Had it been while she’d been in Fhirdiad?

“You don’t look okay,” Annette said, taking her by the hand. “Um… Edelgard… do you want to go back to the monastery? Maybe lie down for a bit? I’m sorry, we were just having so much fun that it slipped my mind how hard things have been for you.”

“Yes.” Edelgard nodded. “Yes, let’s go… I’m tired.” Now she was just confused. Wouldn’t an agent of Those Who Slither want to stick around and coax her into leading them to their target? Was she just being paranoid? Was Annette just Annette? She’d known her for over five years; how could she be _this_ unsure of herself? “Let’s go back to the monastery.”

The two of them headed back. Edelgard’s mind raced. Was Annette—if she was not actually Annette—trying to lull her into a false sense of security, worried she’d played her hand too early? Or was this just rampant and runaway paranoia? Perhaps if she questioned Kronya, she’d get an answer—surely she would know if any other agents were already running around the monastery.

Her thoughts turned to Dedue as well. His note had said that the other agent would arrive a little over a week from today to replace her. Either he had lied to her to mislead her, or Annette was Annette. Or perhaps this agent, if they even existed at all, was completely separate from the one assigned to study and replace her. What was his true relationship with Those Who Slither in the Dark, the so-called Men in Black who had spared him the fate so many of his people had met in the pogroms and raised him as their spymaster? Whose side was he really on?

She reached up and grazed the cloth barrier of her eyepatch with her fingertips as her eye stung and throbbed behind it. This was nonsense, she told herself, quashing the anxieties taking root and sprouting in the fertile soil of her imagination. Utter nonsense. Annette was Annette, and as for herself, _she_ was a paranoid wreck.

She hoped.

“Is your eye okay?” Annette asked.

“Yes,” Edelgard said. “I’ve just got to become accustomed to this blind spot.”

She and Annette walked together through the front gate of the monastery, past the frozen-over pond and into the great hall. Edelgard kept her eyes—or, rather, eye—on the back of Annette’s neck all the while. If Annette was an impostor, then it would only take a firm application of pressure to the base of her neck to reveal it, but to reveal it here in front of so many people would be a dangerous gamble. Perhaps revealing that yet another one of the Blue Lions had been stolen and replaced would be the final straw Dimitri needed to fully push him against Those Who Slither in the Dark, or perhaps Thales already had a plan in place to disavow her just as he had disavowed Solon. To reveal her in public would also cause pandemonium among the academy and the church worse than Solon’s revelation had, for potentially little gain, and revealing that she knew how to dispel their disguises would possibly implicate her in Glenn’s disappearance—and possibly Dedue as well, since he’d been deliberately keeping her in his blind spot for so long.

Her heart hammered in her chest, her pulse racing, as Annette led her to the dormitories. She considered inviting Annette into her room—or simply letting her invite herself in, as the real Annette would probably do—so she could unmask her there, but that, too, was risky. Edelgard still had her own vial of Claude’s poison, but she couldn’t bear to use it on her and then try to unmask her while unconscious if there was any chance she _wasn’t_ an impostor, and if she _was_ an impostor, then unmasking her, subduing her before she could launch a counterattack, and poisoning her would be difficult for her to manage with no backup.

But Annette, if she was an impostor, had no idea that Edelgard knew how to expose her. If Edelgard played her cards right, she might be able to catch her by surprise and knock her out quickly. A swift jab to the back of the neck, an arm barred across her throat… but how could she bear to do that to her if there was any chance that she was the real Annette?

“Are you okay?” Annette asked, stopping suddenly. “Edelgard, you’re breathing really heavily.”

“Am I?” Edelgard only then became aware that the ragged rush of air in and out that had resonated in her ears with the rush of her pulse had been her own breath. Her chest felt as though it was about to explode. “I—I didn’t notice.”

“You need to lie down. Don’t worry,” Annette said, taking her by the hand. “We’ve just got these stairs to climb and we’ll be done.” She led her up the staircase to the second floor of the dormitories. Shadows from the wall sconces stretched across the stairs as they climbed. Every step Edelgard took seemed to lead her closer and closer to her own grave. There was no more perfect place for an impostor to kill her and replace her than the privacy of her own bedroom.

And of _course_ the impostor Annette was here to replace her.

_I kinda think you’re everything I want to be._

How could Edelgard not have seen it earlier?

She racked her brain. She had to think. If Annette was an impostor, there had to be a tell. Something she wouldn’t know that the real Annette would. If she’d been replaced after the ball, then…

“Remember the winter ball?” she asked. “All that time I spent teaching Felix to dance, and he wouldn’t even get out onto the floor.”

“What are you talking about, Edelgard?” Annette asked. _“I_ danced with him. I think he was almost enjoying himself by the end of it!” she said, giggling.

Edelgard sighed. One point in Annette’s favor, though her paranoia still troubled her. The impostor could have been studying her by that point. Perhaps she would have to think back further. “Oh, that’s right. It was such an eventful night that I mixed up a few details.”

“Eventful is right. I had so much fun! Maybe _we_ could dance together sometime. I… I kinda wanted to that night, but Ingrid scared you off.”

“That sounds nice,” Edelgard said as she and Annette came to a halt at her bedroom door. Down the hall, she noticed that Dedue was no longer stationed at Dimitri’s door, so Bernadetta or Marianne (or both) must have successfully managed to soothe the so-called beast.

Annette opened the door for her and ushered her inside. “Alright, here we are!”

Edelgard had no intention of showing her back to Annette if there was even a one in one hundred chance that she was an impostor. “After you,” she said, beckoning her on.

“Oh, you… You want me to come in with you?” Annette’s cheeks, already flushed from the cold, grew redder. “Um… Do you still want to… hang out? In your room?”

Edelgard nodded.

Annette nervously stepped over the threshold. Edelgard followed her in and swiped a letter opener from her desk as the door swung shut behind her. The thought occurred to her that if she held it to Annette’s throat, she would be doing the same thing she’d chastised Jeralt for doing.

Holding her breath, she crept behind Annette and jabbed her thumb into the base of her neck, her other hand clutching the letter opener and preparing to hold it to her throat at the first sign of even the slightest physical transformation—

_“Ow!”_ Annette stumbled forward, rubbing her hand over the back of her neck. She whirled around to face her, wincing in pain. “What was _that_ for, Edelgard? That really _hurt!”_

Edelgard let the letter opener fall to the floor and nearly fell to her knees herself, overcome with relief. “Sorry,” she mumbled, struggling to remain standing as her knees buckled.

“Oh, um… that’s okay!” Annette reached out to keep her from falling over. “You were just doing one of those, uh, pressure point things, right? I read about those in a book on medicine from Sreng! They say you can fix anything just by pushing on the right part of a person’s body…”

Edelgard nodded.

“Well, I think you pushed on the wrong part.”

“I really thought I had it,” she said, feeling her racing heart slow itself to a more languid pace.

“That’s okay. Just warn me next time you want to practice on me!” Annette laughed, then reached out and pressed the tip of her finger to the tip of Edelgard’s nose. “Boop! What does this fix?” she asked, grinning cheerily.

Edelgard felt herself let out something halfway between a sigh and a laugh, her fingertips tingling as her nerves calmed themselves. “I don’t know,” she said, matching Annette’s smile with her own, “but it’s certainly made me feel better, Annie.”

She laid down, and despite her protests Annette went to tuck her into bed. _“Here comes a blanket,”_ her perpetually cheerful classmate sung, _“and here comes a blanket, and I can’t think of another word that rhymes with blanket, why’d I start this song trying to rhyme a word with ‘blanket’ when the only words that rhyme with it are words like ‘trinket’ and ‘junket’ and neither of those fit this song…”_

“Annette,” Edelgard said, “did you really mean it when you said you wanted to be more like me?”

“Of course! You’re _amazing!”_ Annette answered, stars twinkling in her eyes as she drew a thick and fluffy duvet up to her chin. She sat down on the side of the bed next to her. “So, uh… time to hang out, I guess. How does this work, again?”

“I think we’re doing a good job so far.”

“Great! We’re gonna be the best at hanging out!” Annette chirped.


	24. The Scorpion and the Leopard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard makes a bold offer to Kronya, Burkhart and Anselm begin to make demands of their siblings, and Hapi stands up for herself.

On Sunday afternoon Edelgard practiced her painting with Ignatz, glad to have a classmate whose hobbies gave her an excuse to put aside her mounting issues for an hour or so. Usually, it was easy to persuade Bernadetta to join them, but today her absence left a cold spot in the empty Black Eagles common room. Edelgard had paid little mind to it at first, but as time went on while she painted her subjects for this session, she found herself worrying.

It was hard for her to keep her mind at ease, too, because of the nature of today’s models. Sitting under the banner of the Empire that hung over the walls, her youngest sister Hedwig visibly resisted the urge to fidget as Edelgard and Ignatz worked to capture her image on canvas. Petra stood beside her; poor Hedwig had been terribly nervous and while she had been the one to volunteer for this, she would only have her portrait painted if her new friend among the Black Eagles could accompany her.

Edelgard had no issues committing Petra’s face to the canvas. Hers was a face she knew very well, and while she’d had little time to devote to her hobbies in her world, she had taken a crack at sketching her friends on occasion. While she was nervous about capturing the striking contrast between her tattoos and skin, the ornate braids that held back her hair, the hunter’s gleam in her eyes, she felt reasonably well-prepared.

Hedwig was a different story altogether. To observe her, not merely to look at her but to _observe,_ to study the details of her face, her hair, the bright brown eyes behind her glasses, the nervous tic that occasionally pulled her mouth into a frown for a moment here and there, the fingers that kneaded her dress, made Edelgard’s mouth dry out and her ribs curl tightly around her heart. And the prospect of recreating those details with paint, moving her brush across the canvas and capturing this moment in a single image, made her hand tremble. The thought that she might fail to capture her sister’s likeness worried her now more than Dimitri, Hapi, Byleth, or the plots of Those Who Slither in the Dark.

Fortunately, Edelgard could tell that she wasn’t the only painter overwhelmed by nerves. Ignatz, his new glasses just about indistinguishable from his old ones save for a slightly thicker frame, kept an eye on his canvas with a frown she knew well. It was the frown he wore when he was working with everything he had and worried about whether everything he had was enough. Other than Edelgard, he’d never had a princess as a subject before.

At last, Ignatz stepped back from his easel and let the canvas rest, setting aside his paint palette and brushes. “I-I’m finished,” he announced, his lack of confidence evident in his voice. “It’s, um… it’s been an honor to paint you, Lady Hedwig. And you as well, Petra.”

“I’m finished, too,” Edelgard said as she made the last few brushstrokes she needed to capture the sunlight on Hedwig’s chestnut hair. “You can relax now, Hedy.”

Hedwig let out a deep breath she’d been holding in and relaxed, her shoulders slumping. “Th-Thank you,” she said. “I hope I—I d-did okay through the whole th-thing.”

“You did great, Your Highness,” Ignatz said. “I only hope I’ve done justice to you.”

“C-Can I see yours first, El?” Hedwig asked, and before Edelgard could answer, she had gotten between her and the canvas, and Petra had to struggle to keep apace with her. “It l-looks g-great! A-Amazing!” The huge smile that lit up her face was one Edelgard wished she could have painted, though she didn’t know if she would have been able to bear it. “Petra! Y-You look really g-good in this t-t-too!”

“It is like I am seeing myself in a mirror,” Petra breathed. “Thank you, Edelgard. I was not knowing how fun it could be to be painted.”

“I’m glad you two like it,” Edelgard said. “Honestly, Petra, I feel ashamed it took this long for me to do this for you. Now, I don’t mean to get your hopes up for Ignatz’s painting, but he’s far more skilled than I.”

“Oh, you don’t need to flatter me like that, Edelgard,” Ignatz said, his face turning red. He pushed his slipping glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I wouldn’t want to compete with the likes of you.”

Hedwig and Petra looked at Ignatz’s painting next, and Edelgard had to admit, for all his nerves he had done a fine job of depicting his subjects. Both seemed ready to leap off the canvas. She’d always admired his mastery of color and depth.

Both of the painting’s subjects gasped, astonished. “Wow… I-I’m s-speechless… I-I j-just… I-It’s so…” Hedwig stammered, anxiously kneading her hands together as she tried in vain to summon even a single word more.

“I warned you,” Edelgard said, patting her on the shoulder.

“C-Can I t-t-t-take yours h-home w-w-with me?” Hedwig asked, making Ignatz’s face turn even redder all the way to the tips of his ears. “Um… wh-whenever I g-go home, that is. I-I-I-I’m just s-so…”

“Oh… Don’t you want your big sister’s?” Ignatz asked, his nervous smile shrinking a bit.

Hedwig’s elation immediately vanished. “I…” She looked to Edelgard and ashamedly stared at the floor. “I l-l-love y-yours, t-t-t-t-too, El, b-b-b-but… I d-don’t m-m-m-m-mean…”

“It’s alright,” Edelgard consoled her. “I was hoping Petra would want my portrait, actually.”

“Oh! I would be liking that greatly,” Petra said.

Hedwig was silent for a little while as she struggled to find her voice. “Th-Thank you s-s-so much f-for doing this w-with me,” she told her.

“Nothing would have made me be saying no to this,” Petra said to her, carefully lifting Edelgard’s painting off its easel and setting it down on a desk to dry. “Now we are both having something we can use to remember each other. Thank you, Edelgard. Let us be doing this again sometime.”

Edelgard nodded. “And sooner rather than later.” As much as she’d struggled, the joy on the faces of her friend and her sister brought a prickling warmth to her heart—almost painful in a way, not tugging on her heartstrings but rather yanking them like strands of hair, but welcome nonetheless.

The heady thrill of a hobby well indulged-in did not last much longer after she and Ignatz had packed up their supplies and parted ways, though, because Edelgard made the mistake of deciding that some rigorous exercise could keep her mind clear for an hour longer. But when she arrived at the training hall, she found pandemonium awaiting her.

As he often did, Dimitri took out his anger with a weapon in hand, and Edelgard was relieved that this time he was at least in possession of enough of his wits that he hadn’t broken everything in the training hall yet yet. Still, as he stood in the center of the hall with sweat glistening on a patchwork of bruised and scarred skin, clutching a lance with a death grip as his battered chest rose and fell in pace with his pants for breath, it was easy to see that he wasn’t well. Edelgard could see it. The rest of the students spending that Sunday afternoon honing their skills in the training hall could see it. And of course, his reluctant sparring partner Felix could see it as well.

“Face me,” Dimitri growled, leveling his lance at him.

“Are you kidding me?” Felix scoffed, throwing his sword to the ground. “I’ve done my training for the morning, boar. Go back to your den before they put you in a cage.”

“I need more power. Face me, Felix. Forge me into a stronger blade.”

“Can you even hear yourself right now?” He rolled his eyes at the mad prince. “Looks like you need a new muzzle, too. Go back to the infirmary before you drop dead.”

 _“Shut up, Glenn!”_ Dimitri’s snarl turned every head in the room, and Felix looked equal parts enraged and disgusted. _“Don’t you dare laugh at me. Don’t you dare sneer at me!”_ With an enraged roar, he tore across the hall, kicking up plumes of sand as he lunged forward. He made it only a few steps, though, before he collapsed to the ground, the sand underneath him alight with black blossoms as blood from freshly reopened wounds spilled onto the ground.

Felix shook his head and walked away. Everyone else stopped and stared, wide-eyed with slack-jawed amazement and disbelief, as Dimitri struggled to right himself, propping himself up on one knee and one hand as his other hand scrabbled for the weapon he’d dropped. His naked chest heaved, stained with blood and sweat and now encrusted in damp sand, and the glare in his eyes as they darted from person to person spoke to the impotent fury and intense humiliation.

Edelgard and Dedue were at his side in an instant.

“Your Highness,” Dedue scolded him, helping him to his feet, “I had told you this was unwise.”

Dimitri shook his head, his grip tightening on his lance. “No. I need to become stronger.”

“He’s right,” Edelgard said. “Dima, you’re a mess. The _last_ thing you should be doing is holding any sort of weapon, let alone exerting yourself. Your body is too broken—”

In response, he let out another wild, furious snarl and snatched up his lance, hurling it like a javelin. Across the hall, Caspar looked up at the long blade embedded in the wall that was now brushing just against the top of his head; the tiniest trickle of blood rolled down the middle of his forehead, between his eyes, and down to the tip of his nose.

 _“Does_ this _look broken to you?!”_ he snarled, ripping himself away from Dedue. Blood dribbled from a split lip; the purplish and black bruising around both eyes made him look especially skeletal. His knees buckled as he fought to keep himself upright.

Edelgard caught him before he could fall again. “You’re going back to the infirmary,” she said, “and I won’t hear any argument against it.”

“No.”

“You’re hardly in a position to refuse. Dedue, please help me carry him—”

“Dedue, I forbid you from following this woman’s orders,” Dimitri snapped.

“I do not care,” Dedue shot back, his voice icy. “I will not allow you to destroy yourself.”

“You will if I command you.”

“I will not.” Without any further ado, he grabbed Dimitri and flung him over his shoulder like a sack of flour. “Please pardon His Highness,” he told Edelgard. “He was in higher spirits after Bernadetta and Marianne spoke to him, or so it seemed. I overestimated him.”

She accompanied him and Dimitri to the infirmary, where Manuela was understandably unhappy to see him again. Fortunately for everybody involved, Dimitri had mellowed out considerably on his way from the training hall.

“What in the Goddess’ name did you _do_ to yourself?” she chastised him as Dedue laid him down on a spare cot. “I’d slap you for this, Your Highness, if I wasn’t afraid that would be just the last thing I’d need to kill you stone dead.”

Edelgard noticed Gilbert sleeping nearby and wondered to herself how he was doing, for Annette’s sake, before turning her attention back to the prince.

“What did I say to you, Dimitri, when I had you discharged?” Manuela asked. While she cast a healing spell over his reopened wounds to close them again, Dimitri mumbled something incoherent. “That’s right. Don’t even _think_ about any sort of training for at least a week. And what did you do?”

“I must be stronger,” he muttered.

She lifted his bruised and blackened arm and let it flop down. “I don’t understand how anyone is even capable of doing _this_ much damage to his body without dying,” she said, rubbing her temples. “Oh, you are just _adamant_ about making this the worst week of my life, aren’t you, Your Highness?” She stood up and turned to Edelgard and Dedue. “You two keep an eye on him while I go find something to… dull the pain.”

Manuela left the infirmary for her quarters, which Edelgard knew was stocked with plenty of things that would ‘dull the pain,’ whether for herself or her patient, and left her and Dedue to watch over Dimitri.

Dimitri struggled to lift his head. “El,” he moaned. “I’m… I’m sorry.”

Kneeling at his side, Edelgard gently pressed a hand to his forehead and guided his head back down. “You heard Professor Manuela. I’d like it if you didn’t disobey her again.”

“Mother and Father are right. I am a failure,” he said. “I… I understand now. Seeing what has become of… What has been done to…” Tears welled up in his eyes. “Professor… My Prof— _Our_ professor… Byleth is…”

“She’s okay. She’s been through a terrible experience, but she is still—”

“No, no, you don’t understand.” Dimitri shook his head and grabbed her by the wrist, his voice cracking. “Those monsters… all this time, I—I thought I was the culmination of their—of those twisted experiments and horrible rituals. But… But Mercedes and I… all along… failures. Failed prototypes… for _her.”_

“Dimitri, I think you have the wrong idea—”

“No!” His voice, as weak and strangled as it was, still filled the room, and even as tears leaked from his eyes they turned sharp and icy. “No, El—El, don’t you _see?_ They turned her into Rhea _—_ and that was what they had meant to do to _me.”_

“That’s nonsense,” Edelgard retorted, but he wouldn’t hear it.

“Edelgard, you must know the truth. Dedue, tell her.”

Dedue’s brow furrowed. “Are you sure, sir?”

“Please.”

He took a deep breath. “Lady Edelgard, Archbishop Rhea is not human. Surely you know of the Immaculate One, the great beast that arose to defend Adrestia during the War of Heroes. That is her true form. Since the founding of the Church of Seiros, she herself has ruled over humanity from the shadows. We have safeguarded this knowledge for a thousand years.”

Edelgard tried to look shocked. “I somehow knew she wasn’t human,” she said. “Still, you cannot connect what has happened to Byleth to—”

“Your skepticism of the church is…” Dimitri gritted his teeth. “I respect it. But if you can still doubt that they are the enemy after _this,”_ he hissed, “then I cannot trust you as an ally.”

Edelgard was at a loss for words. At this moment, any doubt she tried to engender in him would amount to nothing—Thales had set things up too well. “Our professor hasn’t been turned into Rhea,” she said instead, knowing a direct approach would only drive him apart from her. “Speak to her, Dimitri. You’ll see that she is still herself. Despite everything, she is still Byleth.”

“Is she? How do you know?”

“I’ve spoken to her. She’s afraid. Afraid that you will no longer see her as the same person, or even human at all. She has been changed, but not in the way you think. Just talk to her. You don’t know how much she truly cares about you. That part of her has not changed.”

Dimitri’s expression softened. “I… I was powerless.” He closed his eyes. “Without power, one cannot protect themselves, let alone those they…” His voice grew quieter. Fresh tears squeezed themselves through his eyelids and ran across his face, and as his chest heaved he began to weep.

A concerned frown creased Dedue’s face. “Your Majesty…”

“Majesty? What majesty? What good is my crown if I couldn’t save her? What good is my power, my Crests, if I cannot spare those I care about from meeting my fate?”

“You are strong, Your Majesty,” he said as Dimitri continued to fight against his tears. “I believe that you can carry our hopes and dreams.”

Dimitri let out a deep and heavy sigh. Edelgard was struck by how much the sight of him, weak and despairing in his powerlessness, reminded her of her father. “Dedue… if you believe I can still find justice for your people, in spite of this…”

“I do.”

“I will try.” The tension bled from his body and he sank deeper into his cot. “But I am tired,” he whispered.

“Then rest. I’ll ask Professor Byleth to visit you when she can,” Edelgard assured him, carding a hand through the mess of his hair. The rise and fall of his chest slowed to a soft, steady rhythm as he slipped into a light, but much-needed sleep.

She would see to it that he learned the truth, so that the fear and confusion that had clouded so much of his mind could be swept away and a flame of righteous anger and a drive to create a better world by his own vision and through his own hands would replace it.

And she knew exactly how to do it now.

* * *

In the old days when it had just been herself and Hubert, Edelgard often found solace in the old adage that there was no rest for the wicked, mainly because it meant to her that as a wicked person she had an excuse to work herself to the bone. She was certain she no longer loathed herself so much now, but the phrase still carried tremendous power as it sat in the back of her mind.

After seeing to Dimitri, Edelgard decided to pay Kronya a visit. Her location was a closely guarded secret, but Jeralt was happy to take some time away from the wild goose chase for Glenn and Hapi to help her and Hubert sneak into the catacombs where she was being imprisoned. She’d considered bringing Byleth along, but Byleth’s schedule as a professor overlapped even less with Jeralt’s than Edelgard’s schedule as a student did, and besides, having the dreaded Fell Star at her side while speaking to Kronya might have proven counterproductive.

“I could use an excuse to visit the little creep anyway,” he said as he led them through the bone-lined hallways. “Gotta feed her at least once a day,” he added, explaining the bowl of cold porridge he was holding.

“Are you certain she needs to eat?” Hubert asked.

“Whether or not she needs it,” Edelgard said, “it might make her more cooperative.”

Kronya was waiting for them in a makeshift cell, trussed like a hog with her legs bound into a kneeling position and her hands behind her back. Her gray skin was corpselike in the dim light, but her eyes were wide and alert and immediately flitted toward her guests, and a smile crossed her face.

“Oh, visitors,” she said. “Hello there.”

“Hi,” Jeralt said. “Ready for lunch?”

“I sure am! So, how about you untie me so I can feed myself with some dignity and…”

“No.” He dug a spoon into the porridge. “Open your mouth.”

“Do you trust me _that_ little?”

“You bet your ass I do. Open up.”

Watching Jeralt feed Kronya was without a doubt the single most surreal thing Edelgard had ever witnessed in her life, and she’d seen the so-called almighty goddess Sothis (who was actually a child) spy on Byleth’s students during exams to make sure they weren’t cheating.

“Sorry it’s cold,” Jeralt said, his spoon scraping the bottom of the bowl, “but it beats roaches, doesn’t it?”

Kronya tried to no avail to wipe a smear of porridge off her cheek with her tongue. “Yes,” she admitted, “but it’s been a long time since then. So, if you came down here to make sure my stomach didn’t digest itself, what’s _Edel_ doing here?”

“I’m here to ask you a few questions,” Edelgard said. “I do hope you’ll continue to cooperate with us.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“Solon, Thales, Cornelia, and yourself are all working together, aren’t you?”

“Well, we _were_ until Remire, when Thales cut Solon loose. My job was to be the liaison between the two of them. Oh, and also to make sure Cornelia’s kids made it back to her after Solon was finished borrowing them.”

“So, were all four of you involved in the Tragedy of Duscur?”

Kronya laughed. “That was before my time. I wasn’t brought to the surface until six months ago, when they chose me to take Glenn’s place. But the rest of them sure were.”

“And Dimitri doesn’t know. He thinks the Church did it.”

“Of course he does. And is that so hard to believe, given what those beasts _really_ do? His Glorious Majesty is _such_ a gullible idiot.”

“And Thales is Rodrigue Fraldarius?”

“Oh, you catch on quickly, don’t you? Yes, we’ve been play-acting the most _adorable_ father-son duo. Have you seen how _jealous_ poor Feelie is about us?”

Edelgard wondered how Dimitri would react if Kronya told him the truth. It would come straight from the horse’s mouth, as the saying went. It might be her only shot at saving him. But that would mean having to trust Kronya to betray Thales far more deliberately than she already had.

“So, Kronya, how do you feel about Thales?” she asked. She still remembered the grisly fate Kronya had met in her world all those years ago—all that swagger and bravado had vanished in an instant when Solon had plunged his hand into her chest and ripped out her heart, and she had begged and pleaded for somebody to help her as she had crawled across the ground, her life force ebbing as black ichor pooled around her. In those last few moments before death took her, she had looked childlike, almost _innocent._ She had never imagined that her own allies would have strung her along, betrayed her, and used her as a blood sacrifice. “What has he done to earn your loyalty?”

“What _hasn’t_ he done?” Kronya scoffed. “Because of him, I could see the surface of the Earth. I could lie underneath the sunlight and count the stars. I could feel the wind on my face. I could eat beef and mutton and pheasant and fish of all sorts,” she said, licking her lips as drool dripped down her chin, “and fresh fruits, and vegetables, and even pastries and sweet buns and sherbets and—”

“Yeah, yeah, we get the idea,” Jeralt said.

“And as you’ve told us,” Edelgard continued, “if Thales learns that you’ve revealed such sensitive secrets, he’ll kill you.”

“Oh, of course. I mean, that’s just the sensible thing to do!”

As soon as the words left Kronya’s mouth, her brain caught up with what she’d just said and her face contorted into a horrified grimace.

Hubert spoke up. “In other words, at this moment, your life is forfeit.”

Edelgard smiled. “Exactly. But is there anything Thales has been giving you that _we_ cannot give you? You’ve been well-fed here. No… cockroaches. Even the lowliest human can see the sun from time to time.”

“You want me to… betray Thales.” Kronya’s brow furrowed.

“Imagine for a moment that you’ve done everything he has asked for. What then? Do you think he would let you live out your days here to your heart’s content? Or rather, will he send you back underground? Or… _dispose_ of you?”

Jeralt and Hubert both gave Edelgard a look, their brows furrowing. Both of them knew where she was going with this and neither seemed comfortable with it.

“You know how ruthless the company you keep is. Has it occurred to you that Thales had distanced himself from Solon so that he could use him as a scapegoat?” Edelgard asked Kronya.

Kronya shook her head. “That’s ridiculous. He wouldn’t just—”

“Thales killed Solon to keep his lies alive.”

 _“Thales killed Solon?!”_ Her voice rang out through the catacombs, an echoing shriek bouncing off the walls and vanishing into the distance. She looked shocked; almost heartbroken, in fact.

Edelgard pressed on. “Thales engineered Solon’s death after poisoning Dimitri against him. He used him and disposed of him when he knew it would give him the greatest advantage. He and Cornelia will do the same to you.”

Kronya shook her head. “No. No, no, no—”

“The more you deny it, the more you know it to be true. You’re just as expendable as Solon was. Perhaps even more so. How many corpses just like you do you think Thales has turned into stepping stones as he cuts a path to greater heights of power?”

“Shut up!”

“He might even kill you personally. Or perhaps the time will come when he will whisper the right words in Dimitri’s ear and have him kill you.”

“It wouldn’t be hard,” Hubert added. “It seems His Majesty already intensely dislikes you. One little push…”

“You’re wrong! I’m important! Thales _needs_ me to conquer the surface. He _chose_ me to help him!”

“Do you really think you’re important to him?” Edelgard cocked her head. _“You?_ He can hardly stand you. He’s probably plotting how to get rid of you at this very moment. It would just be a matter of sending a new agent to the monastery. Another man to wear Glenn’s face… and while your corpse slowly decays in some dark hole, everybody would be none the wiser.”

“You stupid vermin! The new agent is coming to replace _you!”_ Kronya crowed. “That’s right! Your days are numbered, so if you think you can intimidate me, you’re so, _so_ wrong—”

“Is _that_ what he told you?” Edelgard said, raising her eyebrows. “And you _believed_ him?”

Kronya stopped shouting. She stopped speaking at all. Edelgard had struck a nerve. She knew that another agent was, in fact, on their way to Garreg Mach, and she _did_ fear being replaced.

“But back to Thales for a moment. We can give you everything he did. And on top of that, we can even give you _more.”_

Her lip curled into a sneer, but she said nothing, merely continuing to glare at Edelgard.

“I know we’re merely primitive savages to you, but we are primitive savages who live under a real sky,” Edelgard said to her. “We might not have your inconceivable technology, but we have sunlight, moonlight, starlight, warm ocean breezes and cold northern winds, good food… need I go on? With us, you can have a life of your own.”

Kronya threw her head back and laughed. “Sorry, Edel. You’re forgetting one thing other Thales gives me.” She grinned wickedly. “He lets me kill.”

“And when did he last let you do that?”

Kronya blinked bemusedly, her smile faltering. Edelgard knew from her eavesdropping that she’d been very frustrated as of late with how few opportunities she’d been given to practice her favorite hobby.

“If you want to kill people, you can be a mercenary,” Edelgard said to her, earning a dirty look from Jeralt.

“You seriously want me to _join_ you?” Kronya let out another forced laugh. “I knew you rats were stupid, but I hadn’t imagined you were _this_ stupid!”

Edelgard felt something hot and wet splatter against her cheek and realized that Kronya had just spat at her. Without hesitating she drew the saber from her side and brought the flat of the blade under Kronya’s chin, forcing her to lift her head and look her in the eyes.

“Lady Edelgard,” Hubert hissed, infuriated by Kronya’s disrespect, “merely say the word and I will conjure a light—”

“No,” Edelgard said to him. “I want her to be herself when she hears what I have to say.” She kept her eyes trained on the helpless assassin. “Listen to me, Kronya,” she said. “I’ve seen the future. I know how you die. You die crawling on the ground like a worm, whimpering and begging and pleading at us to save you while you bleed to death, all because your so-called allies decided that the withered black rock you call a heart was of more use to them in their hands than in your chest. So the choice is yours, Kronya. Work for us—for a life you can be proud to call your own—or work for them and allow yourself to be discarded like a splintered axe. From this point on, there are two different people you can become. One of them has a future. The other does not.”

Kronya glared at her, then looked down at the saber under her chin, then looked at Jeralt. Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. Edelgard wondered if the threat of her death would even do anything. Perhaps Kronya was simply too immature to have any fear of her own mortality, regardless of how many people she’d killed.

“I’ll leave you to consider my offer,” Edelgard said, turning her back on Kronya and sheathing her saber.

Jeralt led her away. “Cethleann’s tits,” he swore, shuddering. “No wonder you were the emperor in your world.”

* * *

The next morning, the Blue Lions gathered in their common room, as they did every Monday morning, but the atmosphere was fraught. Most of the class was still marked by the ravages of Friday’s battle, and a quiet tension filled the air and simmered between Ingrid, Felix, and Sylvain. Ignatz was trying to look small, though Raphael took up as much space as ever. Bernadetta was absent. Dimitri, too, was absent, and Dedue with him; what remained of the class waited and wondered to themselves if Byleth would show up to teach it at all.

Edelgard found herself worrying as the minutes dragged on. She hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Archbishop Rhea since their meeting last week, and her conspicuous absence _now_ of all times unnerved her. What if Rhea had snatched Byleth away in the night, or early this morning? In her world, when Byleth had gained the powers of Sothis, Rhea had latched onto her and insisted on caring for her herself. It had been days before Edelgard had seen her teacher again, and all the while she had wondered whether Rhea was capable of brainwashing people. Once again, things were changing. Things were too different now for her to predict, and she felt as lost now as she had back in her world.

Annette broke her concentration. “Hi, Edelgard!” she chirped, ever the embodiment of a morning person. “Do you mind if I sit next to you?”

“Not at all,” Edelgard said. Although she’d ruled out Annette as an impostor, something about her behavior and how closely she’d begun to cling to her still bothered her. Perhaps Those Who Slither in the Dark were harder to root out than she’d initially assumed, or perhaps…

“Thanks so much for being with me this weekend,” Annette said as she sat down at the desk next to hers and readied herself for Byleth’s lecture—if Byleth did in fact show up to give one. “It really did help me take my mind off of my father.”

“And how is he…”

“Great! He’s still in the infirmary, but Professor Manuela says he’s on the mend.” Annette smiled. “I’ll try to visit him after class if I can. I just hope he’s ready to come back to us now; he might never get another chance.”

“I’m glad to hear it. For a father and a daughter to have things left unsaid between them… it is hard to bear. Say what you must to him.”

“I’m so grateful to have you as a friend, Edelgard,” she said, patting her on the shoulder and leaving her hand there for a very long time. “As… a girl friend.”

“I value your friendship, too,” Edelgard said, taking her hand. “Your… girl friendship.” A blush spread across Annette’s cheeks.

While they waited for class to begin—if it ever did—Edelgard noticed her occasionally glancing toward Felix, as though to gauge his reaction to something, and the thought occurred to her that perhaps she didn’t have to worry even a little bit about Annette being an impostor anymore, because her suspicious behavior was clearly intended to make him jealous. Worse than being caught in a face-stealing assassin’s plot, Edelgard was in fact trapped in the center of a love triangle.

“Do you think Byleth will show up?” Annette wondered aloud as the minutes dragged by.

Almost as if on cue, the doors swung open and Byleth walked up to her place at the head of the classroom. Her mint green hair seemed to glow from the shafts of morning sunlight that fell upon it. Everyone seemed stunned by her appearance.

“Good morning,” she said. Edelgard noted that she sounded quite hoarse. “I’m glad you’re all safe.”

Silence filled the room.

Ignatz tentatively raised a shaking hand. “Um… Professor?”

“Yes, uh… Ignatz?”

“I—I’m sorry if this is out of line of me, but… what happened to you?” he asked. “We all saw you disappear, and when you came back…”

“I gained the power of the Goddess,” Byleth answered matter-of-factly, though Edelgard could hear a bit of pain in her voice she’d never noticed before.

Ignatz was dumbstruck. “Did you… really… Th-The Goddess?”

“You mean… like Saint Seiros?” Ingrid asked, leaning forward with her hands clutching the edge of her desk.

As a rustling wave of hushed whispered rippled through the class, Raphael raised his hand. “But you’re still our professor, right? Did anything else change besides your hair and eyes? Are your arms bigger? How do your abs look?”

Byleth looked bemused by his line of questioning. “Um… A lot has changed. I’m still figuring it out. Not sure about abs. I haven’t looked.”

“You look like a completely different person, Professor,” Sylvain chimed in. “Dare I say, somehow even _more_ beautiful than—”

Ingrid whacked him on the head with her notebook.

“Sylvain’s got a point,” Annette added. “You don’t look like yourself anymore.”

“Maybe I’m not,” Byleth said, completely deadpan.

Annette’s face turned ashen, and Edelgard suddenly felt something very warm and very soft squeeze her hand under her desk very tightly. “D-Don’t scare us like that, Professor! You _are_ still you, right? …Right?”

Byleth seemed genuinely taken aback by Annette’s reaction. Her face fell, her lips curling in a frown. “Oh… That was a joke. I’m sorry. I haven’t totally realized how… different I am now. I was telling a joke.”

“With all due respect, Professor,” Sylvain said, “you need to work on your delivery. I could give you some lessons tonight if you’d—”

Ingrid tried to give him another whack on the head, only for him to deftly duck under her blow, popping back up with a mischievous grin on his face.

“Thank you, Sylvain, but I’ve been a bit tired. Anyway, it’ll take some adjusting to, but I’m still me. Despite everything, I’m still me.”

The class seemed satisfied.

Then Dimitri entered.

He was a ghastly sight, pale and worn, and still looked as weary and haggard as he had yesterday, though his uniform hid his bruised body. His shoulders and chest heaved with every breath as he leaned against Dedue to prop up his unsteady legs.

Byleth’s brow furrowed with concern. “Dimitri… you don’t look well. Maybe you should stay in the infirmary—”

“Professor,” Dimitri spoke. His voice was low, quiet, and hoarse, but it still cut through the air with a quiet intensity. “It is… as I feared. That hair. Those eyes…”

“Dimitri…”

“I am well enough to sit down and take notes, at least,” he insisted, stumbling to an empty desk with Dedue’s help. “I just… wanted to see you, Professor.” As he propped himself up against it, one hand drifted self-consciously to his hair, curling a lock of it around one finger. “You did not _lose_ something as a result of this, did you?” He looked small, frightened, as the question left his mouth—like a child who’d lost his mother.

Byleth opened her mouth to speak, and Edelgard knew she would have liked to say something about Sothis. “I don’t know yet,” she said instead, shaking her head. “I’ve gained the power of the Goddess, but I still feel like myself.”

“The Goddess…” he whispered, bowing his head as though in prayer.

He collapsed in a flurry of limp limbs; Dedue just barely managed to catch him before he fell. “Your Highness!” he gasped, cradling his liege. “I am sorry, Professor,” he said to Byleth. “I expected he would only have the strength to visit. Bringing him here to see you was the most I could do.”

“I understand,” Byleth said. “You’re excused. But first…” She walked toward the two of them, took her hand, and laid it on Dimitri’s brow, brushing aside his hair with her thumb. The rest of the class looked on in awe, as though they were witnessing a saint blessing one of her apostles.

“It’s okay,” she told Dimitri. “It’s going to be okay. It’s all going to be okay.”

* * *

After class Edelgard made her way to the rookery, hoping for another messenger owl from Enbarr. A greedy worry burning deep within her demanded constant updates to the situation that pushed almost all other concerns from her head, even the equally great fear she felt over whatever unknown events were playing out in her world. Dedue was there and paid her no mind as he rolled a small, thin slip of paper around a carrier pigeon’s leg and sent it off. She noticed Joachim waiting there, too, deep in thought.

Edelgard found not one but two surly owls waiting for her, one of which tried to peck at her fingers as she took the letter from it. Both letters were sealed with wax and stamped with the sigil of the Adrestian double-headed eagle. Finding a secluded corner of the rookery and pressing her back to the wall so that no one could eavesdrop on her, she opened both of them in turn.

The first was from Burkhart:

> _Dear Edelgard,_
> 
> _I am writing to you to implore you to speak out in favor of my ascension to the imperial throne. I have reason to believe that our father’s will naming Anselm as his successor in my place was an elegant forgery. While I have many of the noble families on my side already, you must help me. Duke Ludwig von Aegir, like Marquise Vestra, is assuming a neutral position while the rest of the great noble houses squabble among themselves. As his future daughter-in-law, I beseech you to write to him and sway his mind. The future of the entire Adrestian Empire is at stake. Anselm is an egomaniacal, revanchist rat obsessed with the traditional values we rightfully divested ourselves from over one hundred years ago, and given that you, Hubert, and Ferdinand are of certain persuasions, you all have a vested interest in stopping him from becoming emperor. The tyrant may even wish to start a war against the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus and the Leicester Alliance to solidify his rule and quash internal opposition. I know that you and Anselm have always been close, but I beg you to look past that and see the true danger he poses. For the sake of peace and freedom, we must put an end to his self-serving coup. And if your brother should ask you to side with him, do not listen to the lies he will surely tell you about me._
> 
> _Your dear brother,_
> 
> _Burkhart von Hresvelg_

The second was from Anselm:

> _Dearest El,_
> 
> _I write this letter to you confident in my hopes that you will respond favorably and back my rightful ascension to the imperial throne. Our father was of sound mind when he altered his will to name me his successor and his wishes must be respected in spite of Burkhart’s ungrateful and entitled whining. While many of the great noble houses of Adrestia are choosing to side with me, though, Duke Ludwig von Aegir and Marquise Vestra remain frustratingly neutral. You, my El, must write to Ludwig and ask him as his future daughter-in-law to support me. Burkhart is a superficial and image-obsessed fop who has spent years making himself look the part of emperor while lacking any internal qualities that would make him a great ruler—all empty artifice over a hollow shell. As he only cares for his own popularity, he does not have what it takes to make the hard decisions of government as I do. The entire Adrestian Empire will be weak and sickly under his so-called leadership. The Holy Kingdom of Faerghus may even seek to invade our borders and claim more of our territory in the wake of his mismanagement. For the sake of freedom and peace, we have an ethical duty to stop his pathetic coup. Whatever heinous and pernicious lies Burkhart tells about me and my character, remember that I have always been there for you and will always hold you in my heart._
> 
> _Your closest brother,_
> 
> _Anselm von Hresvelg_

Edelgard rolled her eyes. Oh, brother.

Joachim sidled up to her. “Is Anselm begging you for help, too?”

She folded the letters and put them away. “I’m not the only one?”

“Afraid not. I got a letter from him just yesterday asking for help in getting Count Bergliez on his side.” He sighed. “I’d never realized that he and Burk hated each other so much.”

“So… will you help him?”

“I don’t want to help _either_ of them. They shouldn’t be fighting. And they shouldn’t be drawing _us_ into it, either. You know who else got a letter from him asking for help? Hedwig! She’s barely thirteen, what the _fuck_ is she supposed to do—sorry, sorry, language, I know. But I digress. What do you think?”

“I think Burkhart has the more solid claim to the throne,” Edelgard said. “Of course, I support him.”

Joachim’s brows arched. “Really? Well, that’s a relief. But aren’t you worried that if Anselm wins, those of us who side with Burkhart might be charged with sedition?”

“It cuts both ways,” Edelgard pointed out to him. “Burkhart is just as likely to do the same to his enemies. When there was a succession crisis between Lycaeon IV and Agnes II—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. So doesn’t that worry you? Are you that sure Anselm would let you off lightly just because you’re his favorite?”

“I’ll admit there’s risk, but that’s the price of taking a stand. If you stand for nothing, Joachim, then what will you fall for?”

Joachim was taken aback, but let out a nervous laugh. “Wow… you really are just a completely different person now, aren’t you? I mean, the other day when you broke Justine’s arm, that should’ve been enough for me to get it, but…”

“Garreg Mach changes people,” Edelgard said, “doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. The one thing that hasn’t changed, though, is you’re just as stubborn as before. But as for me, I, uh… I have a stomachache,” he said, turning his back to her and heading for the stairs. He leaped out of the way when Cyril rushed up the staircase, as though afraid to so much as brush against the boy.

“Oh, hi, Edelgard,” Cyril said, panting a bit as he held a stack of envelopes in his hand. “Is any of those owls going to Enbarr?”

Edelgard looked to the owl that had tried to bite her fingers off. Its far more good-natured companion had already flown off, unfortunately. “Yes, this one is,” she said, “though it’s a bit ornery.”

“I can deal with ornery. Got these letters from Lady Rhea to send.”

“About the succession crisis, I presume?”

“Dunno about that,” Cyril said. “I’d assume so.”

“Where is Lady Rhea, by the way?” Edelgard asked him. “I haven’t seen her for days.”

Cyril shrugged. “Dunno. I haven’t seen her. Cardinal Aelfric gave me these letters and asked me to send ‘em on her behalf.”

“You haven’t _seen_ her?”

“Nope. She hasn’t even been sleeping in her chambers. I didn’t hear anything about her leaving, but she’s… Well, she can’t have _left,_ ‘cuz these envelopes have got her seal and handwriting on ‘em,” he said as he avoided the owl’s beak and talons and affixed the letters to it. “Now go on! Go on!”

As the owl took to the sky, he looked over his hands to make sure none of his fingers had gotten nicked.

“So she must be somewhere _in_ the monastery,” Edelgard supposed, her thoughts turning to the Holy Tomb deep below the earth. There was no way into it except for some strange mechanism that only Rhea knew how to operate. Edelgard had brought the Flame Emperor’s troops into it only because Rhea had left the way opened when she had taken Byleth and the Black Eagles down there, but that wouldn’t help her get inside now even if she wanted to.

“I guess. But it must be somewhere I don’t know about.” Cyril thought for a moment. “The Holy Mausoleum, maybe. Or the Goddess Tower. But those are rotten places to sleep. I don’t like the idea of Lady Rhea being shut up in either of those places for days, even if she wants to be there.”

“Nor do I.” It sounded to Edelgard as though Rhea was plotting something, something she hadn’t been able to put into motion with Seteth breathing down her neck in her world. But why had she started plotting _before_ Byleth had been transformed? Did she even know it had happened?

“Oh, and that reminds me,” Cyril said. “So, um, your professor… I noticed she looks kinda like Lady Rhea now. Like she could be her daughter or something.”

Edelgard laughed. He’d gotten it backwards, actually.

“I didn’t mean it as a joke. She really does. She looks kinda like Flayn, too. I wonder if Lady Rhea, Seteth, Flayn, and Byleth are all related or something.” He peered wistfully over the stone windowsill and watched the birds flutter by. “Wonder if I could change my hair and eyes like that.”

“You don’t like them as you are?”

Edelgard could swear she saw Cyril blush. “Didn’t mean anything like that,” he said to her. “Just… an improvement’s an improvement, right?”

“Be careful what you wish for,” she told him. “When people’s hair or eyes suddenly change… it usually means something very painful has happened to them.”

“Huh.” Cyril ruminated on her words. “If it took a lot of pain to be a part of Lady Rhea’s family…” He shook his head. “Uh, never mind. Nothing.” He headed for the stairs, his head bowed, clearly embarrassed by what he’d almost said.

Edelgard watched him leave. Rhea would never give him what he wanted, merely stringing him along with unspoken promises he had only ever assumed she had made to him until he bled to death in service of her mad whims. He wasn’t that much different to Rhea, she supposed, as Kronya was to Thales—blind to the fact that the loyalty he thought went both ways was in fact a one-way street. Unlike Kronya, though, he wasn’t a captive audience, and Edelgard could only watch him vanish down the staircase as quickly as he had come up them.

* * *

The next few days crawled by agonizingly slowly, and with each day, Edelgard felt as though a new weight was added to her shoulders. Jeralt, too, was bowing under the pressure; with each passing day, Thales and Cornelia hounded him even more relentlessly; Edelgard could have sworn she’d heard him cursing the two of them out from all the way across the monastery at one point. There was a frantic, painful energy hanging in the air all throughout Garreg Mach—a sort of manic dread. Everyone seemed to feel it in different ways, if not for different reasons. Even Hilda of all people managed to be a little snippy at times.

Edelgard wondered how long Cornelia would put that marriage proposal she’d been talking about on hold. As soon as she left for Enbarr, Hapi would be safe, but with each day that dragged on it felt as though she would never leave until she’d recaptured her wayward ‘daughter.’ Out of all the things she had to worry about, that particular thread was one her mind tugged on most often. She at least wished she could have met Claude’s oh-so-trustworthy spy herself to put her mind at ease, but as the week went on, she knew that if she ventured out, she would risk exposing Hapi to her enemies. And on top of all that, Rhea was still in hiding. What was she waiting for? And then there was the new agent scheduled to arrive at Garreg Mach next week, if Dedue’s warning had been accurate…

That night, Edelgard visited Kronya again. She had visited Kronya every day, although her schedule as a student and Jeralt’s schedule as a knight covering up the disappearances of two highly sought-after people rarely aligned. Kronya reacted flippantly to her overtures and often tried to drown out anything she tried to say with incoherent screeching, but she could tell that she was making headway. _Some_ headway, at least—but likely not enough. That was where today’s secret weapon came in.

Jeralt fed the prisoner the requisite cold gruel (it still unnerved Edelgard to see him spoon-feeding her like a baby), and when the bowl was empty Edelgard produced from her bag a special treat wrapped in a neat little bundle of wax paper—a pastry stuffed with raspberry jelly, which she dangled tantalizingly under the prisoner’s nose.

Kronya leaned forward and tried to bite it, only for Edelgard to yank it away and leave her teeth clenched around thin air. “No. Not yet. Are you going to listen to me today? If you behave yourself, I’ll feed it to you.”

“And if I don’t?”

Edelgard looked to Hubert. “You like raspberry pastries, don’t you, Hubert?”

“I often find them far too sweet for my liking, Lady Edelgard,” he said with a wry grin, “but _that_ one in particular I would gladly make an exception for. It comes from that one bakery in town, does it not? The one you can smell from the walls of the monastery on a cold day when the wind is right?”

“Would you feel bad if you, say, ate this in front of Kronya?” she asked, wiggling it under his nose. “If you had to hear her stomach growl and twist itself into knots with every bite you took?”

“Not in the slightest, my lady.”

Kronya laughed. “You call _this_ torture?”

“No,” Edelgard said to her. “I don’t. This is about incentives. I’m willing to feed this to you if you behave,” she said. “Hear me out. And then think. You only have a few days left before your replacement arrives. This pastry—if you behave—could be the last you’ll ever eat… but only if you choose poorly.”

Edelgard repeated the same argument to Kronya that she’d repeated yesterday and the day before, and Kronya listened patiently without interrupting.

“So, what do you think about my offer now?” Edelgard asked Kronya as the prisoner licked the last few crumbs and bits of red jelly from her gray lips.

This,” Kronya said, and she stuck out her tongue. “You’re an idiot. If I side against Thales, he’ll _kill_ me. Just like he’ll kill _you_ and everyone you care about. You think he cares about your blackmail? He’s got everything figured out already.”

Edelgard crossed her arms. “Thales will _certainly_ kill you if you continue to work for him. When you’ve given him everything he needs from you, you’ll have just finished digging your grave; all he’ll have to do is push you into it. You know that’s the kind of man he is. But if you work with us to kill him, then death _isn’t_ a certainty. Side with us, and if we win, you might live. Stay loyal to him, and whether he wins or loses, you _will_ die.”

“And you’d really trust me?” Kronya asked. “Here’s a little story for you, Edel. It’s about a scorpion who wants to cross a river. She can’t swim, but she meets a frog on the river bank and asks her to let her ride on her back. The frog says, ‘Of course I won’t let you ride on my back; you’ll sting me and I’ll die.’ The scorpion says, ‘Of course I wouldn’t do that! That would just be stupid of me, because I’d die, too.’ So the frog, who is quite nice but sadly very dumb, agrees to cross the river with the scorpion on her back. But oops, oh, no, what a surprise! Halfway across the river, the scorpion digs its tail into the frog’s back, and the venom courses through her, and she begins to drown. ‘Why did you do that?’ the poor frog asks. ‘Now we’re both going to die.’ And the poor scorpion replies, ‘It’s simply in my nature to sting.’ And then they both sink to the bottom of the river and drown.”

Edelgard nodded. “I know that story well,” she said. “Once, I thought I was the scorpion, too.”

Kronya had no pithy response for that.

“I think we should come back here tomorrow,” Edelgard said to Hubert, “and see if she’s come around. Perhaps I’ll bring another pastry, if she behaves herself.”

She left Kronya behind and followed Jeralt out of the catacombs.

“This is getting old,” Jeralt grumbled as the three of them crept out of the hidden entrance to the catacombs and emerged in a disused corner of the monastery grounds. “What do we do if she doesn’t agree to help us? We can’t hold her forever.”

“She will. She’s a valuable asset,” Edelgard said, “if she can be turned.”

 _“If,”_ Hubert said. “There is a saying from Morfis that a leopard cannot change its shorts.”

“Well, then, it is a good thing she is not a leopard,” she retorted. “At any rate, she needs to trust us and view us as allies, at least, if we want to trust any of the information she gives us.” The allure of having someone with intimate and firsthand knowledge of Those Who Slither in the Dark on her side was undeniably strong, and for good reason.

“Fine,” Jeralt said, “but I don’t know how long we can keep this up. If someone finds out about this, well… let’s say I’m really glad Rhea’s been making herself scarce this past week.”

_“Captain Jeralt, is that you?!”_

Alois’ booming voice rang across the cold night air, and a lantern bobbed in the distance, drawing closer and closer until the knight holding it became distinct from the shadows.

“Aw, shit,” Jeralt said. “At ease, Alois! I was just, uh… taking Edelgard and Hubert on my patrol route tonight. Sorry I didn’t put it down in the schedule. Nothing to worry yourself about—”

“Whatever you say, Captain; there’s no time for that!” Alois doubled over and caught his breath, panting. “I’ve just received word that demonic beasts have been sighted just outside town! I’m marshaling the knights to drive them back!”

 _“What?!”_ Jeralt gasped. “Oh, no…”

Edelgard thought about Hapi. One moment of weakness, one involuntary sigh, was all it would take to bring ruin down upon her and anybody around her. She and her new caretaker were in grave danger, along with the rest of the townspeople—and on top of that, this would certainly draw Cornelia to her location.

“I’ve already alerted Catherine and Shamir. But we’ll need your help,” Alois said, wiping sweat from his brow.

“Shit. That many of them?”

“Four big ones, sir.”

“Saint fucking Cichol. Dammit.” Jeralt shook his head. “Hubert, take Edelgard back to the dorms. Stay inside.”

Hubert opened his mouth, but before he could get in so much as a single word, Edelgard spoke up. “Captain Jeralt, I must ask that you allow Hubert and me to accompany you.” Keeping Hapi safe was her responsibility, too, and the girl trusted her to protect her from Cornelia.

“Lady Edelgard,” Alois said, taken aback, “that’s really unwise! Weren’t you injured in the Sealed Forest last Friday?”

“Not badly, compared to my peers,” Edelgard retorted. “We don’t have time to argue about this. Captain, please.”

Jeralt nodded. “Get to the armory and the stables. Arm yourselves. Get a horse. _Quickly.”_

Edelgard hurried to the armory and hastily equipped herself, strapping steel armor on over her uniform and taking a silver-headed battleaxe. Hubert stuck to lightweight leather armor, the better to fit under a set of mages’ robes without weighing him down or restricting his movement, and armed himself with a lance.

“Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Your Highness,” Hubert muttered as he double-checked the clasps and leather straps securing Edelgard’s armor. “With all due respect, I’m starting to think I might prefer this world’s Edelgard to you.”

* * *

The last of the beasts, a silver-furred dire wolf the size of a horse-drawn carriage (horses included), collapsed to the cobblestone streets with a mournful bellow, felled by the strike of a lance. Hubert loomed over its dying body as it breathed its last, seated in the saddle of his sable mare; billowing white fog streamed from the blade of his lance as the evaporating ice crystals coating the silver-etched steel sparkled and gleamed with a magical blue light.

“Is that it?” Jeralt asked, surveying the ruined streets. It had been a frantic battle, but it had ended swiftly enough. The beasts had done a number on this section of the town, their claws and talons leaving behind holes and craters in the roofs, shattering windows, splintering timber and cracking stone. Alois, Catherine, and Shamir circled around the corpses of the other three beasts—a vulture, a chitinous worm, and another wolf—and inspected them. Leonie trailed behind Shamir, and Manuela and Hanneman behind Catherine. Byleth stood at Jeralt’s side, the Sword of the Creator still glowing at her side.

Edelgard clutched at her side where a swipe of one of the beasts’ talons had put a dent in her breastplate. The deformed steel was digging into her ribs, but she didn’t think anything was broken—she’d just have a nasty bruise to contend with in the morning.

“That’s it,” Shamir said as she and everyone else met in the street. “But I think Catherine and I should keep a lookout to make sure there aren’t more of those things out there.”

Jeralt nodded. “Go to it. Manuela, Hanneman, you two go and see if anyone needs medical help.”

“Captain Jeralt,” Leonie said, sharply saluting. “It’s been an honor to fight alongside you.”

“Thanks, kid,” Jeralt mumbled, not matching her enthusiasm whatsoever. “You and Claude can go back home now.” He leaned toward Edelgard. _“Secure the girl,”_ he whispered to her.

Edelgard dismounted from her horse and made for the most beaten and battered house on the street—the target of the monsters’ siege. “I’m checking this house,” she announced, wincing as the dent in her armor cut into her side like a dagger. There was a sharp pain with every step, but she didn’t dare remove her breastplate and risk exposing her unprotected chest to the enemy.

The door to the house opened and a very large, very swarthy man timidly poked his head out. “Is safe to come out?” he asked. Edelgard noted that there was _something_ familiar about his voice, but she wasn’t sure what it was.

“It’s safe, alright,” Shamir said. “Get back, Edelgard. I’ll take it from here. Are you injured?”

“Not much,” the man said. “Maybe bump on my head where bit of roof fell in? Who knows?”

She looked up. The roof was, in fact, caving in. “I’m gonna have to ask you to step outside. I think your house might fall down.”

“Ah! That would be bad. I do not even own this house!” He beckoned to somebody behind him. “Come, come. Is not safe in there. _Out.”_

With a little cajoling, he and the house’s other inhabitant stepped outside, and Edelgard realized that she recognized both of them.

Of course, the girl was Hapi, and Edelgard knew her disguise well enough to see through her braided black hair and the lenses of smoked glass covering her eyes. She took her steps hesitantly, her eyes wide, her complexion pallid, her shoulders quaking.

The man was much more heavily disguised, but although there was a distinct hunch to his shoulders characteristic of a big man trying to look average-sized, his beard was trimmed down to a forest of short bristles clinging to his jawline, a pair of glasses sat on his broad nose, and he was clearly exaggerating his Almyran accent, there was no mistaking the face—or the scars—of Nader the Undefeated, once and future general of the Almyran Immortal Corps.

“Thank you, thank you,” Nader was saying while Manuela checked him over for any serious wounds. “My name is Behnam Attar. I am tailor and seller of fine Almyran silks.”

“You’ve got quite a lot of scars, Mister Behnam,” Manuela pointed out.

“Are relics of battle! Thirty years ago, I was soldier. In Almyra, of course. All water under bridge now!” Nader grinned. “Oh, and this girl? My daughter, Nasrin. My beautiful daughter. Nasrin, my little rosette, say hello to nice Fódlan woman.”

Edelgard pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head. From having fought him in battle twice, she was well aware that Nader spoke fluent Fódlanish, so clearly he was making himself sound like a tired stereotype entirely on purpose.

“Yeah,” Claude said, sidling up beside her, “I… tried to talk him out of doing _that voice,_ but he insisted.”

“Your spy in the heart of Fódlan… is _Nader the Undefeated?”_ Edelgard whispered to him.

Claude shrugged. “Why not? He’s been retired for thirty years. Hasn’t got anything better to do. And look at how much fun he’s having.”

Edelgard took Hapi aside and draped her cloak over her shaking shoulders. “Are you alright?” she asked.

Still shivering, Hapi only shook her head.

“It’s okay. It’s over. Everyone’s safe. Now, Jeralt and I are going to bring you away from here for just a few days, just in case Cornelia tries to track you here.” She took Hapi’s hand, but Hapi tore it out of her grasp, cradling it as though it had been bruised.

“No,” Hapi said. “I’ll just…” Her eyes darted across the street. “I’ll take my chances in the woods… easy to hide there.”

“We’ll take care of you.”

“Stop. It’s—it’s over. You don’t have to help me anymore.” Hapi kept shaking her head.

“I do,” Edelgard said. “For my mother, for Aunt Anselma—”

“Do you want to end up dead like her?” Hapi hissed at her, her scarlet eyes flashing behind her glasses. “Forget about me. I’m dangerous. You _know_ I’m dangerous. All it took was one sigh—I was _happy,_ I felt _good,_ that’s what set it off—and now…”

“Professor Manuela,” Edelgard called out, taking Hapi by the shoulders and wrapping her cloak tightly around her, “I think Nasrin’s in shock. I’d like Captain Jeralt to bring her back to the monastery for the night.”

“Stop!” Hapi pushed her away. “Leave me alone!”

 _“Finally,”_ a familiar voice called out, drifting through the cool night air. It was sweet as honey and yet bitter as wormwood. _“The Knights of Seiros do their jobs.”_

Cornelia sauntered down the middle of the street, all but gliding in her ornate gown across the cobblestones, a satisfied smile crossing her face. She looked for all the world like a cat that had finally caught a mouse.

“Lady Cornelia,” Hanneman huffed, “what in blazes—Excuse me, what are you _doing_ here? In the middle of the night?”

Jeralt nodded to Alois and Byleth. “It’s not safe here, Lady Cornelia,” Alois said as Byleth set her hand to her sword. “Why don’t I escort you back to the monastery?”

 _“Now?”_ Cornelia chuckled. “When you’ve finally delivered my darling wayward daughter to me?” She pressed onward. “You’ve finally caught the dangerous beast-woman, Hapi von Rusalka.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” Hanneman said.

Cornelia leveled a finger at Hapi, then curled it inward to beckon her on. “Come here, girl. Your mother is _very_ cross with you.”

Edelgard grabbed Hapi by the arm, and this time she met no resistance. Nader stepped in front of the two of them, straightening his shoulders and drawing himself up to his full height—well over six feet and just about ready to burst out of his clothing. Claude was subtly slipping an arrow from his quiver.

“You must be confused,” Nader growled, slipping out of his obnoxious fake accent. “This is my daughter, Nasrin.”

Cornelia scoffed. _“Is_ she, though? I can smell her all the way from here. Well, Jeralt? Aren’t you going to hand her over? There’s quite a death toll on her hands, and I’d like to punish her properly, as a mother should, before Lady Rhea has her executed.”

“Sorry,” Jeralt said, “but I can’t let you snatch random girls off the street just because you _think_ they… what? _Smell_ like your daughter? I don’t buy it.”

Edelgard took stock of the distance between her and her horse. If she could count on Hubert and Claude to distract Cornelia (fighting her head-on would be too dangerous), then she and Hapi could make a break for it and escape quite easily. But to where?

“Hapi, come _here,”_ Cornelia repeated sharply, and Edelgard felt Hapi’s arm slip away from her as the girl walked forward, slowly and steadily, as though entranced.

“What the—Hey!” Nader grabbed her by the shoulder, but Hapi shrugged him off. “Hap—Nasrin! What is this, Fódlanish sorcery?”

“That’s a good girl, Hapi,” Cornelia purred. “Come to mama.”

“Whatever you’re doing, I can’t let you do it,” Jeralt said as he and Byleth stepped in front of Hapi and blocked her path. “This isn’t how the Knights of Seiros operate, and as captain I make certain that my men do things by the book.”

Cornelia raised her eyebrows. “I am not one of your men, though, and I am not acquainted with your book.”

Hapi pushed past them, still utterly entranced. Edelgard quietly made for her horse and nodded at Hubert and Claude. There was still time for her to grab Hapi and carry her away; she’d figure out where to go on her way.

“Hapi, _stop,”_ Jeralt blurted out.

Hapi stopped.

Cornelia’s brow furrowed. “Excuse me? Hapi, I told you to—”

Hapi’s voice rang in the air like a bell. “Fuck off.”

“I am your _mother—”_

“Shut up.” Hapi looked to Jeralt and Byleth, then to Nader, then to Hubert and Edelgard, then focused back on Cornelia. “You’re not taking me back.”

Black fire arced between the tips of Cornelia’s fingers as her face contorted into a ratlike scowl. “You… _insolent_ little _beast!_ Don’t you realize that these people will put you down like any other monster? You’re a murderer! You spread death and destruction wherever you go! _I_ am the one who gave you sanctuary, who kept that evil curse of yours under control—”

 _“You’re_ the one who cursed me in the first place,” Hapi spat back, her voice rising. “And if these people are going to kill me, then I’ll make sure I tell them everything first. About you, Rodrigue, Duscur, the Death Knight—”

 _“No,”_ Cornelia howled, flinging out her arms and splaying her hands, tongues of black flame and bolts of black lightning crackling and flowing around her, _“Hapi von Rusalka, you will_ never speak again!”

Edelgard all but threw herself onto her horse and with a snap of her reins and a click of her heels she took off. _“Hapi, this way!”_ she shouted out. Across the street, a magic seal traced itself in the air in front of Cornelia in glittering black and violet. Hapi fell to her knees and screamed, clutching at her head. Pandemonium erupted.

Five things happened at once.

 _“Cornelia, what in the Goddess’ name are you doing!?”_ Hanneman cried out.

 _“Shamir, Catherine,_ get her!” Jeralt shouted out.

“Enjoy your pet monster, Jeralt,” Cornelia sneered, and with a grin and a wicked laugh, she vanished in a column of red light that vanished into the clouds.

“What in hell’s bells is going on here?” Catherine asked, drawing her sword and lighting the street with the bloody glow of Thunderbrand.

Edelgard reached out to Hapi. _“Take my hand!”_ she shouted out to her, watching her writhe in agony on the ground. What in blazes had Cornelia just done to her?

While chaos engulfed her, Hapi reached up to take her hand, and a sharp stinging pain—no, _four_ sharp stinging pains—cut through Edelgard’ forearm. Edelgard recoiled, blood streaming in ribbons from her arm as the four parallel gashes drawn in her flesh gaped and stung. Her horse reared back, screeching in terror and nearly throwing her from the saddle.

She glanced down at Hapi and was met with eyes that were no longer human set in a face that was no longer human; long, curled horns burst from her forehead and scarlet fur sprouted from her skin like thousands of needles. The hand that had moments ago reached out for salvation was now capped with thick, sharp black claws, and the shape that Hapi’s body now took had long, gangling forelimbs and hind legs, a lashing tail, hair growing out into a long and tangled scarlet mane and a mouth—a snout—filled with razor-sharp fangs. Bones snapped and lengthened, sinew creaked as it stretched taut across new flesh, muscle fibers unspooled and coiled around a new skeleton in new configurations. Fur, fangs, claws burst forth from bloodied skin with an anguished scream that cut through the air.

The beast that had once been Hapi was a chimera, almost feline but not quite. Its legs were long and thin, stiltlike, and its clawed paws were large and wide and covered in thick fur, capped not with a cat’s hooked claws but a wolf’s short daggers; a leonine mane wrapped around its head, framing long, sharp, pointed ears and a sharp snout with a forest of wiry white whiskers; its body was long and lithe, its scarlet pelt dotted with patterns of broken circles and rosettes. It was at least the size of a horse.

With a hiss and a sharp, screeching yowl, the beast leaped up and struck Edelgard, knocking her off her horse and throwing her to the ground. Before she hit the cobblestones, she felt the beast’s fangs and its hot breath against the back of her neck.

 _“Edelgard!”_ Byleth screamed, and as Edelgard felt her nose crack against the paving stones and hot, coppery blood spill from her mouth and sting her lips, time came to a stop and the world around her vanished.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edelgard: "Oh, my brothers have sent me a letter. Let's see what they have to say..."
> 
> Burkhart: "Ah… You've finally returned. I owe you a debt of gratitude, for you have nearly released me. My name is Sirrus. I trust that, from your explorations, you've become convinced that my wicked brother, Achenar, is guilty and I am innocent. It is I who am wrongly imprisoned here; imprisoned by my father."
> 
> Anselm: "Hello. I am Achenar. I am glad to see that you have returned to help me escape from my wrongful imprisonment. It was Sirrus who did this to me. Sirrus, my wicked brother. Do not listen to him! I warn you! I warn you again: he is a liar. Do not be persuaded by his evil lies. Do not release him. He killed my father! He will kill you."
> 
> Edelgard: *tosses both letters in the trash*


	25. Cat's Paw

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard goes **pspspspspspspsps**

Everything around her was dark, like the starless sky of an overcast night during a new moon, and deafeningly quiet. In her disorientation, Edelgard still felt the faint sensations of hot blood filling her mouth and pouring down her chin, of deep and bloody furrows etched into her flesh, of a hot breath and sharp fangs pressed against the back of her neck, and a ringing in her ears and sharp pain lancing through her eye. She felt bloody scrapes on the heels of her palms and the stabbing ache of a dent in her armor digging into her ribs.

But all around her was quiet, silent, and still. She couldn’t feel a racing pulse thrumming beneath her skin or a heartbeat pounding against her ribcage, and for a moment, she wondered if she still had them.

Then she cracked her eyes open, and through the blurry cage of her eyelashes glimpsed the soft, dusky light of a lone candle on a nightstand burning itself down to a nub, calming and reassuring in the humble glow it cast. And as the residual pain from her other body faded away and replaced itself with a myriad of aches she knew quite well, she came to realize that she was lying in a bed, swaddled in a warm and thick blanket, feeling a subtle heat rise from under the mattress to keep the encroaching cold at bay. And she became aware of her slow and languid pulse, her heart beating so placidly she could barely feel it, and realized that she had been asleep when she’d crossed from one world to the other.

She felt herself close her eyes against her will and roll over onto her other side as the other Edelgard tried to go back to sleep.

When she returned to the other world, the first thing she felt was her legs dragging limply over rock and grass and snow, followed by the wind rushing against her face, the hot and humid puffs of breath against the nape of her neck, and the sharp fangs pressed against her collar and digging firmly into her flesh just enough to _almost_ break the skin. She realized that she was being carried at a great speed akin to that of a galloping horse at least, if not faster, though the world around her was pitch black—she must have been carried far away from the town already, and after only a few minutes. She could feel the terrain beneath her grow rougher and felt her knees and shins crack against protruding roots. Skeletal branches clawed at her as they whipped by.

Edelgard supposed she now knew what it felt like to be a mouse. Few things made her fearful more than to lose control of her situations, and here she was as helpless as she’d ever been. She tried to quell the fear rising in her heart, telling herself that if Hapi meant to harm her, she'd had ample opportunity already to tear her throat out or rip her open from stem to stern or simply snap her neck. Yet all she was doing was dragging her along by the scruff of her neck, as a mother cat would do to its kittens.

“Hapi,” Edelgard gasped, reaching out to the beast and finding thick fur for her to hook her fingers into and clutch. “Let me go. Hapi, it’s me! Put me down!”

Hapi did not listen to her. The forest, invisible in the night, continued to rush past them, twisting and turning. Edelgard felt a twinge of vertigo seize her gut as she felt the ground drop away from her for an instant and could only imagine what obstacles she was being carried over. She felt herself taken deeper, deeper, deeper into the woods, until she knew for certain that she would be completely lost (at least until sunrise) if she were left on her own. How much time had passed? Minutes? Hours?

But finally, she felt the world around her come to a halt and the pressure of the teeth against her neck lessen, and she promptly fell to the ground like a stone.

Frigid snow and hard-packed, frozen soil was little cushion and little comfort, turning the steel armor strapped over her uniform to sheets of ice pressing through her sodden clothes and burning her skin. She pressed her palms against the ground, her scrapes stinging as the cold wormed through her gloves and burned her knuckles, and tried to prop herself up. She could barely move her legs.

Panic seized her. She was alone in the middle of the woods, high up in the mountains, in the middle of winter, with nothing but her uniform and her armor (both of which were sodden and frigid), by the whims of a beast that had once been a girl. Never mind whether or not Hapi wanted to hurt her—if she wasn’t found soon, her chances of coming down with pneumonia or worse were high.

And then Edelgard felt something warm and furry press forcefully into her side, rolling her onto her back. Before she could so much as raise an arm to defend herself, something hot, wet, and as rough as sandpaper dragged itself across the side of her face. A thick and heavy paw trod on her chest and pinned her down to keep her from resisting.

“Hapi,” she sputtered, “please—please listen to me! You don’t—”

Hapi finished with her face and set to work on her hair. Edelgard suddenly realized that the low, sonorous rumbling feeling her ears was _purring._

“Hapi, stop—you don’t have to groom me,” she insisted, trying to pull away from her. “I’m cold, I’m wet… I’ll freeze to death if I don’t get dry.”

Hapi rubbed the side of her face against the side of her neck, tickling her skin with her whiskers, still purring away.

“Thank you, Hapi. That helps,” Edelgard sighed. At least the beast didn’t intend to eat her. She reached out and rested her hands against Hapi’s flank, hoping that the thick fur would warm them. Beneath the fur, her flesh was as warm as a well-kept hearth, and Edelgard could feel the vibrations from the purring ebb and flow underneath. “I suppose speaking is out of the question?”

Hapi snuffled and rubbed her cheek against Edelgard’s face. Whiskers and the tips of exposed fangs tickled her skin. As the beast slithered around her in the dark, Edelgard tried to gauge some semblance of her size from what she could feel, as well as what she’d seen before she’d been dragged off; she could see almost nothing here except for the occasional glints of scarlet eyeshine. The size of a horse at least, she determined—perhaps even larger. Smaller than the typical demonic beast, but still quite enormous.

Shivering, Edelgard sat up and fumbled with the clasps and leather straps holding her armor on. Shedding the breastplate was a relief, removing the persistent pinch from her side and allowing her to breathe more freely; the shoulder pauldrons, greaves, and assorted other bits came off one by one after it. The air that met her dirty, sodden clothes was only marginally warmer than the frigid steel.

What she could still feel of her legs ached terribly, and she gingerly tried to massage the feeling back into them while avoiding the throbbing bruises and stinging scrapes. With one hand, she conjured a flame. As well as precious warmth, light spilled out and cast long, wavering shadows across the terrain. Edelgard could see now where she was—a clearing in the woods, surrounded on three sides by towering snow-dusted conifers and the fallen remains of dead trees. A sheer cliff face stood behind her, a shallow cave bored into the rock wall and draped with moss and ivy.

She could see Hapi now, too, and her suspicions of her size had been correct. She’d been transformed into a big cat (or, well, _not quite_ a cat, or _mostly_ a cat) at least the size of a horse and quite possibly as tall as an Albinean moose, no less than six feet to the withers (though the long and spindly legs propping her up might have made her even taller). She had a mane of bloody scarlet cascading down her back and over her shoulders fading to black at the fringes—remnants of the dye that had been in her hair. Two long onyx horns sprouted from her head near her ears, twisted into helices and coiled like ram’s horns; patches of thick, sharp scales, as black and as lustrous as polished obsidian, padded her shoulders and ran down her spine. A few persistent scraps of cloth still clung to her, half-buried in her fur.

Edelgard sighed as she gazed upon the poor creature. What had that witch done to her?

As she appraised herself and her surroundings, she wondered what had happened while she’d been unconscious. Byleth had reversed time by a few minutes, but it seemed everything had played out mostly the same—with the exception that she hadn’t sustained the wound to her arm she’d remembered getting. She could still feel the sharp, stinging sensation of the claws cutting deep into her flesh, just as she could still feel the phantom pain of her eye, but it wasn’t quite as palpable.

Hapi sat down near, but not next to her. Her long, bushy tail swept back and forth across the ground, picking up twigs and pebbles and scattering them about; the twitching of her ears and whiskers as well made her seem anxious. Edelgard felt very small as she looked up to lock eyes with her, suddenly recalled what she knew about cats, and sharply glanced away.

“Can you understand me?” she asked Hapi. “If you still have your reason, then surely you remember how to nod your head if you need to say yes.”

Hapi leaned over, craned her neck, and sniffed at Edelgard’s head, then rubbed her cheek against her face again.

“I… suppose that’s a no,” Edelgard said, disappointed and disheartened. She felt as though she’d had a fist driven into her gut. What, then, was truly left of Hapi, if she could no longer understand human language? Was human thought alien to her as well?

She shivered again as a gust of icy wind whistled through the clearing, though it wasn’t just the cold that had chilled her to the bone. “Excuse me. I’ll have to start a fire if I want to dry off,” she said, struggling to her feet. Her steps were shaky and hesitant. Hapi stuck to her like a shadow, keeping far less distance than one would expect from a cat. Edelgard wondered if, however her mind currently worked, Hapi saw her as a particularly stupid and helpless kitten.

Anyone who studied at Garreg Mach learned how to make a proper campfire; for some scions of nobility, field exercises with their classes were their first and only exposure to such things. Taking great care with her steps, she cleared out a place for a rudimentary fire pit at the mouth of the small cave and collected the rocks she would need for the pit and the dead wood she would need for kindling. At least building the fire was the hard part; starting it was simply a matter of applying the tongue of flame she’d already conjured to the tinder and watching it catch alight.

While she put the fire pit together and piled up the logs and kindling she’d collected, Edelgard caught sight of Hapi, still not too far from her, flopping to the ground and rolling onto her back to expose a soft underbelly blanketed in fluffy white fur. “I’m glad to know you feel comfortable around me,” she said to her idly, as one might talk to a cat. She took it as some consolation that Hapi seemed to, on some primitive level at the very least, remember who she was and how she felt about her.

Once she’d started the fire, Edelgard huddled in front of it, exhausted, and allowed its warmth to sink into her. If she kept it burning all night, she’d have nothing to worry about; if it kept going into the dawn, then Byleth and the others might even see the smoke in the sky.

Seemingly entranced and intrigued by the fire, Hapi slunk toward it and curled up around Edelgard, who suddenly found herself nestled in a throne of fur with a fluffy tail draped over her lap like a blanket.

Edelgard leaned back and reached out, scratching Hapi gently behind one ear. With her other hand she traced the mesmerizing patterns of black rings and rosettes that blossomed on Hapi’s scarlet fur. “I’m sorry, Hapi,” she said. “After everything Jeralt and I did to protect you, those monsters found you. And when you had only just found your voice…”

She swallowed a growing lump in her throat and felt tears spring to her eyes.

Hapi purred louder.

“Well, at least you seem to be in higher spirits now,” Edelgard answered her, briefly lifting her eyepatch and wiping away her tears on her sleeve. “And at least now you don’t have to worry about sighing.”

Her heart still felt heavy, though, and the loudest and most resonant purring she’d ever heard in her life couldn’t lift her spirits. She stared into the flames, allowing the roiling and flickering tongues of orange and yellow and the crackling and popping of burning wood to ease her troubled mind. She watched bits of wood glow orange and turn gray and black and sparks fly from snapping twigs.

“Nobody deserves to be made into a monster, especially by the likes of Cornelia and her ilk. You can’t even think like a proper human anymore, can you? I wonder how much of your human life you remember right now, or how your mind would even conceive of such memories in its current form.”

Hapi kept purring and the fire kept crackling.

“There are memories in my head,” she said, “deep in the back of my mind, that I can no longer make sense of anymore either. They come to me in fits and starts, bursts of awareness, but mostly in my dreams. My conscious mind resists them; there’s too much… pain there. I thought I’d been made into a monster once, too, but never like this. I hadn’t imagined that they could do worse than what they’d done to me, but _this…”_

She bowed her head and closed her eyes, trying with shallow and shaky breaths to soothe her aching heart and lamenting the deaf ears her words fell on. “One way or another,” she said, “I’ll find a way to bring you back. I owe you as much.”

Hapi curled up tighter around her, resting her head atop her long and lanky forelegs as Edelgard continued to scratch behind her ears and horns.

“I never told you what they did to me, did they?” Edelgard asked, though she knew better than to expect a response. “It’s a long and complicated story, but I suppose there’s no harm in telling you now. There’s nothing to be gained from it, either, but… long, long ago, twelve or thirteen years ago or more, in another world…”

She told her everything, starting from the beginning, and as time dragged on, she grew wearier and wearier until the embers of the fire became indistinct blurs and her eyelids dragged themselves down over her eyes. The gentle rumbling that surrounded her eventually drowned out all conscious thoughts. Sleep carried her away until the sunlight stung her eye.

* * *

She woke up to see dawn sunbeams filtering through the trees and into the clearing, the ice and snow clinging to the pines gleaming and glistening. The fire had long since gone out, and only a few bits of wood burnt to blackened husks remained nestled among the gray ashes. A faint wisp of smoke rose from the last glowing ember.

Edelgard found herself buried in fur, ensconced within it, warm and secure in its embrace. If she’d been on her own all night, she surely would have frozen to death, but thanks to her companion she could still feel all of her fingers and toes. She pulled herself free, and as cats were light sleepers and easily disturbed, Hapi awoke with a gentle chirrup and unfolded herself as well. Even sitting on her haunches, she was at least as tall as Hubert was standing up.

Edelgard braced herself against Hapi’s flank and tried to stand. Her legs were weak and sore, and in the morning light she could see scrapes and scratches and purple bruises blossoming all over her exposed skin, not to mention dried mud and dirt staining her clothes. Her stomach rumbled, her mouth was dry and stale, and her lips were cracked and chapped.

“I wonder if I could ride you home,” she mused, eyeing the beast towering over her, “but that would likely be as difficult as herding cats.” Her voice was hoarse and weak. She needed water. Thankfully a few handfuls of relatively clean-looking snow would be enough to slake her thirst for the time being.

Hapi lowered her head and nuzzled her chest, nearly pushing her off her feet.

“Or we could stay here,” Edelgard said, rubbing her palm against the short, bristly fur on the bridge of Hapi’s snout. “If we start another fire, we can send out smoke signals, and then Byleth and Jeralt will be able to find us. I have no doubt they’ve been searching all night.”

As Edelgard gathered more wood and rebuilt the fire pit, Hapi loped to the edge of the clearing and sat down, staring intently at her. The occasional snap of a twig or flutter of a bird’s wings would distract her every now and then, but she would always revert to staring.

This time, Edelgard collected more wood and piled it higher, clearing out the area of as much deadwood as she could find and stacking it all in layers over the pit. Though it took a while to get going, it blazed hotter and brighter, and much to her delight, produced gouts of thick, dark smoke.

Edelgard sat by the fire, already exhausted, and waited. The sun slowly began to climb above the treeline.

At the sound of the first snap of a distant twig Hapi leaped in front of her, fur bristling, hackles risen, back arched and ears pinned back, hissing and spitting in the direction of the oncoming intruders. It struck Edelgard that her smoke signal could just as easily attract enemies as it could allies. She could see flashes of horses and armor in the gaps between the trees, but not enough to discern friend from foe.

Thankfully, it was Jeralt, followed closely by Byleth and Hubert, who emerged into the clearing, flanked by Catherine, Shamir, Manuela, and Hanneman.

_“Lady Edelgard!”_ Hubert cried out, his voice a hoarse rasp. He, like everyone else, was disheveled and haggard. Edelgard could see bits of twigs and needles caught in his hair and prickling his cloak. Hapi hissed and bristled and Jeralt’s horse reared back with a terrified scream.

_“We’ve come to rescue you, Your Highness!”_ Alois shouted out, brandishing his axe. Shamir had an arrow already nocked to her bow, aimed, and ready to shoot; Catherine and Byleth were both reaching for their swords.

_“Wait!”_ Edelgard rushed in front of Hapi and held out her hands. “Put down your weapons! She’s harmless!” She patted herself down. “See? I’m not hurt!”

Jeralt got his spooked horse under control and lowered his lance. His gaze lingered uncomfortably on the sight of Hapi’s bestial form. “You sure?”

A low growl escaped Hapi’s throat. Edelgard stepped forward. “I’m sure of it. She recognizes me. Come closer and you’ll see, Jeralt.”

Sharing a look with the other knights, Jeralt dismounted and set his weapon aside. Shamir kept her arrow trained on the beast as he approached it with slow, tentative steps.

Edelgard retreated to Hapi’s side. “It’s okay,” she told her, though she herself was worried by the gleam in the beast’s scarlet eyes, her slitted pupils, her bared fangs and bristling hackles. “You recognized me. You remembered me. Surely you remember Jeralt, too.” The more she assured Hapi, though, the less sure she felt.

Jeralt held his hands up. “This is as far as I go,” he said. “Kid… if you’re in there…”

Everybody waited with bated breath as Hapi inched forward, craned her neck, and sniffed the air, whiskers twitching. Shamir’s bowstring drew back another fraction of an inch, the tip of her arrowhead shifting to match the position of Hapi’s head. Byleth stared ahead, a grim and tight-lipped frown on her face as she watched her father step forward.

“Captain,” Catherine cautioned, Thunderbrand half out of its sheath.

“I know what I’m doing,” Jeralt assured her.

The tip of Hapi’s nose brushed against Jeralt’s hand and quickly pulled away. Everybody tensed, grips tightening on their weapons. One finger slipped from Shamir’s arrow as she prepared to fire.

Hapi rubbed her face against Jeralt’s side and started purring. Edelgard let out a relieved sigh. Shamir set aside her bow and slipped her arrow back into her quiver. Catherine reluctantly slipped Thunderbrand back into its sheath.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Alois exclaimed with a nervous chuckle, a disbelieving look on his face as Jeralt’s gloved hand ran through the beast’s fur. “Captain, that cat fancies you!”

Hubert dismounted and strolled to Edelgard’s side. “Lady Edelgard,” he said, bowing as he presented her with her cloak. “You dropped this.”

“Thank you,” Edelgard said, taking the cloak and wrapping herself up in it. She was grateful to finally have something to cover herself with.

“Are you really unharmed? Forgive me for looking at your legs, but—”

“They did get a little bruised,” she said, “but thankfully, Hapi meant no harm. She was just trying to protect me.”

“Protect you? From whom? Cornelia had already escaped by the time she took you.”

“From _you,”_ Edelgard explained. “She was confused and afraid. She thought she was in danger, and because of that, she thought _I_ was in danger, too. I should be flattered she remembered me,” she added with a sardonic grin.

Hubert did not return her grin. “We have been searching for you all night,” he said. He reached into his cloak and produced a canteen. “Here. There is still some water in this. I daresay you need it more than me, from the sound of it.”

With trembling fingers, she uncorked the canteen, threw her head back, and poured the rest of the contents into her mouth. She gulped the water down greedily, craving the cool balm that soothed her dry and scraped throat.

“Edelgard!” Byleth took her by the shoulders. “You’re okay.”

“A little battered, but yes,” Edelgard told her, falling into her embrace as her legs gave out, “yes, I’m okay, Professor. I’m so sorry… you must have been so worried.”

“I turned back time,” Byleth muttered as she laid Edelgard down and channeled healing magic over her bruises and scrapes, “and even then, it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t control it.”

“It’s okay.” Edelgard spared a glance at Hapi, who was still allowing Jeralt to pet him (though she growled and hissed when the other knights tried to approach). “She’s still in there… a part of her. The part that knows her friends.”

“A part of her…” Byleth looked especially glum as she let those words and their implications settle in her mouth.

“I know it sounds bleak,” Edelgard said, “but surely if there’s a way to turn her into a monster, there’s a way to make her human again.” She wasn’t sure she quite believed her own words, but they didn’t quite turn to ash in her mouth, so some part of her must have been holding out hope. “And who knows how much of her is still in there… buried under layers of instinct, perhaps, translated to a language none of us can understand…”

“I daresay,” Hanneman said, approaching Jeralt and Hapi, “this term just keeps getting more and more interesting! Captain Jeralt, do you think your furry friend there might consent to a blood sample? Or even just a hair sample? Just a few will do!”

Hapi hissed at him.

“I think that means no,” Jeralt said.

“So,” Shamir said, eyeing him suspiciously, “is there a reason the fugitive we’ve been hunting for over two weeks is on such good terms with you?”

“Shamir’s right. You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, Captain,” Catherine said, crossing her arms and eyeing her superior with a furious, smoldering glower.

“I’ll get to it later,” Jeralt said, ruffling Hapi’s fur.

“You’ve been saying that all night. What’s going on here? What was Hapi doing in town and what in the Goddess’ name has gotten into Lady Cornelia?”

“Okay, fine. I think Cornelia’s been involved in some shady business,” Jeralt explained. “Not quite sure what, but I figured her kid would have some answers. So I’ve been… uh…” He glanced at Edelgard. “I’ve been looking after her on my own, earning her trust, getting on her good side… unfortunately, just as she seemed ready to spill her guts, this happened.”

“Captain!” Alois’ face fell. “Why couldn’t you tell us? Couldn’t you at least tell your old pal _Alois?”_

“Alois, you’re a good man, but you can’t keep secrets. As for you two,” Jeralt said to Shamir and Catherine, “it’s nothing personal—just that the kid really doesn’t like you.”

Shamir shrugged. “Fair enough. We were rough on her.”

“By Lady Rhea’s orders!” Catherine said.

“Lady Rhea’s orders were to get information out of the girl,” Jeralt said. “I made a lot more progress by keeping her somewhere warm and cozy than you did by sticking her in a dungeon.”

“I see your point,” Catherine said, “but still—”

“That’s true. After last night, we know Cornelia’s shady,” Shamir said.

“Something connected to the Death Knight,” Manuela chimed in, “and Remire, and the Tragedy of Duscur. But I still don’t understand. How could _she_ be wrapped up in these terrible events?”

“I don’t know,” Jeralt said, “but I have an idea where she’s going. She’s been talking about going to Enbarr to answer a marriage proposal these past few days. Wherever she went last night, she might be headed there now. Shamir, you’re our fastest scout. As soon as we get back to the monastery, pack your bags and take off for Enbarr. Intercept her if you can.”

Shamir saluted. “Got it.”

“And be careful.”

Hapi left Jeralt’s side and ambled over toward Byleth. Byleth tried to pet her, but she simply nudged her out of the way and tried to lie down on top of Edelgard.

Edelgard hastily scuttled out of the way. “Hapi, no,” she said. “You’re too big; you’d crush me.”

Hapi meowed irritably at her. Edelgard’s jaw dropped. She’d never expected to hear such a large and fearsome animal _meow._ She’d never heard of a lion being able to; she’d thought they only roared.

Alois snickered. “Your Highness, it seems your friend thinks you’re… the cat’s meow.”

Everyone shot him a dirty look.

“So what do we do about Hapi?” Byleth asked, trying to pet her again. This time, her attempt was successful and the great beast leaned into her touch.

Hubert shook his head. “A beast of her size wouldn’t be a welcome sight in the monastery. But perhaps we can let her roam in the forest. I’m sure that like any animal, she’d be quite self-sufficient.”

“We can’t just leave her here,” she retorted.

“Right,” Shamir said. “All it would take is one hunter catching sight of her and getting spooked. Someone would die. Probably not her.”

“Or Cornelia could come back for her,” Jeralt added. “This is a pain in the ass, alright. She was easier to hide when she was human-sized. And human-shaped.”

Hapi forcefully nudged his shoulder, as though she’d taken offense to that. She nearly knocked him down.

“It’s true,” he told her.

Hanneman stroked his chin thoughtfully. “She does seem quite tame for a monster. And given her unique circumstances, there’s so much that might be uncovered from just a cursory examination! I could bring her into Garreg Mach as a research subject…”

Edelgard knew it was just Hanneman, and he got like this sometimes, but his cavalier attitude to experimentation did rankle her fiercely sometimes. She pushed herself to her feet. On top of that, there were all the ways this could possibly go wrong. “No, absolutely not. I mean… Professor Hanneman, who would dare sign off on such a thing?”

Hanneman chuckled. “True, Seteth has denied many of my more ambitious research ventures in the past, but Seteth is no longer here.”

“I doubt you’ll find her to be a model test subject.”

“Her Highness is right,” Catherine said. “We can’t bring this thing anywhere near the monastery.”

“We might not have a choice,” Jeralt told her.

“It’s a wild animal,” she replied, although Hapi didn’t look quite so wild while Byleth was scratching under her chin. “If we bring it back to Garreg Mach, and someone gets hurt… well… it’ll be put down, one way or another, and Lady Rhea will know I said I told you so.”

Manuela helped Edelgard to her feet. “Can you walk on those things? They took quite a beating, from the looks of it. Captain Jeralt and the others can spend all day deciding what to do with your friend, but _you_ need to get somewhere warm before any of your toes freeze and fall off.” She looked to Byleth. “If that’s alright with you, Professor?”

Byleth nodded. “Yes, please.”

“One warp spell should be enough to get us to the monastery gates,” Manuela said to Edelgard. “From there, we’ll have to walk. You can do that, right? Please don’t make me have to carry you. I’ve been running around all night.” She yawned. To say she looked exhausted did not quite do justice to how worn and weary she looked. The aging former diva looked every bit her age and more; her face creased with worry, eyes bloodshot, makeup smeared, coiffed graying hair mussed and messy. One who didn’t know better might have assumed she’d been drinking from dusk to dawn.

“I can manage, Professor,” Edelgard assured her. “You have my gratitude for coming to find me.”

Manuela laughed. “Darling, do you honestly think I’d stand back and let _another_ one of your professor’s students die? I saw how much the last one wrecked her. And of course, burying two students in one term would reflect poorly on the academy. Now follow me and hang on tight, because I’m very tired and I’d like to make this spell as easy to cast as possible so I don’t do something stupid like warp your outsides away but leave your insides behind.”

“That can happen?”

A loud meow interrupted them. Hapi broke away from Byleth and sauntered toward them, stretched, wormed her claws into the ground, and meowed again. For a moment, Edelgard found herself struck by just how much that vocalization sounded as though she were crying out, _‘El!’_

“I’m sorry, Hapi,” Edelgard said, reaching out and letting Hapi sniff her hand. “You can’t come with us. Stay with Jeralt.” She knew it was pointless to speak to her, but there was something about cats that simply made it impossible to _not_ try to hold a conversation, however one-sided it was.

Hapi meowed again and lowered her head, allowing Edelgard to scratch between her ears.

“It won’t be long. I’ll see you again,” Edelgard assured her, raking her fingernails over her scalp. “We’ll find a way to fix you.”

Hapi pulled away from her and examined Manuela skeptically. Manuela recoiled a bit, her breath freezing in the air as the beast inched closer and sniffed the air around her, whiskers twitching.

“I think she might like you, Professor,” Edelgard said.

Emboldened, Manuela held out her hand and carefully started scratching under Hapi’s chin. “Oh. Oh, you. You’re just a big kitten, aren’t you? Who’s a big kitty?”

As though to answer her question, Hapi started purring.

“She must remember that I took care of her in the infirmary. That’s right, you’re safe around me. You’re actually a _very_ pretty kitty, Hapi. So, you like all of us professors except for crusty old Hanneman, do you? Well, it’s okay. Captain Jeralt won’t let that mean old geezer hurt you.”

Hapi dropped to the ground and rolled onto her back. The sight of it, rather than amusing Edelgard as it had when the two of them had been alone last night, almost _sickened_ her. This was what it meant to be reduced to a beast—to be deprived of all thought but instinct, all behavior but unrestrained id. The human girl this beast had been only a day ago would be mortified to be caught behaving like this in broad daylight in front of so many people.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Manuela said, eyeing the tantalizingly fluffy spread of soft belly-fur laid out before her. “I’m wise to your tricks.” She grabbed hold of Edelgard and guided her to the edge of the clearing, the better to perform the spell in her tired state. “Sorry, Hapi, but I’ve got to take your friend back home. We’ll see you later.”

Hapi looked up at them and let out an almost sad-sounding trill. Her scarlet eyes were wide, pupils round and dilated. She rolled over, pressed herself low to the ground, and with a sudden lunge nipped at Edelgard’s ankle—or, rather, her entire leg. There was a sharp outcry from the others, but Edelgard stayed calm. Hapi’s fangs hadn’t broken the skin; they’d clamped down gently on her leg, applying a firm yet harmless pressure.

Hubert wiped beads of sweat from his brow. “It appears she would rather have you stay, Lady Edelgard,” he said with a trace of amusement in his voice.

“I know,” Edelgard said. Unfortunately, she couldn’t have that. “Hubert, would you please take your lance and draw a square about Hapi’s size in the dirt?”

“A… square?” His brow furrowed, then relaxed. “Ah, I understand. At once, Your Highness.”

Hapi turned around and watched as Hubert set to work. He traced four lines in the ground with his blade, and after he’d stepped away and waited a minute or so, she sauntered over to it and sat down in the square, folding her paws underneath herself and making herself into a furry lump. She seemed content.

“Holy shit,” Jeralt said.

Manuela took Edelgard by the shoulder. “Ready now?”

Edelgard nodded. The world promptly vanished in a pillar of light and a moment later, Edelgard found herself at the front gates to the monastery, towering walls of stone and mortar rising up to replace the frosted trees. Her legs threatened to crumple under her weight and the world spun around her in a vertigo-inducing swirl for a few minutes while she got her bearings. Spots danced in front of her eye.

“Greetings, Professor!” the gatekeeper chirped, sharply saluting Manuela as she reeled and fought to regain her balance. “Nothing to report. Except for those beasts that attacked the town last night—are those all taken care of now?”

“More or less,” Manuela said, and once she’d gotten herself steady she walked Edelgard through the gates and into the main hall. It wasn’t long before they reached the stairs to the faculty offices and the infirmary.

“Stairs,” she muttered, trudging up the steps one at a time. “Why stairs? Why did they put the infirmary on the second floor? Didn’t anyone ever think about how hard it is to carry wounded people up a flight of stairs? The nerve of this place’s architects… if I could go back in time a thousand years, why, I’d give ‘em a piece of my mind…”

They passed Cyril in the hall. “Hey there, Professor,” he said to Manuela as he swept the floor. “Hittin’ the bottle again?”

“Oh, don’t give me that. You don’t know what a night this has been, you little twerp.”

Edelgard and Manuela settled into the infirmary. Edelgard had started getting used to lying down on these cots. Manuela took to her chair and started rummaging under her desk.

“Thank you, Professor,” Edelgard said. She observed the infirmary and found it empty. “Dimitri and Gilbert were discharged?” She held back a sneeze, paused and waited for it to come, and felt the tickle in the back of her nose and mouth mercifully fade.

“Hmm?” Manuela looked up from the flask she’d found. “Oh, yes, I sent them on their way last night before we went into town. With strict instructions to take it easy, of course. Strict _er_ in His Highness’ case. If Dedue doesn’t keep him down until at least Monday, I will—well, I’ll be _very_ cross with both of them.”

“Good. Annette was distraught about Gilbert’s health.”

“She was, hmm…” Manuela took a swig from her flask. “Ugh. Thank the Goddess for the gift of whiskey. And thank the Goddess I told Claude to teach the class for me today. Heaven only knows what he’s teaching them, of course, but you couldn’t put me in front of those brats right now after… all this.”

Edelgard would have said something, but Manuela kept going.

“Was that really Cornelia last night? _The_ Lady Cornelia? The one and only, inimitable, greatest physician and white magician in all of Fódlan since the War of Heroes?”

The answer to that was complicated, but as far as Edelgard was aware, there was indeed only one Cornelia currently alive in Fódlan. “I’m afraid so.”

“I can’t believe it. The Death Knight, the Hurricane King, Tomas, Remire, Duscur—I can’t _believe_ she’s wrapped up in these things! Why, it was her work treating the plague in Faerghus all those years ago that inspired me to become a physician in the first place! She was a _good_ person, not someone who would turn her own daughter into a beast—” Manuela leaped out of her chair and slammed her hands on the desk, letting her flask fall to the floor. “Oh, dear Goddess! If _that’s_ what she did to Hapi, then what has she been doing to poor _Mercedes?!_ I’ll have to talk to Lord Fraldarius right away—”

“No,” Edelgard said. “Professor, Jeralt and I believe that whatever Cornelia’s been involved in, _he’s_ a part of it as well. Remember, before Cornelia transformed her, Hapi mentioned Rodrigue by name. You might want to steer clear of him and let the knights handle this.”

Manuela’s face turned pale. “So she did.” She slumped back into her seat. “So she did. Well, I’m going to lie down on one of these cots now. If anybody asks, tell them I’m not dead. Or hung over. Stay here until your legs feel better. Physician’s orders.” She trudged to one of the empty cots and laid herself down. “What a week, huh? Thank the Goddess it’s Friday.”

“It’s Thursday, Professor,” Edelgard pointed out.

Manuela let out a pained, ghastly moan. “Thursday. I _hate_ Thursdays. What business do they have, being so close to Friday? The Goddess shouldn’t have allowed it.”

Edelgard looked down at herself and for the first time noticed all the short, wispy scarlet hairs clinging to her blouse, bright and distinct against the stained and muddy once-white cotton.

She sneezed.

“Cat allergy?” Manuela asked.

“I should hope not. I’ve never been allergic to cats before,” she said. “And I’d hate to start now.”

With a put-upon sigh, Manuela left her cot, crossed the room, and put the back of her hand against Edelgard’s forehead. “Hmm. No fever from what I can tell. You’re probably a bit achy, though that’s probably from the beating you took. Any congestion, sinus pressure, sore throat, the like?”

“A little.”

“To nobody’s surprise, you’re probably coming down with a cold. Here. Take this.” Manuela trudged to her cabinet, produced a vial of syrupy violet liquid, and brought it to her.

Edelgard downed the vial’s contents, ignored the ghastly taste, and instantly felt as though a bell had been rung inside her nose.

Satisfied, Manuela went back to take her much-needed nap.

* * *

Edelgard felt well enough to leave the infirmary later that afternoon and, while Manuela was getting some much-needed sleep and snoring away, she discharged herself and crept into the hall and down the stairs. She felt filthy; desperately in need of a hot bath from head to toe. Her uniform would need some deep cleaning and mending as well (at least she had plenty of spares). More than that, though, she was starving—but was loath to go to the dining hall as she was. She’d have to change clothes and at least try to comb most of the sticks and dirt out of her hair first, she decided, but her wandering eye caught sight of something that stopped her in her tracks.

There, at the entrance to the hall, stood Thales and Ingrid, both conversing in low voices. Edelgard crept closer, hoping to get close enough to make out their whispers without either of them noticing, but before she could get close, she sneezed. Thales abruptly broke away from Ingrid and vanished into the courtyard with a sweep of his fur-lined cloak.

Ingrid heard Edelgard and all but sprinted to her side, her conversation with the impostor Lord Fraldarius quickly forgotten. “Edelgard! Are you alright? Claude and Hilda and Leonie told us what happened last night and—You look _terrible,_ by the way—Are you okay?”

“Well, I’ve had better days,” Edelgard said, “but—”

_“Edelgard!”_ Ferdinand’s voice echoed through the hall, booming, accompanied by the squeaks and clacks of freshly-polished boots against the tile floor. He was upon her in an instant; because of her eyepatch and the blind spot it introduced, Edelgard only heard him coming. “There you are! Are you well? Claude and Hilda and Leonie told me what happened last night and—Oh, you look _ghastly,_ by the way—”

“I’m fine, Ferdinand.”

“Thank heavens. And where is Hubert?”

“He’s on his way back. The long way. Professor Manuela could only warp herself and one of us back, and obviously…”

“Yes, of course, obviously,” Ferdinand said, letting out a relieved sigh as he looked her over. He held out a paper box he’d been carrying under his arm. “Oh, and one more thing—this arrived for you this morning. Apparently, you special-ordered a chocolate cherry cake from the bakery…”

Edelgard took the box. “It’s for Bernadetta, actually. I promised it to her last weekend.”

“Good luck reaching her,” Ingrid said. “I couldn’t get her out of her room this morning.”

“So,” Edelgard said, “what were you and Rodrigue talking about?” She noticed, too late, that Ingrid’s eyes were rimmed with red.

“Oh…” Ingrid tensed up and glanced away. “I was just… worried about Glenn.”

“Don’t you think you might be overreacting? How many times has he disappeared for no reason and then just popped up again like he’d never left?”

“Because _Rodrigue_ is worried. And if _he’s_ worried… At least you’re safe, Edelgard.” Ingrid crossed her arms. “But what is it about you that you keep getting dragged into these situations?”

“I have to concur with Lady Ingrid,” Ferdinand said, crossing his arms in turn. “Edelgard, Hubert and I both agree that your constant trouble-making is running us ragged. I have been sick with worry all night! I could hardly eat this morning! And I just got out of a certification exam which I am _certain_ I failed due to how overcome I was with worry! Imagine, _me,_ head of the Black Eagles, future prime minister, Ferdinand von Aegir, _failing_ a certification exam—how on _earth_ am I expected to beat Burkhart’s record now?!”

“I wouldn’t say I make trouble,” Edelgard retorted flippantly. “It simply _finds_ me.”

“Well, make yourself harder to find, then, for your sake and ours both!” Ferdinand snapped at her, his face reddening.

She sneezed into her elbow.

“Oh, er—I did not mean to raise my voice. Pardon my outburst. It seems you are more in need of a nice bath and some warm tea than anything I have to say.”

_“Hey! Princess!”_

Next it was Sylvain who came running down the hall. He doubled over, resting his hands on his knees as he caught his breath. “Nice to see you again. I heard from Claude and Hilda and Leonie that you were—”

“Yes, yes, I’m fine now,” Edelgard said. “What’s the matter?”

“I need your help,” he said. “Bernadetta’s barricaded herself in the greenhouse.”

“I am sorry, but Lady Edelgard has been lost in the woods all night,” Ferdinand said, taking Edelgard by the shoulder. “First things first, I am going to have a bath drawn for her and—”

“And normally, I’d love to join her,” Sylvain said, eliciting an indignant glare from Ferdinand, “but this is _serious._ I’m worried about Bernie.”

Ingrid rolled her eyes. “Oh, are you?”

“Yes, I am!”

“And what ulterior motives could you _possibly_ have? You haven’t stopped harassing her since she joined our class.”

_“Harassing_ her? Like _you’ve_ got room to talk. Who was it who damn near busted her door down yesterday?” Sylvain spat back.

“I just wanted to make sure she attended combat drills with us,” she said.

“Well, then, the donkey calls the pig long-ears,” he retorted.

“Stop bickering, both of you,” Edelgard said, trying to look as stern and authoritative as possible while holding an entire chocolate cake in her arms.

Sylvain fell silent, and Ingrid with him. “I gotta say,” he said, “that eyepatch makes you at least three times more authoritative. Why are your older brothers fighting over the Empire? If anything, _you_ should be in charge.”

“Flattered. I’ll head over to the greenhouse and see if I can’t coax her out.”

“Edelgard,” Ferdinand said, “you’re really in no condition to—”

“I’ll be alright.” She sneezed again and just barely managed to catch it on her sleeve.

Ferdinand grimaced at the sight of the mucous clinging to her blouse. “Manners, Edelgard…” he moaned, fetching a spare handkerchief from his coat and handing it to her.

“Oh, please. It’s past saving, anyway,” Edelgard said, though she took the handkerchief and used it to mop up what she could. “I have an idea. Why don’t you get my bath started while I take care of this?”

“You are right. It will take time to heat the water, anyway. Is there any tea you’d prefer? I’d recommend mint or ginger if you feel a cold coming on.”

“Mint will do, Ferdinand. Thank you.”

Ferdinand bowed to her. “It is the least I can do, my dear,” he said, and he was off.

Edelgard let Sylvain lead her and Ingrid to the greenhouse. Much to her chagrin, the two of them wouldn’t stop sniping at each other, making the short walk seem like an eternity. Edelgard found herself almost wishing she hadn’t left the woods.

“For once, I’m not chasing another girl’s skirt!”

“Save your breath. I know you’re just trying to get another look at her diary.”

“That wasn’t her diary!”

“I swear, if you go any lower, no one will need to bury you when you die—”

“I’m worried about a girl that I actually want to be _friends_ with,” Sylvain huffed, “and that’s _it!”_

“Oh, you want to be _friends_ with her? Pull the other one!” Ingrid snapped. “If I’ve seen you do this once, I’ve seen you do this a hundred times, and the _last_ thing I want is to clean up _yet another_ another piece of human debris you leave behind!”

_“Enough,”_ Edelgard said to them as she reached the greenhouse door. “You’ll scare her.”

She put her hand on the handle. It jiggled, but wouldn’t budge. Bernadetta must have put something in front of the door to keep it shut. The glass walls were fogged and frosted, reducing everything inside to a blur. There was a vaguely purplish blur through the green-tinted glass that might have been Bernadetta.

Edelgard knocked on the door. “Bernadetta,” she called out. “Are you alright? We’re worried about you.”

There was no answer.

Sylvain cupped his hands around his mouth. _“Hey, Bernie! Would it help if I apologized? Again?”_

“So you _were_ harassing her,” Ingrid said.

“Just covering my bases.”

Edelgard watched the purplish blur that might have been Bernadetta pace nervously in front of the door. “Whatever has caused you to lock yourself up in here, it’s okay. We’re here to help you.”

“Why don’t you just go away and find some other girl’s heart to break?” Ingrid asked Sylvain.

“Look, I know you’re broken up that your asshole fiance might be dead again,” Sylvain retorted, “but that’s no excuse to take your frustration out on me! You’re always telling _me_ to act your age, but who’s going to tell _you?”_

Bernadetta’s voice, small, weak, and muffled, came through the door. _“Um… Edelgard? I-I mean, Your Highness?”_

Sylvain and Ingrid promptly shut themselves up.

“Hello, Bernadetta,” Edelgard said. “Sorry for the noise. Is something wrong?”

_“Nope! Not at all! Everything’s fine! Why would you even say otherwise? I’m definitely not worried about my father!”_

“Is something wrong with your father?”

_“What_ isn’t? _Uh, I-I mean, nothing! Nothing!”_

“Bernie, your friends are here to see if you need help,” Edelgard said. “You don’t need to keep all your troubles to yourself. Also… I have that cake I promised you.”

_“Really?”_

“Yes.”

_“You’re not trying to trick me?”_

“No. It’s right here. It arrived from the bakery today.”

The door creaked open and Bernadetta shuffled out. Her gray eyes were downcast, her mouth drawn into a worried frown, and her hood was pulled tightly over the mop of violet hair that fell over her brow. In her hands she clutched an unopened enveloped sealed with wax and stamped with the seal of House Varley. “Th-The cake?”

Edelgard pulled away the lid of the box just enough for her to see the treat within—a thick, round chocolate cake slathered with chocolate frosting and dotted with candied cherries. Bernadetta’s eyes lit up at the sight of it.

“So _that’s_ what I’ve been doing wrong,” Sylvain muttered, peering over Edelgard’s shoulder.

“Thank you, Edelgard!” Bernadetta squeaked, grabbing the box and hurrying back inside as the door swung shut again.

Edelgard put out her foot and held the door open. “Not so fast. You can have your cake, but I want you to come out and tell us why you’ve shut yourself up in here. We want to help you.”

With a resigned sigh, Bernadetta allowed herself to leave the greenhouse, shivering in the cold. She still had the envelope pressed to her chest along with the cake box. “Okay. Fine. I’m out. I did it because it’s nice in here. Because it’s warm and… I couldn’t take it anymore and—and Bernie just likes being surrounded by beauty when Bernie’s upset, okay?”

“What’s the matter, Bernadetta?” Ingrid asked. It was remarkable how quickly she could set aside her issues with Sylvain when the task at hand called for it.

“It’s… It’s, um… uh… a letter,” Bernadetta whimpered. “From my father.”

“Oh.” Ingrid nodded. “I see. I suppose you’d want to read it in private, then. Alright, Sylvain, time to go—”

“Are you kidding me?! I don’t want to read it at all!” Bernadetta cried. “I’ve been holding onto it for days but—i-if I could have my way I’d just—I’d burn it! I’d burn it all! But he’d know… He’d know if I didn’t answer any of his letters, he’d know Bernie burned them!”

“Well, you shouldn’t burn it, then. There could be important news in there,” Sylvain said to her. “Hey, it could even be _good_ news.”

Bernadetta vigorously shook her head. _“Nobody’s_ getting good news right now!”

Edelgard had to admit, she had a point. “Bernadetta, would it help if we were with you while you read it to yourself?”

“M… Maybe… Maybe just a little?”

The four of them stepped into the greenhouse. Edelgard could see why Bernadetta had chosen to hide here. After what she’d been through, the warm, humid air was like a blessing from the Goddess.

Bernadetta’s grip on the envelope loosened. “Oh… Okay… Here goes! Bernie’s gonna do it!” She ripped the envelope open and pulled out the letter within. “C’mon, Bernie, be brave! Like you are when you talk to Dimitri! Brave Bernie… Brave Bernie…” She took a deep breath. “I can do it. I can do it. Okay… It says…” She looked down at it. “‘Dear Bernadetta…’ Um… Uh…”

“Is something wrong?” Edelgard asked her.

Bernadetta squeezed her eyes shut. “I can’t do it! What if he’s disowning me? What would I do? All I have is the money Mother sent with me here and if I’m disowned and then I run out then what do I do? I’ll end up living on the streets…”

“I’m sure it’s nothing that terrible,” Edelgard said.

“Would it help if I read the letter for you?” Ingrid asked. “You can’t avoid this thing forever, you know.”

“I can try, can’t I? If I don’t read it, it doesn’t have to have happened!”

“Ingrid has a point,” Edelgard said. “Ignoring the letter won’t change its contents.”

“I’ll look it over first,” Ingrid assured Bernadetta, “and see whether or not you should be nervous about it.” She held out her hand, and Bernadetta placed the letter in it, trembling like a baby deer. Everyone sat down amid the plants. Bernadetta kept the cake box on her lap.

Ingrid looked over the letter while Bernadetta pecked at the cake with a fork she’d had hidden in her uniform. “Oh, this is nothing to be worried about,” she finally said after a long silence, chuckling a little. “Your father’s just notifying you of some suitors he’s found for you. I used to get letters like this all the time. It’s not too bad; if you’re not interested in them, I’m sure he will—” She trailed off. Her eyes widened. _“Prince Anselm wants your hand in marriage?!”_ she gasped.

_“What?!”_ Edelgard gasped.

_“What?!”_ Sylvain gasped.

_“Hwhugh?!”_ Bernadetta gasped, spilling a fork- and mouthful of cake down the front of her blouse. “Y-You’re making that up,” she said, hastily wiping down her blouse. “I-It’s a trick! A trick! Well, I’m onto you! You’re not gonna pull the wool over Bernie’s eyes—”

“It’s all right here,” Ingrid said, reading further down. “And that’s not all. You’ve got an offer to be one of Prince Burkhart’s… imperial consorts?” Her brow furrowed.

“That’s ridiculous!” Bernadetta said. “That’s… There’s no way…”

Once the initial shock had worn off, Edelgard supposed she wasn’t all that surprised. Both Anselm and Burkhart wanted House Varley on their side, and marriage—and lots of money—was a good way to solidify such a tie. Burkhart must have already offered a marriage proposal to someone else, but just as their father had done, it was customary for an emperor-to-be to collect plenty of women on the side in order to produce as many potential heirs as possible. It was entirely possible that a consort’s child could end up inheriting the throne over a child of the emperor’s actual wife, as Edelgard knew all too well.

Bernadetta shuddered as though a chill had just run up her spine. “I… I’m just… Father always told me that I was useless and unmarriageable, but… But now… I mean, this can’t be real, right? He’s got to be pulling a prank on me or something. I-I’ve never been good enough and now he—and now two _princes_ want to—” She let out a nervous bark of laughter. “That’s right! It’s a joke! A hilarious joke… at my expense. He’s probably laughing himself to death right now thinking about how I’d react,” she added with a sigh. “Or what if… What if I marry Anselm and Burkhart becomes the emperor? Or what if I marry Burkhart and Anselm becomes the emperor? It’d be off with Bernie’s head! A-And either way, if a civil war happens, I’ll be caught in the middle of it! That’s it! That’s what this is all about! He’s trying to get rid of me!”

“There’s more.” A discomforted frown creased Ingrid’s face as she read on. She cleared her throat. “‘As much as I detest Prince Anselm, Prince Burkhart’s offer is wholly and entirely unacceptable, not in the slightest due to the paucity of the bridewealth he has offered. I will not allow my daughter to settle for the life of an emperor’s whor—’ There are some _very_ uncouth words here,” she said.

That sounded like Count Varley, for sure. Edelgard hadn’t been able to stand the man even before she’d met Bernadetta and discovered how he treated his daughter. It seemed Anselm had chosen to gamble on his greed—and it had been a winning move. Like so many political figures, any pretense of principle went out the window when sufficient sums of money were on the table.

“To make a long story short…” Ingrid set the letter down. “Bernadetta, your father is going to marry you to Prince Anselm as soon as you leave Garreg Mach.”

“No way!” Sylvain shouted out, leaping to his feet. “He can’t do that!”

“He’s well within his rights to,” Ingrid said. “Just like in Faerghus, and everywhere else, it’s the head of the house’s responsibility to arrange marriages for his children—”

“Here’s what we’ll do, Bernie,” Sylvain continued, ignoring her. “As soon as we all graduate, you go to Archbishop Rhea and ask to join the Church of Seiros as a nun, so you’ll never have to leave Garreg Mach, and later _I’ll_ become a professor at the academy…”

“Sylvain, take this seriously!”

“I _am!”_

Even before Bernadetta started crying, Edelgard could see the forlorn, lost look on her face, the melancholy even a week’s worth of sweet desserts couldn’t erase, and by the time the first tear rolled from her eyes down her cheeks, Edelgard already had one hand on her shoulder and another on her chest. “I’m sorry, Bernie,” she said. “It’s not fair for you to be dragged into my family’s petty squabbles.”

Bernadetta sobbed into her shoulder. Edelgard patted her on the back, drew little circles with her fingertip between her shoulderblades, did all the things she’d learned over the years that soothed her.

“Look what you’ve done,” Ingrid told Sylvain. “Are you happy now?”

“Well, I don’t see _you_ offering any solutions.”

“‘Solutions?’ What’s there to solve? It’s an arranged marriage, just like mine.”

“Yeah, just like yours, and I _know_ how you feel about Glenn. As for this Anselm guy, I don’t know him, I don’t _want_ to know him, but I know his type. He’s bitter and resentful because he didn’t get something he felt entitled to. And if you think I’m going to stand by and let her marry that kind of rat…”

“You’re not going to _stand by?_ Oh, please. All you have is inane ideas straight out of—”

“Straight out of Ashe’s knight stories?”

Ingrid stood up. “How dare you!” she snarled, drawing her fist back.

Bernadetta pulled herself out of Edelgard’s embrace. “It’s okay,” she mumbled, sniffling. “I just… Bernie’s enough. Bernie’s good enough.” She made a noise halfway between a laugh and a sob, a walking contradiction torn apart by all the conflicting ways the news had hit her. “That’s, uh… good? That’s good! I’m not useless to him anymore. He needs me. He finally needs me!”

Sylvain looked down at her with his brow furrowed, his concern distracting him from his spat with Ingrid. “Uh… Bernie, are you alright?”

Bernadetta nodded and stood up. “Y-Yes, of course, Bernie’s alright. Totally fine. Th-This is good news, actually. This is the best day of Bernie’s life!”

Ingrid’s expression softened. “Wait a minute. Your father called you _useless?”_

“Yes, but—But I’m not anymore,” Bernadetta said excitedly. “I’m not unmarriageable. He said I wasn’t unmarriageable anymore, a-and—and d-does that mean it worked? A-All the times he tied me up and slapped me for fidgeting and dragged me out of my room and tore up my paintings and burned my stories and—” She started choking on her own breath.

“Breathe, Bernie,” Edelgard said, taking hold of her. “Calm down.” She pressed her palm to her heaving chest and took her hand, squeezing it gently and slowly. “Here. Calm down. It’s alright.”

Ingrid and Sylvain were aghast at what they’d heard.

“He did _what_ to you?” Ingrid asked, and Edelgard could see in her eyes that she was thinking of how kind her own father had always been to her, how fortunate she’d been to have a father who hadn’t tried to beat her childhood dreams out of her.

“Did he really do all those things to you, Bernie?” Sylvain asked, and Edelgard could hear the indignation in his voice, as someone who’d fallen in love with Bernadetta for the same stories her father had dismissed as idle trash and set alight.

Bernadetta nodded as she tried to catch her breath. “He—He—” She hiccuped. “He used to… train me to be a good wife,” she sobbed. “He’d scold me all the time, he’d tie me to a chair and leave me there all day to teach me to be quiet, he’d drag me kicking and screaming out of my room…”

Ingrid shifted uncomfortably where she stood.

“Shouldn’t have busted her door down yesterday,” Sylvain muttered to her. “I _told_ you.”

Her downcast eyes fell to the floor. “I… had no idea. I’m sorry, Bernadetta.”

“I’ve… only heard rumors of Count Varley’s cruelty,” Edelgard said to Bernadetta, pretending she didn’t know her entire history like an open book. “But the Adrestian nobles are more rotten than even I’d fathomed. I’m so sorry you suffered through that.”

Bernadetta sniffled as her breathing steadied, resting her head on Edelgard’s shoulder. “But… it’s okay now, right? I guess… Bernie’s got to thank him for all the work he put into Bernie—”

“No, it’s _not_ okay!” Ingrid all but shouted. “After all the ways he hurt you, you don’t owe him a damn thing!”

Sylvain stared at her, jaw slack, mouth agape. Obviously, she’d taken the words from his mouth and he was shocked to hear them coming from her, of all people.

“I know what it’s like to feel an obligation to your father’s wishes,” she continued, clenching her fists, “but my father _earned_ that from me. He was stern sometimes, like a parent should be, frustrating sometimes, sure, but… real fathers don’t torture their daughters. I’m sorry.”

“Oh. Okay.” Bernadetta swallowed the lump in her throat. “I, uh… I think I’m gonna go back to my room. And eat this whole cake now.”

“No, don’t,” Ingrid said. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

“Maybe we could share it,” Sylvain suggested. “If you want to. It’s just—like Ingrid said, it’s a lot to eat on your own.”

“That sounds nice, if it’s all the same to you,” Edelgard said to Bernadetta. She barely managed to catch a sneeze in time. “But,” she croaked, “I don’t think I’d be able to join you. I had a rough night.”

Bernadetta looked at her, blinked, and seemed to finally _see_ her for the first time today. “Oh, um—L-Lady Edelgard, Your Highness, you look awful! What happened?!” She looked to Sylvain and Ingrid. “Uh… Did I miss something important?”

* * *

Edelgard sank into the bathtub, letting the just-warm-enough water lap at her skin and her hair fan out across the surface. It was far from the largest or most luxurious bathtub, since it was only used for patients in the infirmary whose treatments required mineral baths; she would have liked to be able to fit in it without bending her legs and forcing her knees to stick out in the air like a pair of mountains, but after her ordeal, it was more than enough to count as a small piece of heaven. Ferdinand had left her a bar of lavender-scented soap, a mug of steaming, freshly poured mint tea, a comb for her hair, a clean towel, and a pristine and neatly folded uniform before leaving her to her own devices. She might as well have been in a palace; this was the most pampering she’d gotten in months.

So, of course, while she allowed herself to spoil herself, her thoughts turned to Hapi, and for the rest of the afternoon as she soaked and scrubbed away the dirt and let the warm water caress her sore and aching body, all she could do was worry. She worried while she sipped her tea. She worried while she let the tea grow cold. She worried while she whittled down her soap against a few persistent mud and blood stains that had stuck themselves firmly to her skin. She worried while she washed her hair.

And when she had climbed out of the tub, dried herself off, dressed herself, and drunk the last dregs of cold tea, she was still worried. She simply had to trust that Byleth, Jeralt, and Hanneman could come to some agreement about how to safeguard a not-quite-feral cat the size of an Albinean moose, and that said cat would cooperate with them—but while she’d learned to delegate, she had no one to task with doing her _worrying_ for her. She felt that if she did that, there was no depth to which she wouldn’t sink. To worry was to care, to worry was one of few virtues she knew for sure she possessed. And yet it would be nice to not be so _compulsive_ about it.

Her hair, tied up in a loose bun while it dried, was still quite damp when she stepped outside and the air that set upon it was ice cold. Heavy gray clouds blanketed the sky now, with only a faint white glow slipping slowly toward the horizon marking the sun’s location behind them, and a few snowflakes were beginning to drift lazily to the ground in slow, twirling descents. In the distance, the cathedral’s bells rang three o’clock. She was clean, her body didn’t hurt nearly as much as it had in the morning, she didn’t feel quite so stuffy, and she felt hungry enough to eat a horse.

She ran into Ingrid in the courtyard, both of them finding themselves on their way to the dining hall. Ingrid seemed to be in slightly higher spirits than earlier, but there was still a nervous tension running under her skin like the air before a thunderstorm.

“Edelgard,” she said, stopping in her tracks to meet her, “you look a lot better now. How do you feel?”

“Human, at least,” Edelgard answered. “How is Bernie?”

“Better… a little less hysterical, at least. Sylvain’s got a whole bunch of utterly ridiculous schemes she could use to get out of that marriage. But… what do you think?”

“I think the nun idea is particularly ill-advised,” Edelgard said.

“No, about Anselm. Regardless of Bernadetta’s father, how do you feel about that arrangement? Would he be a good husband to her?”

“I wish I knew.”

“From how your siblings talk about him, I’d figured you two were quite close.”

“We were,” Edelgard said, trying not to sound too evasive, “but the Anselm who’s doing these things now… I don’t understand who he’s become.”

“I see.” Ingrid sighed. “I’m sorry I’ve been so edgy lately. It’s Glenn.”

“I figured as much.” Edelgard knew that it was primarily her fault that Ingrid had this worry gnawing at her heart.

“I hope he’s okay. As much as I… I mean…” Ingrid’s mouth flapped, opened and closed like a fish gasping for air, but nothing came out. “It’ll just be a few months until I marry him. I’d hoped to be a proper Garland bride, but Rodrigue doesn’t want to wait that long anymore.”

“Are you afraid he won’t be a good husband to you?”

“Given the situation, I’m not comfortable speaking ill of him right now.” Ingrid said, biting her lip as her evasive answer darted from her mouth in a puff of white clouds.

“I understand.” Edelgard nodded. “Felix keeps saying he’s nothing like his old self, though. I wonder…”

“What?”

“If he might be an impostor, like Tomas was.”

Ingrid shook her head. “No, that’s ridiculous. What if I told you that _Anselm_ was an impostor? Would you believe me?”

“It would explain a lot,” Edelgard said. “But Ingrid, think. What if he _was?_ It would explain his mysterious disappearances, his strange attitude…”

“No. Stop.” Ingrid kept shaking her head. “Glenn’s alive, he’s out there, I _know_ it. I can’t accept that he isn’t. I can’t bury him again.”

“I’m sorry,” Edelgard said, realizing that she wouldn’t accomplish anything but further upsetting her. She took Ingrid by the shoulder. “It was just a thought I had, and if you think it’s nonsense, then… I trust you. You know him better than I do, after all. I suppose I’m just paranoid.”

She knew she was digging a grave for herself. When Kronya revealed herself—because whatever happened, she couldn’t pretend to be Glenn forever—Ingrid and Felix would both recall that Edelgard had suggested the truth to them first, and they had both rejected it. They would wonder how she could have known that, and what else she had known—what else she had been hiding.

Ingrid took her hand and brushed it aside, but there was a faint smile on her face. “I suppose you are. And you have every reason to be. Um… do you want to share a meal with me right now? I’ve got some training scheduled later this afternoon, so I thought I’d grab an early supper. You must be starving.”

Edelgard’s stomach twisted itself into a knot around her backbone. “I’d like that a lot,” she said.

The two of them entered the dining hall and took their place in line. Today’s meal was meat pies, judging from the smell, but Edelgard was so hungry that even _that_ made her mouth water.

After they’d reached the head of the line and received their food—the sight of it, let alone the smell, made Edelgard feel faint—they searched for a table, only to find themselves intercepted by a plump, brown-haired young woman Edelgard identified too late as her older sister Heidemarie. Her face lit up with shock and relief at the sight of her. “Oh, El, darling! Here you are! You’re alright!”

Edelgard found herself swaddled in a warm, firm embrace. Hedwig may have hugged the hardest and the most enthusiastically, but Heidemarie hugged the way a swordmaster dueled—gracefully, artfully, with a well-honed technique that spoke to years of craftsmanship.

“I heard about what happened last night—”

“—from Claude, Hilda, and Leonie, yes, I know—”

“—and Ferdinand told me you’d came back, but I couldn’t find you; he said you were cleaning up but I checked the showers and you weren’t there. Oh, but you don’t look so bad for someone who was mauled by a beast!” Heidemarie looked her over. “A few bruises, a couple scrapes…”

“The worst of it is healed, thankfully,” Edelgard said, “and it wasn’t so bad to begin with.”

Heidemarie looked Ingrid’s way. “And who’s this? Your friend?”

Ingrid bowed. “Ingrid Brandl Galatea of the Blue Lions, Your Highness. It’s an honor and a pleasure.”

“Galatea? As in House Galatea?” Heidemarie’s voice was sweet, but there was no denying that despite her smile she sounded just a _little_ disappointed, as though she had hoped Edelgard was keeping wealthier company. “It’s nice to meet you, too. I’m glad El has friends in her new class.”

“Oh, Edelgard gets along with just about everyone,” Ingrid said.

“Well, quite the problem-solver you’ve become,” Heidemarie said to Edelgard.

“I didn’t say she solves problems,” Ingrid clarified. “Just that she gets along with everyone.”

Heidemarie laughed. “That sounds more like the El I know. Do you mind if I join you?”

“Not at all,” Edelgard said, and the three of them found a table together. She usually wasn’t as much of a voracious eater as Ingrid, but at this moment she could hardly control herself. Heidemarie watched them finish their meals with quiet bemusement while she picked at her own food.

“Is this one of your favorites?” Heidemarie asked when Edelgard had nearly finished. “I’ve actually never liked the meat pies here.”

Edelgard set her fork down and shook her head. “Oh, no, they disgust me.”

Heidemarie laughed. “Any port in a storm, I suppose.”

Ingrid’s fork scraped against her plate as she finished the last few bites of her supper. When she ate, she left her plates and bowls almost as clean as they’d been when she got them. “So, Lady Heidemarie, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but… can you tell me more about Prince Anselm?”

Heidemarie frowned. “What about him? Why would you want to know more about him?”

“Well, between us, I was with Bernadetta von Varley earlier and she’s just received news from her father that she’s to marry him.”

“Oh. That poor girl.”

Ingrid’s face fell. “Would he be that poor of a husband?”

“Oh, no, I was saying that in general. The little Miss Varley is very, um… well, one look at her and you can tell she’s in a sorry state. I think Anselm would be a fairly decent husband to her, I suppose.”

“Really? I didn’t think you and your siblings had very high opinions about him.”

Heidemarie shrugged. “Well, it is awfully hard to get a word in edgewise with Gerlinde and Justine dominating the conversation.”

“Do you support Anselm, then?” Edelgard asked, trying her best to sound as non-judgmental as possible.

“Well, between the three of us, honestly, yes,” Heidemarie answered her. “Father put him into his will for a reason, and I have faith that it was a good one.”

“But a will isn’t legally binding when we already have rules establishing primogeniture for imperial succession,” Edelgard said. “If our father had really wanted to pass the crown onto him, he should have gone through official channels and consulted parliament.”

“Perhaps he meant to before he passed.”

“Still, while I think Anselm would make a fine ruler, his claim to the throne is specious at best; certainly not worth tearing Adrestia—” She tried and failed to hold back a sneeze. “Excuse me. Tearing Adrestia apart. Besides, why would our father have made such a drastic change to his will without informing us before he passed? Clearly, something is rotten in the state of Adrestia.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for that rumor Burkhart is trying to spread about it being a forged will. Honestly, it’s because he made that claim that I don’t feel comfortable supporting him. I don’t think he ever really respected Father at all.”

“Is dividing the empire respectful of his wishes?”

Heidemarie, obviously not accustomed to hearing rebuttals from Edelgard, continued as though she hadn’t said anything. “More to the point, though, El—Anselm has a real vision for the empire. He wants to make things _better._ Burkhart just wants more of the same. I’m sure Immanuel and Dagmar agree with me; I just haven’t heard back from them yet.” She went back to picking at her food.

“How is Anselm going to make Adrestia better by tearing it apart? This whole succession crisis is asinine. He and Burkhart need to come to their senses and find a compromise before the situation worsens.”

“Yes, they _should_ find a compromise. Burkhart can start by stepping down and allowing Anselm to take the crown. Have you heard that the people of Enbarr are gathering outside of the palace gates, demanding that Anselm be made emperor?”

“I have not, and I find it hard to believe,” Edelgard said.

“Um… forget I brought it up,” Ingrid said. “The Empire’s business really doesn’t concern me, anyway. But back to my point, Lady Heidemarie, if you think so highly of Prince Anselm, then I feel better about Bernadetta.” She stood up. “Actually, I have to go. I’ve got some training to do, and then it’s straight to the library so I’m ready for tomorrow’s quiz.”

Edelgard stood up next. “Oh! The quiz—that’s right. With everything that’s happened, it’s completely slipped my mind. Thanks for reminding me, Ingrid. Sorry, Heidemarie, but I’ve got a lot of reading to catch up on tonight.” There was no quiz tomorrow, actually, but she’d had just about enough of her family’s petty squabbles for one day, and it seemed Ingrid could tell that she needed an excuse to leave.

“Oh, I understand,” Heidemarie said. “Good luck and take care, El!”

* * *

The sky was beginning to turn dark and the snowfall was becoming heavier when Edelgard returned to the dormitories and settled into her room. Byleth, Jeralt, and Hapi’s whereabouts still weighed on her mind, but there was nothing to do and nothing to be done, especially with Ferdinand’s watchful eye upon her—as soon as she’d left the dining hall, he had found her and impressed on her that he was under strict orders from her Uncle Volkhard to keep her safe and sound while she recuperated.

She took the time once she’d changed into her pajamas to collect her thoughts and update her journal, though it wasn’t long before she was interrupted by a knock on her door.

“Who is it?” she called out, slipping the journal into her desk drawer behind all the notebooks she used for her classes.

_“El, it’s me,”_ Dimitri answered from behind the door, his voice muffled by the wood. Evidently, he was feeling better since his meltdown earlier this week. _“May I come in?”_

“The door’s unlocked; go ahead.”

Dimitri opened the door and stepped inside. He looked better, relatively speaking; his skin was clearer, he didn’t look quite so gaunt, and there was less of a haunted look in his eyes. He’d traded in his uniform for the same shorts and tunic he typically wore to bed, and the short sleeves exposed his scarred and bruised arms. He smiled at the sight of her. “You don’t look terrible.”

“You don’t look terrible, either,” Edelgard replied. “Bed rest is doing you good, I see.”

“Professor Manuela got tired of healing me and decided it would be best if the rest of my injuries ran their course.” He took careful, deliberate steps toward her bed and sat down on it. “So until Monday at least, I fear I am a prisoner in this building. If I leave, Dedue and I will be expelled. Of course,” he added with a dark chuckle, “that does not matter much to either of us, but the scandal would destroy the rest of the house.”

Edelgard left her chair and came to his side. “Does it still hurt?”

He nodded.

“Anywhere in particular?”

“Just about everywhere,” he said, “but…” He placed his hand on his heart. “Everywhere but here, thankfully.”

“Oh?”

“You were right. You were right about Byleth. If I had lost her, I do not know what I would have done. What I was that day, the boar… I would have never came back. Thank you.” One finger lightly traced the line of one of his ghostly white seam-line scars as it intersected with a fading blotch of gray and purple. “I spoke to her yesterday and asked her how she was doing. She said that… when she looked in a mirror, she felt as though she was missing an old friend. I had never thought of it that way.”

Edelgard knew that Byleth had meant that _very_ literally, but as a metaphor for the loss Dimitri had suffered in this world and she had suffered in her own world, it worked surprisingly well.

“Professor Byleth and I are not unalike,” he added. “Did you know that before she came here, she was known as the Ashen Demon? She showed no emotion on the battlefield, and her first taste of battle was when she was only ten. She’s been a remorseless killer since she was a child.”

“Is that so?”

“This all came out when Dedue conducted his background check on her early in the term. We decided to keep it a secret to avoid causing any upsets. As I understand it, our professor is loath to reflect on that part of her life,” Dimitri said. “I can well imagine what she must have been like, though. Watching her grow and shed that callous shell, leave behind that identity, these past ten months… I feel as though there might be hope for me yet. I’m glad that hope is still alive. When we had fought Solon, I thought it had been taken from me forever.”

She gently rested her palm on one of his bruises. “Does it hurt every time?”

“Every time I what?”

“Every time you use both of your Crests.” Edelgard had only once called upon the power of both the Crest of Seiros and the Crest of Flames at the same time; she’d been told that there was significant danger in doing so, and on that occasion, she had felt the truth in those words regardless of their source. To call upon both Crests had summoned a fire in her veins that had spread through her whole body, penetrating deep into her bones like acid. It had felt as though she were being flayed alive, and deep within her heart, she had known that if she had pushed herself any harder, she would have split herself open like a butterfly’s chrysalis and something terrible and monstrous would have burst out of her in a shower of viscera.

“Yes,” he said. “It is nothing compared to what I have suffered in the past, but the pain is terrible. It’s like I’m being torn apart from the inside.”

“And yet we call these things blessings from the Goddess,” she muttered.

“What?”

“Sometimes I think about you, Dimitri,” she said. “And Ingrid, and Sylvain, and—” She wanted to add Lysithea and Mercedes and Marianne and Hapi, and of course Byleth, and so many other friends she knew whose lives had been made worse for their Crests. “I think of all the ways Crests bring you pain. Why did the Church of Seiros tell us that these horrible things were symbols of the Goddess’ love? Why should her love hurt us?”

Dimitri bowed his head. “I want to tell you something in confidence. She made me swear not to tell anybody.” His voice fell to a whisper. “Marianne has the Crest of the Beast. That is the curse she speaks of. Crests are weapons of great power that we can use to defend ourselves, but why does the Goddess give these weapons to people who cannot bear to use them?”

“I don’t think the Goddess has anything to do with Crests, actually,” Edelgard said. “I think it’s a lie the church and the aristocracy tell so that the strong remain strong and the weak remain weak.”

“I suppose the Goddess told you that herself.” A smile crossed his face. “I am so relieved that you are okay. Your legs…”

“Just a little sore now. Nothing compared to what _you_ did to _yours.”_

“You’re fortunate, then.”

There was another knock on the door. Dimitri sat up straight, grimacing. “If that is Dedue,” he said, “please do not tell him I was trying to escape.”

_“Lady Edelgard,”_ Hubert called out. _“I would like to see that you are well.”_

Edelgard stood up, her sore legs wobbling a bit as she rose to her feet, and opened the door. Hubert stood in front of her, twice as disheveled and bedraggled as he had been in the morning, his hair littered with twigs that Ferdinand was trying to brush out.

“Hubert, really,” Ferdinand said, “you simply cannot present yourself to Lady Edelgard like this. Where are your manners—Oh! Edelgard, darling, hello!”

“Hello, Hubert. I see you made it back okay,” Edelgard said.

“After quite a few bumps in the road,” he said. There was pain in his eyes.

Ferdinand rolled up his sleeve. “Hubert, what is _this?!”_ he gasped, his eyes nearly popping out of his head as he saw four livid claw marks, freshly healed, drawn across his forearm.

“I tripped and fell on a knife,” Hubert said. “Several knives. Thankfully, Professor Byleth is quite adept at healing magic.”

“And all this hair,” Ferdinand added, plucking a bit of scarlet fur off of Hubert’s black cloak.

“Ferdinand, _dear,_ I think Hubert would like to speak to me alone,” Edelgard said. She looked over her shoulder and saw Dimitri already pulling himself off her bed.

“I will just be on my way,” he said. “El, thank you so much for talking with me.”

He and Ferdinand left Hubert and Edelgard alone, though Ferdinand needed a bit more jostling before he left.

“We are having a meeting tonight,” Hubert said to her.

“Is Hapi…”

“Safe? Yes, Lady Edelgard, you need not worry about her yet.”

“…Yet?”

“You will see.”

Edelgard did not like how ominous that answer sounded. “So, what happened to your arm?”

Hubert was silent for a while. “Hapi wanted to play. Unfortunately for her and myself both, her claws don’t retract like those of a normal cat do. But it is nothing for you to concern yourself with. It hardly even hurts anymore.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Again, it is nothing. Cats are as cats do, I’m afraid, and fortunately I am still standing. Do you need my help getting ready?”

“No, I can dress myself.”

“And how do you feel?”

“A little sore, a bit achy, a cough and a sneeze every so often…” Edelgard shrugged. “Nothing that won’t go away after a good night’s sleep.”

“Good. I do have the utmost faith in Professor Manuela to take good care of you.” Hubert sighed. “Lady Edelgard, please tell me all this peril is only temporary. The worst is behind us, is it not?”

“That would be nice,” she replied, watching his face fall. The worst, she thought, was yet to come.

* * *

Edelgard knew that the meeting would be unusual when she noticed enormous pawprints in the snow outside the guard tower’s door. The snow fell fast and thick, quickly erasing them, but they were still visible when she and Hubert arrived.

At the top of the stairs, at the top of the monastery wall, the little room Time Squad had eked out a command center in looked the same as ever, save for the enormous cat nestled in the corner of the room. Byleth, Claude, and Hilda were already there.

“Hapi? How did you get her up here?” Edelgard asked them.

“We didn’t,” Byleth said. She shrugged. “She found it on her own.”

“She must remember this place,” Edelgard supposed. “It must feel safe to her.”

At the sound of her voice, Hapi sat straight up, and with a swish of her tail unfolded herself and crossed the floor. She filled the little room, making it seem more like a dollhouse.

“Are you _sure_ she’s tame?” Hilda asked, taking a step backward.

Hapi sniffed the air around Edelgard, let out an irritated (or possibly dismayed) meow, and headbutted her with enough force to knock her to the floor. Before Edelgard could pull herself off of her aching backside, Hapi started vigorously rubbing her cheek against her. Edelgard let out a little involuntary laugh as her long, wiry whiskers tickled her face.

“Yes,” Edelgard said. Hapi started licking her hair. “No—No, Hapi, stop—I _just_ washed this—” she sputtered.

“Aw, she thinks you’re one of her kitties,” Claude cooed while Hapi pinned her down. “So I guess this explains why she was so good with cats.”

“So… how are we going to feed her?” Hilda asked.

“Hmm… She’ll probably eat as much as a full-grown wyvern,” Byleth said, “judging by her size.”

“Great. Well, I’m not dragging any goat carcasses all the way out here. You’ll do it, right, Claude? I mean, it’s just that you’re used to it…”

“I’d love to,” Claude said, “but I’m pretty busy. And Byleth is a professor, Jeralt is a knight, both with pretty packed schedules… so I’ll need your help, of course.”

Hilda groaned.

“Where is Jeralt?” Edelgard asked once she’d pulled herself away from Hapi. Hapi answered her question with a stern meow and pulled her back in. The tips of her claws hooked themselves into her clothes. “No, bad kitty—”

Hilda laughed at her, and she could tell from the barely-stifled smirk on Claude’s face that he, too, found this incredibly amusing.

“Dad’s got some work with the knights,” Byleth said, “but he’ll be here soon.”

“What are we going to do,” Edelgard said, resigning herself to being pinned underneath Hapi’s paws, “when Hapi leaves? She’s a cat; she’ll come and go as she pleases.” The thought occurred to her that while Hapi was quite calm around people she knew, she was more than capable of harming other students—and other students were capable of harming _her._ On top of that, there was Thales…

“Right,” Claude said. “If there’s one thing cats hate, it’s being cooped up. Though if she’s afraid around people she doesn’t know, she might just hide here for the next few days.”

“Hanneman has appointed himself responsible for her,” Hubert said. “At least it will be easier to keep this area clear for her now that the knights are aware.”

Soon, the door to the room opened again and Jeralt trod in, stamping the snow off his boots and brushing it off his shoulders and out of his hair. “Hi,” he grunted. “Long day, huh? Sorry I’m late. I just had Catherine take Lord Fraldarius in for questioning. Of course, I doubt we’ll get anything out of him, and we’re making it clear we don’t think he’s _guilty_ of anything—hopefully it’ll just keep him out of our hair for a bit while we figure this mess out. Shamir’s gone off to see where Cornelia’s headed. Hanneman is locked in his office tinkering with one of those damned Crest machines of his. What else is new?”

“I had a little chat with Kronya today,” Claude said.

_“What?”_ Edelgard snapped. _“Alone?”_

“Of course.” He shrugged. “You and Jeralt weren’t around to come with me. Anyway, I’ve got to thank you for softening her up for me. I think I might have taken her the rest of the way.”

To say the least, Edelgard was skeptical. Something wasn’t adding up here. “What did you talk about?”

“Oh, a lot of private stuff,” Claude said evasively. “But more to the point, I’m pretty sure we’ve made some great progress on her, because…” He pulled a small leather notebook out from under his cloak. “She let me retrieve the codebook from Glenn’s room. Now we have a full set of codes for the No-Eyes’s Enigma machine. All the messages I’ve picked up that we haven’t been able to decode so far are revealed to us now.”

“She just… handed all this over to us?” Hubert asked. “How do you know the codes aren’t fake?”

“I’d already collected about a third of them,” Claude said. “They match up with the contents of this book.” He let the codebook fall to the table with a heavy thwack. “They’ve got no more secrets. Nowhere to hide. So… yeah. I think we can trust her.”

Edelgard’s eyes narrowed. “How did you turn her to our side, Claude? I’d like to know,” she said. None of this felt right. There was something wrong about all of this—why was _Claude,_ the only person in the monastery more paranoid and transactional than her, being so trusting?

“I just picked up where you left off,” Claude said with a wry smile that did nothing to put her at ease.

“Well, as long as you didn’t set her loose,” Jeralt said.

“With Not-Rodrigue still running around and doing as he pleases? Of course not.” Claude rapped his knuckles on the codebook’s cover. “But speaking of this little beauty… I was able to use it to decode a message I intercepted in the rookery this morning.” The levity vanished from his face and his voice, and there was a hard and serious glint in his eyes. “Their new impostor is just a little ahead of schedule. They’re arriving Saturday night.”

As though sensing her distress, Hapi laid her head on Edelgard’s lap and started purring.


	26. Trust No One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Claude draws Edelgard's suspicion, a shocking truth about Thales is revealed, and a new guest arrives at the monastery whose presence threatens to throw everything into chaos.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had the pleasure of commissioning a friend of mine for some **amazing** artwork to go along with the fic and it's fucking incredible, please let it fill your eyeballs:  
>   
> And then [go on Twitter and tell the artist how great it is](https://twitter.com/Kirakanjo/status/1331503957475254272) because **holy fuck** it's fucking good as hell!!!
> 
> Anyway, happy Thanksgiving! I hope you're all celebrating as safely as you can and if you can't I hope you stay safe anyway. Here's your weekly dose of Edelgard suffering.

At first, Edelgard had been wary of Professor Hanneman von Essar. He was a man driven by intellectual curiosity, naturally curious, and all too eager to pry into certain secrets she couldn’t allow to be revealed. But he was also, as she had eventually learned, a kindred spirit, all too aware of the ways lives could be destroyed over Crests and the lack thereof. The von Essar line bore the Crest of Indech and bore it quite fruitfully compared to other noble lines, which made its daughters especially prized by other noble families as brood mares. The root of his obsession—to understand Crests in every way—stemmed from that injustice.

And that obsession, as much as it had put Edelgard on guard at first, had been the key to saving Lysithea’s life. It was the key to saving her own life, too, and the key to creating a world free from the tyranny of aristocracy. And now, in this world, in this past, it might have been the key to restoring Hapi to her true self.

That Friday morning, just about at the crack of dawn, Edelgard found herself roused from her sleep by Byleth and Jeralt and summoned to Hanneman’s office, with Hubert following close behind. Within the office Hanneman busied himself with his Crest Analyzer, bent over the machine with fingers carefully tuning knobs as glass lenses of various sizes and thicknesses positioned themselves by subtle fractions of inches over a thin disk of luminous violet crystal. He was a bundle of nervous energy, clearly excited nearly to the point of mania by the sleepless night he’d spent conducting his research. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and mustache unkempt, his clothes rumpled. Byleth and Jeralt kept a keen eye on him as he worked, as though simple observation of his work might impart on them some wisdom of the universe.

“This would be so much easier,” he announced, always in the mood for an impromptu lecture, “if I could have taken a blood sample. But it’s a common misconception, or rather, a gross oversimplification, that Crests are solely a property of one’s blood. True, Crest signatures are most highly concentrated in blood, but they can be found quite plentifully in flesh, sweat, saliva, and mucous as well. Trace amounts remain even in things like hair, fingernails, dandruff, bits of dead skin, various excretions, the like…”

“So you can find something?” Edelgard inquired.

“Have you been up all night?” Byleth asked.

“No, no, I simply awoke a few hours ago. I saw _something_ just before I summoned you, and I am sure I can do it again if I can just set up the calibrations right. It may be faint and difficult to make out, but—” Hanneman continued to fiddle with the machine. “I am not seeing a reaction… perhaps if I were to increase the magnification… Ah! Here it is!”

The subtle glow within the crystal grew stronger and brighter, illuminating the lenses, until finally an image appeared in the air above the machine. Traced in violet light was the shape of a broken ring reminiscent of the curving horns of a beast with spines protruding from its size, and with an unbroken ring caught between the tips of the horns. The image wavered, though, like the surface of a pond broken by ripples, and the arcs of light that would normally trace clean lines through the air roiled and fluttered like tongues of flame. It seemed to throb and spasm as though in great pain. Beneath the distortions, something about the shape seemed faintly familiar to Edelgard.

“So, Professor,” Hubert said, eyeing the strange Crest, “what is this one? I don’t recall ever seeing it in any text on the subject.”

Hanneman stood up, leaned forward, and squinted through his monocle. He stroked his mustache between his fingertips. For a long while, he said nothing.

“I,” he said, “have never seen this Crest before in my entire life.”

“Fuck,” Jeralt said, disappointed.

“I have never seen this Crest before in my entire life,” Hanneman repeated, shocked. A second later and he looked as though he could have started jumping for joy right then and there. “I have never seen this Crest before in my entire life!” he cried out, exuberant. A laugh escaped his lips. “This is incredible. Is it a new Crest? Or perhaps a Crest long lost to history? A sign of a lost bloodline, perhaps?”

He rushed to his desk and fumbled with his notebook, putting pen to ink pot with shaking hands and then excitedly transcribing the shape he saw to paper. “Hmm… These distortions make it hard to make out the details, but it seems a simple shape at heart… If I correct for the ripples, then I… I think… I may have got it! The shape of Hapi’s Crest!”

Edelgard circled around his desk and peered over his shoulder. She _had_ seen that shape before. “I’ve seen this Crest before,” she said.

“What?! Where?” Hanneman grabbed her by the shoulders, manic in his excitement. “Where have you seen it?”

“On the third floor,” she said, brushing his hands aside (he sheepishly retreated from her with a mumbled apology). “Rhea’s star terrace, where she has Byleth and me for tea. It’s engraved into the floor tiles.”

“Oh,” Byleth said. “That’s right. I remember now. I thought it looked familiar.”

“Astounding.” Hanneman started scribbling notes. “So it seems that this Crest belonged to a man or woman who was quite important in the church’s early history. Perhaps a lost fifth saint, or some sort of apostle, any apocryphal figure…”

“Does it really matter who the Crest originally belonged to?” Jeralt asked. He poked at the image of the Crest, making the rippling and shivering light coil around his finger like a wisp of smoke before reforming. “Anyway, I’ve never seen a Crest manifest itself like this. It looks, uh… sick or something.”

“Crests are not living things,” Hanneman said, “and they cannot be ‘sick,’ Captain. But they _can_ be corrupted, theoretically. I recall a story from centuries back of a gremory with a major Crest of Lamine. It was said that she became unable to control her Crest. At first, she could heal people of even the most grievous and mortal wounds simply by touching them, but as her magic became stronger, anybody she came into contact with became riddled with tumors. Soon her healing magic turned inward. The story goes that she lived for two hundred years and that by the time the Knights of Seiros put her down, she had been reduced to a shambling mass of flesh that no longer even resembled a human.”

“That could explain why Hapi summons monsters whenever she sighs,” Byleth said. “And why they’re so angry when they show up.”

“She _what?”_ Hanneman gasped. “Well, that narrows it down, I suppose. An apocryphal figure in the Church of Seiros who could make beasts do his bidding. Unfortunately, I won’t have time to scour the library chasing this legend, and I doubt any of you do, either. Perhaps Linhardt would be interested in some extra credit, given how desperately he needs it to graduate…”

“Professor, can you un-corrupt her Crest?” Hubert asked, dragging Hanneman’s excited ramblings back to his point. “Perhaps that would change her back.”

“Perhaps,” Hanneman replied. “I shall have to run tests. Lots of tests. And it would help if I had blood to work with.”

“How long will that take?” Jeralt asked.

“My work has only just begun; I cannot say,” Hanneman said. “But science often moves slowly. I cannot promise to have found any breakthroughs before the end of the term.”

“That’s a long time to be stuck as a giant cat,” Byleth muttered, her eyes finding the floor.

“Well, at least she’s happy, if you’ll pardon the play on words. At any rate—” Hanneman put his hand over his mouth to stifle a yawn. “You can count on me to see this situation resolved as swiftly as scientifically possible.” He glanced out the window. “Goodness. Dawn already?”

A hush fell over the office. One could hear a pin drop as the gears in Hanneman’s fatigued brain came to a halt and started turning again.

“Good heavens! I have a class to teach this morning!” he gasped. “What was I thinking? They would expect this sort of conduct from the likes of Manuela, but _me,_ of all people?!”

“Honestly, it’s so late in the term,” Jeralt said, “what do you even still have to teach the brats? Give ‘em a day off.”

“Besides, all the Black Eagles are probably pretty worn down,” Byleth added, “with everything that’s going on.”

Hubert nodded in agreement, thoroughly exhausted by Edelgard’s extracurricular activities.

“Have _you_ been going easy on _your_ class?” Hanneman asked Byleth, a sharp and accusing note to his voice.

She nodded.

He calmed down a bit. “That is… somewhat sensible. I have never been known to give days off, but these _are_ extenuating circumstances. I suppose the Black Eagles can all sleep through their morning lecture today.”

“Ferdinand and I shall inform the rest of the class,” Hubert said, offering Hanneman a polite bow. He, Jeralt, Byleth, and Edelgard started to leave.

“Wait,” Hanneman said. “Edelgard, a moment of your time, please?”

Edelgard stayed behind as Byleth, Jeralt, and Hubert stepped out into the hallway. “Yes, Professor?”

Hanneman slumped in his desk chair, his weariness catching up with him. “You have been through quite a lot over the past two weeks. How are you managing?”

These two weeks, while certainly eventful, had hardly been the hardest or even the worst weeks of her life, not by a long shot, but Edelgard appreciated his concern. “I’m managing,” she simply said.

“And to think, at the start of the term, you were one of the laziest students I had ever had the privilege of teaching. I only wish I could take full responsibility for your transformation.” He chuckled. “Though I had thought you would be more distressed, especially given your family’s… situation.”

“Oh, I am,” Edelgard answered. “Make no doubt about it, this conflict is…” She trailed off. She wasn’t sure how she wanted to describe the feeling of a dismal reality hammering a hole through years of self-delusion. In honor of her siblings’ memories, she’d tried to remember what little of them she _could_ remember at their best. She hadn’t allowed herself to imagine that they could fight among themselves or be petty or prejudiced or embody any human flaws, thinking it would be an insult to all of them, and to be faced with that reality… “It’s… soul-crushing.”

“Soul-crushing.” Hanneman nodded. “I understand.”

“Professor, if I may,” Edelgard added, “could you tell me more about Burkhart and Anselm? As their teacher, you must know at least some facets of them better than I do.”

“Certainly. As I’ve said before, Burkhart was under intense pressure as crown prince to be the best, and that pressure manifested as an almost neurotic perfectionism. And one of the key traits of perfectionists is that they will steer the course of their lives to avoid exposing their imperfections to the world. He never took an exam he didn’t think he could pass with flying colors.”

“He got top marks in everything, I hear,” Edelgard said. “Ferdinand is always talking about beating his performance.”

“He did, but sometimes I wish I had been firmer with him and pushed him to try subjects he couldn’t master so handily. He has never learned that there is no shame in being bad at something; Anselm’s power play might be the first time he has ever been faced with a real challenge outside of his control.” A smile crossed Hanneman’s face. “I suppose you must be his exact opposite. Since you joined Professor Byleth’s class, it seems there’s no subject you won’t study.”

Edelgard recalled her first few weeks flopping around the training hall as she’d tried to whip this soft body into shape. She certainly was different from Burkhart. “And what about Anselm?”

“Anselm? He was much like you, but, well, he _started out_ driven. He was hungry from the day he arrived at Garreg Mach. He didn’t demand perfection from himself like Burkhart as long as he could best his peers. I could tell he had quite the chip on his shoulder. Honestly, together he and Burkhart would be two halves of a whole. Perhaps that is why they get along like a house on fire.”

“Indeed. It’s almost enough to make one wish they could _both_ be emperor, if only they could get along.”

Hanneman laughed. “Pascal said the same thing to me the other day.”

“One thing I’d like to know,” Edelgard said, “is what they aim to do with the Empire. I’ve received messages from both of them, but all they do is speak ill of the other. I’m supporting Burkhart because he has the firmest right to the crown, but I haven’t a clue what sort of a world he or Anselm wants to create.”

“And that would change your mind?”

“I think I could forgive Anselm’s bid for power,” Edelgard said, “if I knew exactly what he wanted for Adrestia and I approved of it.” She’d gotten some impression, not just from Burkhart’s slanderous letter but also from Anselm’s entreaty to Archbishop Rhea, that he was a traditionalist, not somebody who looked to the future; for that reason, she was loath to side with him.

“In other words, the ends justify the means?” Hanneman raised an eyebrow. “Well, I cannot say that Burkhart would be a bad emperor. I do not think Anselm would be one either. I think they would both be quite adept at managing the Empire’s affairs. At least as good as your father was.”

“You don’t need to speak so diplomatically to me, Professor.”

“I wish I could say more. I’m afraid your brothers didn’t exactly bear their souls to me while they were enrolled here. At any rate, there is little the emperor can get done without the support of Duke Aegir, so I personally think it is a moot point who is in charge.”

“Well, thank you nonetheless, Professor. I just wish I could talk to them both right here. Letters are so inconvenient, and if I ask them both individually, they’ll just keep spewing lies and exaggerations about each other.”

“Would that we could simply speak to everyone like that.”

Edelgard offered him a polite bow. “Thank you for indulging me, Professor. I’ll let you rest now.”

“The pleasure is all mine, Edelgard,” Hanneman said.

“And thank you for helping with Hapi.”

“Of course.” His eyes roved to the Crest Analyzer, his brow furrowing. “Hapi von Rusalka… the poor girl.”

“You knew Lady Cornelia, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, his eyes downcast. “Yes, I did. Before we renounced our titles and left our respective houses, we both conducted research on Crests together.” He shook his head sadly. “I had never imagined she would use her knowledge to do such horrible things. She was such a nice and sweet person when I knew her.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I remember the day we parted ways. Like myself, Cornelia had grown disgusted by the environment of the aristocracy and simply wished to continue her research in peace. I had planned to come here to continue my work and suggested that she do the same, but she said that the people of Faerghus had moved her heart. She took the surname Arnim and began to work for King Lambert as his court mage.” He rested his hand on his whiskery cheek, his eyes roaming wistfully from his tools and equipment to the dawn sky outside the window. “I wonder when she started going by von Rusalka again. I had always thought she’d wanted nothing to do with her house, but something must have changed.”

“Something did change,” Edelgard said. The real Cornelia, the Cornelia that Hanneman had known, had died a long time ago. “I’m sorry. It sounds like you two were close.”

Hanneman’s cheeks turned red behind two days’ worth of overgrown salt-and-pepper stubble. “What exactly are you implying, young lady?” he sputtered.

“That you were good friends,” she said.

“Ah. Yes. Of course. That we were, Edelgard.” He hastily regained his composure. “That we were. And now I see her doing to her own children far more grotesque things than the acts that so disgusted us about our families in our youths. I can promise you that I will do everything in my power to help Hapi.”

“After you take some time to rest,” Edelgard said.

“Right. Of course,” Hanneman said. “Fatigue is the enemy of research.” Almost as if on cue, he stifled a yawn. “Do take care, Edelgard.”

“Also,” she added, heading to the door, “I think you and Linhardt would work well together on this project.”

“For his sake, I should hope he would. He needs the extra credit. I don’t know how I can allow him to graduate in good conscience otherwise.”

Feeling a little guilty that in this world Linhardt hadn’t had her influence to whip him into shape, or at least something almost vaguely resembling shape if one were to squint a little, Edelgard left the room and found Hubert waiting for her.

The two of them headed downstairs together. “Lady Edelgard,” Hubert asked, “are you feeling better today?”

As if to answer his question, she sneezed. “Still a little stuffy, I’m afraid.”

“I am sure Ferdinand would say some tea and bed rest would do you good; your professor will probably understand.”

Edelgard tuned him out in favor of a far more interesting conversation her ears had picked up. Down in the main hall, Thales was giving a handful of Knights of Seiros quite a vicious tongue-lashing.

 _“How much longer do you insist on detaining me? Do you have even the slightest clue who I_ am? _The Lord Regent of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus—”_

“We know who you are,” Jeralt said, hardly able to contain his contempt.

“Lord Fraldarius,” Catherine said, “for the umpteenth time, you aren’t being detained and nobody is accusing you of anything. We just want to ask you some questions about Lady Cornelia.”

“Have I not answered enough questions already? Her business is her business; we are hardly joined at the hip,” Thales snapped. “Tell me, Captain Jeralt, is this level of incompetence to be expected of the Knights of Seiros? It has been a week since my firstborn has vanished and you are no closer to finding him, and rather than bring me peace of mind, you waste my time and insult me with asinine interrogations. I have better and more important things to do than waste my time here entertaining you. How many lords of Faerghus pay your monthly stipends?”

Jeralt and Catherine didn’t so much as flinch at his tirade. “All of them except you, apparently,” he said.

“And now I see I was right to cease my donations. I had heard such tales of your career as a knight, Captain, but it seems the Knights of Seiros are worse off with you out of retirement than they were before you returned here.”

“Now see here,” one of the other knights spoke up. “Captain Jeralt is entitled to your respect, sir!”

“Is he? The entire Holy Kingdom of Faerghus is under my authority. Who calls _you_ master? Do not forget from whence you came, Jeralt Reus Eisner. The same goes for you, Catherine of House Charon.”

“It’s been a long time since I called myself a subject of the Kingdom, Lord Fraldarius,” Jeralt said.

“Our allegiance isn’t to any kingdom,” Catherine added. “Our allegiance is to Archbishop Rhea first and foremost, and it is our duty to strike down all who would call the Church of Seiros their enemy.”

Edelgard wondered if Thales was feeling at all pressured by now. Catherine could be quite intimidating especially with Thunderbrand at her side and Jeralt’s attitude had to have him wondering what the knights suspected him of. It was a wonderful sight to see him cornered, even though she knew he would find some way to slither out of it.

“Trust me, we don’t want to keep you here any longer than we need to,” Jeralt said. “So if you would cooperate just a little longer, we’ll let you go on your way.”

“That loathsome man,” Hubert hissed into Edelgard’s ear. “How the sight of him galls me. If I could only slip behind him and rid him of that disguise, reveal him to the world…”

“We don’t need to reveal him to the world,” Edelgard whispered back, “just to Dimitri.”

“I can already feel an ulcer forming in my gut from your sheer stupidity and constant blundering,” Thales said, “but I suppose I have no choice.” His gaze flitted away from the knights and met Edelgard’s; she felt a dagger plunge into her eye beneath her patch. There might have been a flicker of a smile on his face. “But I must impress on you that this is a waste of both my time and yours when we _all_ have more important tasks at hand.”

“We’ll be the judge of that,” Jeralt said, and he and his fellow knights led him away.

Edelgard sneezed again.

“To bed, Lady Edelgard?” Hubert asked.

“No,” she said, sniffling. “Not yet.”

* * *

The catacombs were dark, dreary, and dank. The occasional drip of water from the ceiling echoed through the twisting tunnels, the distant and not-so-distant squeaks and scrapes of vermin scurrying from hiding place to hiding place, the oppressive thickness and moistness of the air, and the skulls leering out from the bone-packed corridors made this place Edelgard’s nightmares made flesh, and she wished Jeralt had found a better place to keep Kronya hidden.

“Are you sure we should have come here without Captain Jeralt?” Hubert asked.

“He’s busy,” Edelgard said. The labyrinthine tunnels inched past, their bony walls seeming to ripple and squirm in the torch light.

They found Kronya right where they left her, lying on the floor. Since Edelgard had last been here, her accommodations had been altered. She no longer had her hands bound behind her back or her ankles tied together, and simply paced back and forth like a caged lion. A row of iron bars had been strung up on a network of ropes that anchored them to the walls and to each other with byzantine knots, forming a barrier that looked at once both oddly sturdy and fragile as gossamer.

“Hello, Kronya,” Edelgard said. “How is our little scorpion today?”

“Hello there, Edel,” she said. “I’ve redecorated. What do you think? Your sweet little pal Claude put up a fancy new wall so he could untie me and let me walk around.” She rubbed her chafed wrists. “It took _forever_ to feel my hands and feet again.”

“Is that why you handed him your codebook?” Hubert asked. “Because he gave you better accommodations? Lady Edelgard, perhaps this was why he was so cagey last night.”

“What?” Kronya frowned. “I didn’t give Claude my codebook; that would just be one more reason Thales would have to kill me! Is your skull full of depleted uranium?”

“He didn’t get the codebook from you?” Edelgard asked, taken aback. “Then who?”

Kronya shrugged. “How am I supposed to know? I’m stuck down here, you idiots. Maybe he ransacked my room. That isn’t to say I didn’t _do_ something for him, though,” she said.

“What did you do?” Edelgard asked, crossing her arms.

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Why not?”

“He made me swear not to.”

“And why would you swear that to him?”

“Because he made me swear not to.”

“And since when do you take orders from him?” Edelgard asked, her blood turning icy. The possibility rose to the forefront of her mind that… no, no, that was _impossible,_ she told herself, _ludicrous._

“They’re not orders. They’re suggestions I agree with.”

Edelgard took a pastry from her bag and pulled off the wax paper wrapping. “Perhaps this will loosen your tongue,” she said. “It’s filled with vanilla custard.”

Kronya held out her hand, her wrist banging against the bars of her cell. “Gimme.”

Edelgard held it just out of reach. “You’ll have to tell us what you and Claude talked about yesterday.”

“Okay. I let him in on a little secret. A secret about Thales,” Kronya said. “Sometimes he gets horrible headaches. Sometimes he faints. He’s more vulnerable than you think he is. If you time things right, I think you can take him out.”

“Is he? How interesting,” Hubert said.

“I can’t say I’m not surprised that you’ve chosen to help us against Thales,” Edelgard told Kronya as she slid the pastry through the bars.

Kronya took a moment to unravel the double negative. “Why would you be surprised?”

“Claude told you what has happened to Lady Cornelia, I take it?” Hubert said. “An obvious trend has emerged. He is leading his allies into situations that will paint them as villains, then disavowing them. For whatever reason, you have all become dead weight to him, and he is looking to shed as much of it as he can. You will be next, and eventually, the Death Knight and Hurricane King will fall, and he will stand alone at the apex of the world.”

Kronya nodded. “It’s as you said. Thales is purging his underlings and consolidating his operations. I’m one of his underlings and I don’t want to be purged. Especially not like…” She shuddered. “Not like _that._ I’m trying to have faith that you filthy vermin can keep me safe. It’s hard, though. Because Thales is good at getting rid of people, and he’s already planning on getting rid of you and the rest of your… time idiots.”

“Time squad,” Hubert corrected.

Satisfied, though not fully, Edelgard handed over the pastry and Kronya she started nibbling at it. She sat down and crossed her legs, seemingly deep in thought as she ate, looking for all the world like an overgrown rat. Edelgard watched her slowly erode the pastry against her teeth the way lapping waves might eventually wear down a boulder on the shore of a lake until the last morsel of pastry crust and glob of custard vanished into her mouth.

Kronya licked her fingers. “Do you know what I am?”

“A scorpion?” Hubert asked wryly.

“I’m a mound of flesh that was grown in a vat around a magic rock. I wasn’t _born_ like you, I was _manufactured._ Like a car or a train or—” She shook his head. “No, wait, you idiots don’t know what those things are. Like molten iron poured into a mold. When I was made Thales gave me a number. He put me in a room with only one door and another me, and told the two of us that we had to decide between us which one of us went through the door. This went on about a dozen times before he dropped me in a bigger room with twenty other potential me’s and said we had to decide which one out of all of us went through the door. When I was finished with all of them, he gave me a name. From the day I opened my eyes, I existed at his pleasure. But I don’t want to stop existing when he’s done with me.”

Edelgard silently absorbed Kronya’s story. She’d always figured Kronya’s existence must have been hellish. With her limited life experience and childish mindset, she simply didn’t know how to imagine a better life. Perhaps she was jealous. Perhaps she saw children and wondered why she hadn’t had a chance to be one. Perhaps she’d seen mothers and fathers and wondered what it would be like to have one. Perhaps that was why she postured so much about how stupid humans were—because a constant front of inherent superiority masked her jealousy. Deep down, Kronya only wanted what she herself had wanted but hadn’t thought she’d deserved: to be human. She just didn’t want to admit it, or perhaps didn’t know _how_ to admit it.

“Can I go now?” Kronya stood up, there was a flash of violet sparks, and in her place stood Glenn Fraldarius. Her next words came out in his voice. “I’m sure Feelie and Ingry are worried sick about me.”

“I’ll ask you again, Kronya,” Edelgard said. “Who is Claude? _What_ is Claude?”

“I’ll do you one better. _Why_ is Claude?” Kronya answered with a smarmy smile twisting Glenn’s face. She leaned against the bars of her cell and folded her arms over her chest. The ropes that held the bars in place bowed a little and went taut, faintly creaking under the strain. “I’ll tell you if you let me go. Or at least bring me more treats. Maybe even twice a day, too. No, three times.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Edelgard said, and she and Hubert left her behind.

As soon as she left behind those awful catacombs and the dark memories their shadowy corridors dredged up behind, she and Hubert went their separate ways—he was signed up for a seminar at the start of the next hour—and she sought out Claude von Riegan and an end to the gnawing paranoia that had festered in her mind all night.

He wasn’t hard to find. In fact, he was so easy to find that if she believed in fate, she might have thought it had been fate that his path and Edelgard’s crossed so soon. She found him in the training hall, practicing with a wooden sword.

“Claude,” she called out. “Care for a friendly duel?”

He greeted her with a friendly grin that, like most of his smiles, didn’t come close to his eyes. “Sure, Your Highness. Pick up a sword and let’s get to work. Go easy on me, though; it’s not my specialty.”

Edelgard was all too happy to oblige. Her sword struck his with enough force to nearly knock him off his feet, but he regained his balance all too quickly and struck back. They traded blows. Edelgard felt his wooden blade bruise her skin nearly as many times as hers made contact with his—he was surprisingly gifted with the sword for someone who almost always stuck to long-range combat.

At last, she hooked her foot around his ankle, knocked the wind out of him with a blow to his diaphragm, and sent him tumbling unceremoniously onto the sandy floor. As he pulled himself up, she swooped down, held her wooden blade against his throat, and pressed her thumb against the back of his neck.

“Uh… Edelgard?” Claude asked. “What are you doing?”

Edelgard felt her heart leap into her throat as her thumb pressed into his neck. She pressed until she felt bone underneath the skin, hard and unyielding beneath supple flesh, press back.

Nothing happened.

“Ow,” Claude said. “That hurt.”

Edelgard dropped her sword and stood up. “I’m… sorry.” She couldn’t believe what she’d done. She’d just thought that _Claude_ of all people had been an impostor. “I just had to be sure.”

Claude rubbed the back of his neck. “What the hell?”

“Your behavior with Kronya was suspicious, so I started to wonder…”

“You thought I was one of _them?”_ he asked, incredulous. “I’m fighting the No-Eyes _with_ you, Edelgard—”

“It’s ridiculous, yes, but I couldn’t rule out the possibility,” Edelgard said. “Even nonsense can be true sometimes. Even so, Claude, I want answers.” She brandished her sword. “Considering that Hilda and I were the time travelers, you sure were eager to spearhead this little Time Squad of yours.”

“I knew you’d come around to the name eventually.”

“For a native to this time-line, someone who by all rights has no skin in this game whatsoever, you’ve been quite invested in taking charge of the situation. You’ve been taking point on almost all of our plans. You’ve been the one cracking the No-Eyes’ codes for us. And then there’s your interactions with Kronya. I know you lied about her giving you the codebook. No glib responses. Tell me. Who are you really, Claude? And what are you plotting?”

Claude gave her another false smile. “Well… you know I’m not one of the No-Eyed People. Isn’t that enough to make you feel at ease, Edelgard?”

“No,” Edelgard said. “And another thing. Nader. What’s he doing acting as your spy? What are you up to?”

Claude took a step back, as though stepping out of strangling range. “Okay, Edelgard. You want the truth?”

“I do.”

“Well, it’s not your time to know.” He glanced at the door. “But I guess I can tell you this much. I may not be a time traveler like you,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t have any experience with it. Do you remember that letter that led you to me? The one in Hilda’s handwriting, tagged with Hilda’s perfume, that Hilda insists she didn’t write? The one that had the date of your wedding on it?”

“I remember.”

“I’ve been receiving more of those letters.” He took a deep, anxious breath. “The first letter I got said that nobody can know their own future.”

“The messages are from the future?” Edelgard asked.

“So it seems. And there’s only one person I know of who can copy Hilda’s handwriting so perfectly and has access to her perfume.”

“Who?”

Claude smiled. “Me.”

Edelgard felt as though she’d had the wind knocked out of her. “…What? You think you’re receiving instructions from your future self?”

“Seems likely,” he said. “He doesn’t go into much detail, Future Claude. Of course, he can’t, or else I’d know the future, and apparently that’s bad. But whatever his goals are, they’re consistent with helping you and Hilda.”

“And Kronya.” Edelgard set aside her sword. “So… you’re doing the things your future self commands you to do so that you can become your future self and send those notes back in time.”

“A perfect loop. That’s how I understand it.” Claude grinned. “On the plus side, that means I’m pretty much immortal, at least until my future self stops sending letters back to me.”

She shook her head, recalling one of Sothis’ most crucial lessons about messing with time, the lesson she had learned from allowing the two daggers to erase themselves from history and the consequences of that single mistake in Remire. “I hate to rain on your parade, Claude, but you are most definitely _not_ immortal. It’s just that if you die, you’ll break time.”

He was silent for a moment.

“Oh,” he said. “That sounds bad.”

“It’s very bad.”

Claude’s revelation only raised further questions. For starters, Those Who Slither in the Dark were, as far as Edelgard knew, the only faction in play currently studying time travel. And him being a time traveler didn’t explain why Kronya had suddenly become so cooperative with him. And as long as he couldn’t present evidence, it was just as likely that his whole story was a fabrication.

“I’m not satisfied,” she told him. “You need to tell me what your goals are. And I need to know where you got that codebook from. If you’d simply stolen it from one of the people we fought last week, that’s what you would have said, but you lied. How did you get it?”

“I have a confidential source.”

“Who?”

“I can’t tell you that. That would defeat the purpose of them being confidential.”

“The night we met, you told me you had your own reasons for trusting me,” Edelgard said. “But what reasons do I have to trust you?”

“Because I’m like you. I want to destroy the No-Eyed People and Thales more than anything. For my own reasons. And sometimes… you have to cooperate with people to destroy them. Right, Edelgard?” There was a hard gleam in his emerald eyes, a knowing and taunting smile in his voice. He tapped the side of his nose and winked. “I’m afraid I can’t let you in on the whole truth. Not yet, anyway. Not without jeopardizing everything I’ve been working for. Or everything I _will_ be working for.”

“Does Hilda know?”

“She knows enough.”

“Why aren’t you keeping me in the loop? I don’t take kindly to being used.”

“You’re _not_ being used, Edelgard. I’m helping you get home, remember? We unravel the No-Eyes’ plot, we stop whatever weird time things they’re doing, we undo whatever left you and Hilda stranded here. Beyond that, I have my own goals, and since you’ll be back in your home time-line, those goals are none of your concern. Just trust me when I say that I want to destroy the No-Eyes and make Fódlan a better place, just like you do.”

The door to the training hall swung open and Ferdinand stepped in, dragging an extremely unwilling Linhardt behind him. “Come now, Linhardt, just because Professor Hanneman canceled our morning lecture and battalion drills is no reason to sleep in!”

“Actually, it’s _every_ reason to sleep in,” Linhardt said.

“Nonsense! There is no reason to sleep in unless you are ill.” Ferdinand pressed a hand to his forehead. “I do not feel a fever. Besides, you’ll need plenty of lance training if you want to pass that holy knight certification by the end of the term.”

“I don’t recall saying I wanted to _pass_ it.”

Ferdinand noticed Edelgard. “Oh! Speaking of people who should be sleeping in, Edelgard…”

Claude winked. “Let’s just keep this between us, shall we?” he asked, making use of the distraction to saunter off.

“For now,” Edelgard said, fuming as she watched him leave, powerless to stop him. Everything made just as much sense as before. “Ferdinand! I’m feeling much better this morning,” she said, holding back a cough.

“I should hope so. You do not feel dizzy or nauseous, do you?” Ferdinand rushed to her side. With his would-be jailer distracted, Linhardt started to slowly creep back toward the door. “What were you talking to Claude about?”

“Nothing,” Edelgard said. “Just small talk.”

“You looked a bit upset.”

“Well, you know Claude. He can be quite upsetting sometimes.”

Ferdinand laughed. “That he can be, dear. Anyway, since you are here, there is something I would like to ask you. I am penning a letter to my father about this whole situation and imploring him to do the right thing and shut down Prince Anselm’s coup. If you could write a letter of your own and send it with mine, the two of us might be able to save Adrestia.” He sounded so wide-eyed and optimistic. “And, honestly, I am stuck on mine and think you might have some suggestions to improve it. These _are_ your brothers we are talking about, after all.”

He noticed Linhardt slinking away. “Linhardt! No!” he barked, dashing across the hall and tackling him to the floor. “If you do not show some initiative _now_ after ten months of nothing, think of how poorly that would reflect on me, your house leader!”

“That sounds like a _you_ problem, not a _me_ problem,” Linhardt said as Ferdinand dragged him to his feet.

“Oh, and one more thing,” Ferdinand added once he’d led Linhardt to the weapons rack and picked out a training lance for him. “Edelgard, do you remember Constance von Nuvelle?”

“No,” Edelgard said. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I don’t.” She recalled the name Nuvelle, but in her world, House Nuvelle had completely collapsed and left no heirs that she knew of. The Viscounty of Nuvelle, which sat on the west coast of the Empire nestled between the Brionac Plateau and the Barony of Ochs, was now managed by House Ochs. Obviously, House Nuvelle must have been doing relatively well for itself in this world, considering that it apparently still existed.

“That is okay. I do not think you have seen her since you were eight, but we all used to be the best of friends. You know, before you returned from Fhirdiad and our fathers decided we were to be wed, Constance and I, well… we each thought the other was the one.”

“You were twelve.”

“And in love. I implored my father to arrange our marriage. However, he had other ideas. Her family seemed rather against it as well, sadly. Anyway, I received a letter from her just the other day, and was so busy that I did not have a chance to read it until last night,” Ferdinand said. “Constance has been offered the position of one of Prince Burkhart’s consorts. And she is coming to Garreg Mach to rub the news in my face. She is due tomorrow evening.”

“T-Tomorrow evening?” Edelgard repeated, her mouth dry.

“Um… yes. Is something the matter?”

“No,” she said. “I’m excited to see her after… how long has it been? Ten years?”

“Honestly, I am quite surprised she has been allowed to accept the offer,” Ferdinand said. “As I understand it, House Nuvelle is very secretive and frowns upon its heirs marrying out of the house. But it was greatly diminished after the Brigid-Dagda war, so I suppose they are abandoning their principles to be afforded more power and status. Anyway, I am happy for her. She shall know that. I will see to it that she knows that.” He let out a laugh. He sounded quite uncomfortable. “She has come here to gloat. She thinks I will be jealous. Ha! Me, _jealous?”_

“You do sound a bit jealous,” Linhardt said.

“I am _not,”_ Ferdinand insisted. “I am completely and entirely happy for her, because I am completely and entirely happy with my fiancee. Now, Edelgard, since you are here, do you want to grab a lance and help our friend Linhardt graduate?”

“Actually, there’s another subject I’d rather study right now—”

“This is for your own good, Linhardt. Now let us go through the proper stance again…”

Edelgard used the opportunity to tutor Linhardt, a frustrating situation if ever there was one, to drive from her head the terrifying thought that the new agent of Those Who Slither in the Dark had taken the form of a childhood friend of hers. And yet the thought remained in her mind, sitting upon her brain the way an imagined sleep paralysis goblin might sit on her chest in the middle of the night.

* * *

Edelgard found Byleth later that day sitting in the middle of the frozen-over pond, her fishing rod suspended over a hole she’d cut in the ice, and couldn’t help but smile at the sight of her professor doing everything she could to get her daily required dose of fishing in, no matter what. With careful steps, she embarked onto the ice, the snow crunching under her boots. Each step she took was slow and hesitant, until Byleth stood up from the stool she’d set down and all but glided over the ice to her.

“Careful there,” she said, taking Edelgard by the waist. “Those uniform boots don’t have much traction. You’ll slip.”

“Thank you, Professor,” Edelgard said. In the sunlight, Byleth’s hair seemed luminous, and flecks of snow that had fallen onto the mint-green locks glittered and sparkled. Edelgard was shocked to notice two small pleats woven into her hair, framing her face, with thin red and white ribbons threaded into them. “Your hair… Did Hilda do that for you?”

Byleth nodded. “You like it?”

“It’s sweet.” Edelgard smiled. “I might have to tell my Byleth to do it, too.”

“Thank you.” Byleth led her to the hole and took a seat. “Sorry there’s only one stool. Have you ever gone ice fishing?”

“Oh, plenty of times. Granted, we had little time for recreation these past five years, but my Byleth promised me that next winter, we would put up an ice shanty over a lake and stay there for a weekend.”

“It’d be cold.”

“Not with her.”

Byleth looked away. Edelgard felt as though she’d just said something awkward. The two of them were silent until the line on her fishing rod jerked and she started reeling in her catch. A colorful trout emerged from the hole in the ice; Byleth slipped the hook out of its mouth and tossed the fish into a bucket.

“I don’t feel so lonely when I’m fishing,” she said.

“I understand.” Edelgard peered into the bucket. Byleth had caught over half a dozen fish, all of them whoppers. “Are you trying to catch enough to feed the entire monastery?”

“No, just Hapi.” Byleth cast her reel again. “Giant monster cats like fish, right?”

“I would hope so. How is Hapi?”

“Still in the guard tower. Dad has a few knights setting up a sand pit outside so she doesn’t ruin the tower.”

“I see.”

“What have you been up to?”

“Well… after last night, I’ve been concerned about Claude.” Edelgard filled Byleth in on her conversations with Kronya and Claude. All the while, Byleth continued fishing.

“That’s concerning,” Byleth replied when she was done. “But if it gets Kronya on our side and gets us the information we need…” she shrugged.

“I know. It’s just… another thing we’ll have to keep an eye on. I’ve also worked out the identity of… my replacement. Constance von Nuvelle. She’s an old friend of Ferdinand’s.”

Byleth pursed her lips.

“And on top of that…” Edelgard trailed off.

“What?” Byleth asked, noting her silence with a concerned furrow of her brow.

“No, never mind. I can’t ask you to…”

“To what?”

“To use your power. You said the other day that you couldn’t control it anymore, so—”

“You want to visit home,” Byleth interrupted.

Edelgard sighed. “I do. Last week, I felt my world’s Byleth turn back time again. I’m worried,” she admitted, kneading her cold hands together. “I’m afraid for her, for my friends. But if you can’t control your power, then I shouldn’t burden you—”

“When I said I couldn’t control it,” Byleth said, “I meant it happened on instinct. When Sothis was with me, she handled all the details. She’d even know how long I wanted to go back, like she could pluck it right out of my head.”

“I see. All this time, you’ve been riding along as a passenger, and now you’ve been forced to take the reins yourself.”

“That’s a good way of putting it.”

“Well,” Edelgard said, “I’m sorry to trouble you.”

“No, I should try it,” Byleth said. “If I’m to use this power to protect you all, I need to master it.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s fish for a little while longer. Then I’ll go back… hmm… Just before you stepped onto the ice. That should give you some time to catch up.”

Edelgard stayed at Byleth’s side long enough for her to double the number of fish in her bucket.

Byleth sighed. “I’ll have to catch all these fish again,” she lamented.

“It’ll be just as fun the second time,” Edelgard assured her.

She closed her eyes, bowed her head as though praying, and set down her rod, clasping her hands in her lap. Her brow furrowed; her teeth latched onto her lip. Edelgard could hear a low, strained hum slip between her teeth as her eyes squeezed shut even tighter.

“Professor,” Edelgard said, “if you strain yourself, you might—”

The world froze. This time, no fey child appeared at Byleth’s side; Sothis’ absence was palpable. But though the color faded from the world around her, Byleth herself remained radiant and vibrant, awash in vivid color.

The world burned away and Edelgard found herself in a different Garreg Mach. An older, more battered Garreg Mach, wearier and worn. The air was brisk, not cold; the blanket of snow that covered the eaves of the buildings and the walls of the monastery was thin and powdery, as though it was the first snow of the year. Perhaps it was. The body she found herself in was tired and the dull, omnipresent pain of dozens of scars upon scars greeted her like an old friend. She was sitting on the star terrace overlooking the courtyard with a warm mug of hot cocoa pressed into her hands.

Edelgard greeted her counterpart with a polite clearing of her throat. “Ahem.”

“Ah!” The other Edelgard jolted from shock, sending ripples through her drink. “Oh, it’s you. I guess there’s no way to let me know you’re here without surprising me.”

“I suppose not,” Edelgard said. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

She told the other Edelgard what was happening to her family. When she had finished, the other Edelgard said nothing. Edelgard could feel her ribs curl around her heart.

“I can’t believe it,” she finally said, shaking her head. “Burky and Ansy… I mean, they didn’t _like_ each other, but…” Edelgard could feel tears forming in her eyes at her counterpart’s bidding. “How could they do this to us?”

“We hope things can still be resolved amicably,” Edelgard said, choking down her counterpart’s tears for her, “but as time goes on, the battle lines seem to only become further entrenched. Burkhart and Anselm are collecting support from other nobles. Ferdinand and I are going to write letters to Duke Aegir, but…”

“I’m pretty powerless compared to you, aren’t I?” the other Edelgard said. “I’ve got… some stupid castle somewhere in Arundel that I’m not even going to live in because House Aegir has a bigger and nicer castle that Ferdinand’s set to inherit and—But _you, you_ have the Black Eagle Strike Force and a whole army behind you that treats you like a god…” The other Edelgard sipped her cocoa and tried to choke it down. “My family’s a bunch of j-jerks, huh? Except Hedy and Pasky. And Joachim. And sometimes Heidi.”

“I was so young when they passed away,” Edelgard said, no longer sure who of the two of them was crying anymore. “I held them in my heart as nothing less than angels and blamed myself for being too earthly, too corrupt, too sinful to follow them into the Goddess’ embrace. Seeing them in your world, all too human…”

“Disappointing, isn’t it?” the other Edelgard asked, sniffling and drying her eyes on her sleeve.

“Painful.” Edelgard looked down into her mug. “I’m sorry, Edelgard. The world, _your_ world, is falling into chaos. When we fix this, you won’t be able to go back to the lazy, carefree life you’d known.”

“That life was ending anyway,” the other Edelgard replied, somber. “Except for when I was with Hilda, I felt pretty miserable at Garreg Mach. And I knew it was only a matter of time before I married Ferdinand, and he’d be… well… he’s such a _busybody._ I hope you’ve helped him drag his head out of his ass a bit.”

“Perhaps a little,” Edelgard said. “All the same, though, for all I’ve said about making a world where everyone can choose their own path, their own destiny, I’ve decided on the course of your life for you. Purely in reaction to the unfolding events, of course, but still, you’ll return to your world set on a course you may not want.”

 _“Excuse me, Your Majesty.”_ The voice of Ladislava, the captain of Edelgard’s personal guard, rang out across the terrace. “I hope I’m not bothering you.”

Ladislava stood tall, perfectly composed and not at all surprised at the sight of her emperor speaking to herself (or at least making sure not to show it). She had a stern face that looked quite sour on a good day and spoke to her serious nature, framed with dirty blonde hair tied back in a severe bun. She’d been at Edelgard’s side so often over the course of the war that some of the Black Eagles Strike Force considered her an unofficial member of the team. Her face bore the scars of battle, and her armored uniform hid dozens more.

“Not at all,” Edelgard said as her counterpart took control of her legs and stood up. Ladislava towered over her even when she was at her tallest. “Is something the matter?”

“Shamir Nevrand has just arrived from Goneril territory,” Ladislava said. “She’s waiting in the reception hall. Should I bring her up?”

“Shamir?” Edelgard’s ears perked up. As the swiftest of the former Knights of Seiros, she’d frequently relied on Shamir as a scout. Byleth must have sent her ahead with news. But good news, or ill? “No, we’ll visit her. Hurry.” She wasn’t sure how much time she had left, but she knew it wouldn’t be enough.

Ladislava led her down the stairs and into the reception hall. Shamir leaned against one of the stone pillars that held up the towering ceiling, but snapped to attention when she caught sight of her employer. Lysithea was there as well, and though she certainly didn’t have to bow to the emperor, she did anyway.

“Lady Edelgard.” Though she didn’t bow or salute, Shamir retained her formal and rigid posture out of respect. Someone more vain or more obsessed with decorum than Edelgard might have taken offense. “Ladi.”

“Hi, Shammy,” Ladislava answered.

“So, is it just you,” Shamir asked Edelgard, not missing a beat despite the telltale signs of a faint blush on her cheeks, “or do you have our Edelgard with you?”

“We’re both here,” Edelgard answered. “Quickly, Shamir—I don’t know how much time I have. What’s going on at Shambhala?”

“Byleth changed our plans at the last minute and led a small strike team into the stronghold through an alternate route,” Shamir said. “The infiltration took a lot longer than expected. It wasn’t until last Friday that we managed to capture Thales and seize control of the javelins of light. Once we had that, it was a simple matter of busting down the front door and sending our main forces in.”

“You captured Thales a week ago?” Edelgard asked. “Were there any complications?”

Shamir snorted. “Complications? Besides being stuck in that hellhole for over a week, it went smoothly. When we found Thales, he was lying down on the floor in the citadel completely unconscious. We restrained him before he woke up and Hubert and Ferdinand warped him outside. They’ve taken him back to the Imperial Palace to rot in the dungeons.”

“It can’t have been that easy,” Edelgard gasped in disbelief. She still recalled the other Hilda’s testimony—an old man with a sword-whip who had somehow gotten the jump on them and slaughtered them in the span of seconds, triggering Byleth’s power. “Wasn’t there anything Thales could use to defend himself—soldiers, magical weapons, technology—”

“He did have something with him in the citadel. A giant metal and glass cylinder,” Shamir said, “with a man inside it. Guy looked tough. Had a sword that looked just like the one Byleth used to use. It looked like he’d been trying to let him out before he lost consciousness.”

“That’s it?” Lysithea asked.

“You sound disappointed,” Shamir said, and only someone who had known her deadpan manner of speaking for years could tell that she was making fun. “Anyway, the real ordeal was seizing the rest of the city. Even with the citadel already under our control, they fought tooth and nail. We dug our heels in and fought for days. We’ve mostly eliminated the enemy forces, except for a few holdouts who’ve hidden away in the tunnels. Aside from a small occupying force, the rest of our army is back on the surface and the rest of the Black Eagles Strike Force is preparing to return here on their way to Enbarr. There’s just the matter of the civilians.”

“Civilians?” Edelgard repeated. “What do you mean, civilians?” She had never thought that _people,_ innocent people, had lived in Shambhala.

“You know, people who aren’t soldiers. We estimate there might have been ten thousand people living in there who weren’t directly a part of the Agarthan military. When it became clear that we were winning…” Shamir paused, her eyes tracing the intricate patterns of the tile floor. “Remember Fhirdiad?”

“I don’t think any of us can forget,” Lysithea said, shuddering. Edelgard set a hand on her shoulder. “So, Thales’ men… did he burn them alive? His own people?”

Shamir shook her head. “No, worse than that. There was this noise throughout the city, like… like hearing an orchestra through a tin can. And a voice speaking over it, issuing instructions. The people stepped out of their front doors, laid down, and slit their throats. Just rows and rows of people, laid out like caskets, bleeding to death with smiles on their faces. We managed to save about two hundred of them from ‘forced compliance’ with their leader’s orders. Now we’re figuring out what to do with them.”

Aghast, Edelgard forced down a mouthful of air and struggled to regain her composure. Her counterpart was utterly dumbstruck. “Well… we have conquered Shambhala. The survivors are subjects of the Adrestian Empire now, and they shall be treated with all of the courtesy that affords them.” She had dreamed of the day she would be able to say those words.

“Figured as much.”

Lysithea took a deep, shuddering breath and leaned against Edelgard, resting her head on her shoulder. Edelgard could feel the fragile warmth running under her skin and her pulse flutter as the news sank in and held her closer.

“It’s over,” Lysithea murmured.

Edelgard ran her fingers gently through her hair. “Yes… it’s over.” In this world, anyway, it was over.

She felt the fishhook dig into her soul again. “Thank you for your service, Shamir. I expect you and Byleth to compile a full report on the tactics we used to bring Shambhala under our control. There are other worlds than this one.”

Shamir gave her a curt nod. “Of course, Lady Edelgard.”

The world burst into flames and Edelgard woke up to find herself tucked snugly into her bed. Byleth must have carried her back to her room after she’d reset time. She was probably still fishing at the pond.

Edelgard pulled herself out of bed. It was still early in the afternoon; the shadows hadn’t begun to lengthen yet and sunlight still streamed through the open window. She had to admit, she felt much better. Thales was captured, Those Who Slither in the Dark had been crushed, and the remnants of Agartha in her world now belonged to Adrestia.

Still, though, there was enough to feel uneasy about in _this_ world.

There was a heavy, angry knocking at her door. _“Edelgard!”_ Hilda shouted out at her. _“I know you’re awake! Open the door!”_

Edelgard opened the door. Hilda put her hands on her hips and glared at her. Her hair was a tangled mess of pink bedhead, her makeup smeared, her clothes rumpled.

“What can I do for you, Hilda?” Edelgard asked.

“You can _warn_ me the next time you make Byleth use her powers,” Hilda snarled. “Marianne had to drag me all the way back to my room and now I’m a mess! Anyway, I hope you had as much fun as I did back home. I was surrounded by traumatized mole people.”

* * *

Friday gave way to Saturday all too soon, and the arc of the sun from horizon to horizon plotted a course toward doom. Edelgard tried to pass her time, spending Friday afternoon helping Ferdinand pen his letters, the evening helping Byleth feed Hapi, and the subsequent Saturday morning helping Raphael shovel snow from the walkways. In the afternoon, Annette invited her and whichever other Blue Lions she could drag out of the dormitory on a shopping trip, and though spirits were high and the sunlight danced and sparkled on the fresh snow that had fallen overnight, a grim pallor only Edelgard could sense hung over the world.

“Ooh, where should we go first?” Annette asked her classmates. “The bakery? The boutique? There’s a jewelry store in the town square…”

“It’s all the same to me,” Ingrid said.

“Why did you drag me along to this?” Felix grumbled to Sylvain.

“Because we’ve all had a shit week,” Sylvain answered him. “I mean, hell, your father was just arrested by the Knights of Seiros, wasn’t he?”

 _“What?”_ Ingrid gasped. “Felix, is that true?”

“He hasn’t been arrested,” Edelgard said. “From what I hear, they’re just questioning him about Cornelia.”

Annette’s smile suddenly looked twice as fake and uneasy. Word of Cornelia’s actions the other night had spread quickly, albeit inaccurately, and she was undoubtedly worrying for Mercedes’ well being.

“No, he’s been arrested. I made sure to tip them off,” Felix said. He sounded—and looked—almost smug.

“You… had the knights arrest your dad?” Raphael asked, puzzled.

“How could you do that?” Ingrid asked, shocked and appalled. As a self-proclaimed moral center of the group, she took it upon herself to model outrage for everyone else. “After everything he’s done for us…”

“I’ve overheard some weird conversations between him and Glenn,” Felix answered coolly. “Conversations that make me think he’s up to something. Anyway, if he’s innocent, then he’s got nothing to hide, and the knights will let him go. Simple as that.”

“Remind me never to get on your bad side,” Sylvain said with a nervous laugh. “So, uh, how about the boutique? You girls need to get ready for spring, and us guys could help you pick out outfits…”

“I hear he fainted yesterday afternoon while they were questioning him.” Felix scoffed. “For all his bluster, to think the old man would be so weak.”

“He fainted?” Edelgard asked, a chill running up her spine. “Yesterday afternoon?” Kronya’s words echoed in her head. _Sometimes he gets horrible headaches. Sometimes he faints. He’s more vulnerable than you think he is._ Who else got horrible headaches and fainted on occasion? Had Kronya been suggesting that…

“That’s disgusting, Felix,” Ingrid snapped. “Your own father—”

“If you knew him like I do, you wouldn’t speak so highly of him.”

“First Dimitri, now Lord Fraldarius—you don’t hold _anything_ sacred, do you, Felix?”

“Should I?”

“Tell me you at least still believe in the Goddess.”

“The boutique! Yeah! Let’s go!” Annette interrupted. “Great idea, Sylvain!” She grabbed Ingrid by the wrist and tried to pull her and Felix apart.

“There’s an Almyran merchant on the edge of town,” Edelgard suggested, “that I’ve been curious about. He sells fine silks, I hear.”

“Almyran fashion?” Sylvain arched his eyebrows. “I mean, I’ll try anything once,” he said, his thoughts no doubt turning to the stories he’d read about exotic princesses and belly-dancers clad in nothing but golden jewelry and gossamer silks so sheer that they were almost as transparent as glass. “Can’t imagine he gets many customers right here in the heart of Fódlan. We should make his day.”

As the boiling tension between Ingrid and Felix cooled to a simmer, Edelgard led the class away from the town square. The route she took still showed signs of the beast attack earlier that week—deep claw marks in the cobblestones, the occasional hastily shuttered window and newly sheaved roofs and holes patched in the walls.

“Almyran fashion is catching on in Derdriu, actually,” Ignatz spoke up. “But only among the new rich. The old money, the noble houses, are the ones who do all the fighting at Fódlan’s Throat, so they think wearing the clothes of the enemy is a bit, uh… gauche.”

“Do you live in Derdriu?” Annette asked him.

Ignatz shook his head. “No, but my parents visit the markets there about twice a year.”

“I’d love to see it someday. All the cities and towns up north are pretty much glorified fortresses. It gets old every once in a while. Sometimes you want to see a place that doesn’t remind you of fighting.”

“A fortress is the last thing Derdriu is. It’s right on the ocean,” Ignatz said. “And I mean _right_ on the ocean! You know how the Great Bridge of Myrddin was built over the Airmid River? They did the same thing with Derdriu. And on the outskirts, you have houses built on stilts right on the shoreline, and you can go fishing off the back porch. It’s a beautiful place. My parents are planning to retire there one day.”

“Sounds like heaven for our professor,” Sylvain said. “Hey, you know what would be nice? When we all graduate, instead of going our separate ways right away, we go on a big trip across Fódlan! We can visit Derdriu, Enbarr, Fódlan’s Fangs, Lake Teutates, Fhirdiad… Who knows? We might even run into Flayn and Seteth somewhere out there.”

“That sounds like a great idea!” Raphael said. “Can my sister come along with us?”

The class arrived at the home of Claude’s spy. Edelgard knocked on the door. Nader was a sly and shrewd man both on the battlefield and off it, but if she was lucky, perhaps she would be able to wring some answers about Claude’s mysterious behavior out of him.

Nader greeted them at the door. It was amazing how much a simple pair of glasses and a change in posture could disguise a man. While he didn’t have Edelgard fooled in the slightest, no one else would dare to suspect this man of being anything but a humble merchant, let alone the legendary general who had led hundreds of attacks on Fódlan’s Locket.

“Good afternoon, sir,” Edelgard said. “We heard you sell Almyran silks?”

“Ah, Fódlan children! Come in, come in!” he replied, slipping into his ridiculous fake accent and leading the class inside. “My name is Behnam, and I am silk seller and tailor. You are interested, yes? Almyran clothes big hit in Leicester. No one will admit it, though. They only buy silk for their summer underwear, ha!”

“Um, sorry, but it’s not pronounced ‘lie-ces-ter,’ sir,” Ignatz said. “It’s more like ‘less-ter.’”

“You Fódlaners have strange language! So many words where you only say half the letters!”

Sylvain examined a wooden mannequin torso draped in blue and green silks that shimmered like the ocean on a summer day. “So, uh, is this what the women wear in Almyra?” he asked.

“Is _men’s_ fashion,” Nader answered. “You like? You try! Go into back room, put it on.”

Ingrid held back a laugh at the splotch of red that had spread on Sylvain’s face all the way to the tips of his ears. “Well,” Felix said, nudging him in the side, “why don’t you try it on?”

 _“You_ should try it on, Felix,” Annette said, and now it was _his_ turn for his face to turn red. “Just imagine dancing in that!”

Nader seized on that. “You are dancer?” He came around to Felix’s side. “Almyran dancing is most exciting dancing in world. I teach you a few moves, yes?”

Felix crossed his arms. “Edelgard’s the dancer here. Ask _her.”_

Edelgard could tell that Nader was having the time of his life. “Sure,” she said.

While the rest of her classmates examined Nader’s wares, Edelgard joined him in the back room.

“I was waiting for you to show up,” Nader said, straightening his shoulders and taking off his glasses. “So, how’s Hapi? Is she still a cat?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Edelgard said, “but she’s quite tame.”

“Praise the gods for small miracles,” he replied. “She was a good houseguest for a few days, at least. Pleasant enough company.”

“We’re looking into a way to change her back. With any luck, we’ll find something soon. I hope the knights haven’t been scrutinizing you over harboring her.”

“No, no, I had just the right sob story for them.” He slipped back into his parody accent. “I have lovely daughter, Nasrin. Five years ago, I lose her in war. This girl shows up at my door, is spitting image of my dear rosette, does not say no when I call her Nasrin. How could poor Behnam know she was fugitive Hapi? As far as I knew, my desert rose had returned. I had never been happier.”

Edelgard laughed. “You’re having a lot of fun with this.”

“When Prince Khalid suggested this plan to me, I was skeptical. But this is the most fun I’ve had since my daughter came up to my knee.”

“But you’re not just here to wring amusement out of the locals.”

“Of course not. It’s just a perk of the job.” He grinned. “Now, Your Highness, why don’t I show you a few moves you can impress your friends with?”

“You were _serious_ about that?”

“Of course.” He took her by the arms and began to guide her through the unfamiliar steps of a foreign dance. “So, Lady Edelgard von Hresvelg, Prince Khalid tells me we have fought twice on the field of battle.”

“He told you I was a time traveler?”

“He did. So, we have fought. Have I been defeated?”

“Of course not,” Edelgard said. Almyrans had a very different definition of defeat. To them, surviving a battle and running to fight another day was a form of victory in itself, and one was only defeated when one was unable to get back up and try again tomorrow. “Of course not, Nader the Undefeated. You live up to your name.”

“Ah. I await the opportunity to return to the battlefield.”

“Is that why you’re here?” she asked.

Nader gave her a very Claude-like wink. “Why else would I be here?”

Edelgard figured he must have been serving as not only an observer but a liaison of sorts between Claude and the Almyran army on the other side of Fódlan’s Throat. He had been preparing for the oncoming attack on Garreg Mach in his own way, mustering his own military in secret. But why keep it a secret from his allies in the Time Squad? For the same reason he kept his knowledge of the future and his interactions with Kronya secret?

“Well,” she said, “I hope that when the fighting breaks out, we won’t find ourselves on opposite sides. Sending you home with your tail between your legs is getting boring.”

A wide grin split Nader’s face, stretching the scars that ran across his cheek and the bridge of his nose. “I don’t think you need to worry about that, Your Highness.”

* * *

After an eventful and, dare she say it, _fun_ afternoon in town, Edelgard returned to the monastery, wary of the sun’s motions overhead. But she had barely gotten past the gatekeeper before realizing that she was out of time.

“Oh! Edelgard, darling, there you are!” Ferdinand called out, crossing the great hall with long, excited strides. He was beaming. Following behind him was a woman who recognized Edelgard at first glance, though Edelgard didn’t recognize her. She had a sharp face that called to mind a mink or a fox, decorated with a haughty smile curling her red lips and cunning gleam in her violet eyes. Blonde hair fell to her chin in tight, ornate curls. She wore an ornate dress in layers of teal and salmon pink, gaudy and ostentatious.

The rest of the Blue Lions went on ahead, leaving Edelgard trapped with Ferdinand and his guest.

“I wondered when you would return. Constance and I have been waiting for you!” Ferdinand said. “Constance, you do remember Edelgard, don’t you?”

“Oh, of _course,”_ Constance said. “I could never forget my old, dear friend Edelgard! You have gotten so…” She looked Edelgard up and down. “Well… I did think you would be taller.” She laughed, and it was the most dominating laugh Edelgard had ever heard. It _aggressively_ filled the room, pushing everything else aside.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you again, Constance,” Edelgard said, offering her a polite curtsy.

“Oh, the pleasure is all mine! I take it Ferdinand has told you the news? While I won’t be _officially_ a Hresvelg, I am oh, _so_ excited to call you my sister-in-law.”

“Likewise,” Edelgard said. “I thought you weren’t arriving until sunset.”

“Well, I had _expected_ to arrive in the evening, but in the last stretch, the horses simply flew across the roads!” Constance’s smile widened, and Edelgard saw knives behind it and felt a familiar sting in her eye. _“Loving_ the eyepatch, by the way, darling; it is _so_ distinguished. You look like quite the warrior princess! But I hear you are a lovely painter. Ooh! Perhaps you could paint me tomorrow? I am so excited. I just want to spend all the time in the world with you!”

“That sounds wonderful,” Edelgard said against every survival instinct in her psyche. “I can’t wait.”

“Why wait? We can start right now! Where do you typically paint your subjects? How about the Black Eagles common room, right under the banners?” Constance talked a mile a minute.

“Constance, my friend,” Ferdinand interjected, “you should settle yourself in. We can talk more at supper. And perhaps you would like to meet this year’s Black Eagles class as well?”

“Would I! I hear it is quite an eccentric collection you have this year. And you as head of the house. Oh, and I hear some of the other Hresvelgs are here as well! Are Joachim and Heidemarie among them? I attended this very academy with them, you know. We are great friends!”

“I shall inform them of your arrival,” Ferdinand said. “Make sure all your things are in order and we shall meet in the dining hall at sundown.”

“Wonderful idea, my friend,” Constance said, and she finally left.

Edelgard crossed her arms. “So,” she said once Constance was well out of earshot. “She was the one, hmm?”

“I must go,” Ferdinand said, hurrying down the hall.

Edelgard didn’t get much farther before Hubert stopped her. “Lady Edelgard,” he said, bowing. “We have a problem.”

“I know,” she said. “The new agent has arrived.”

“We have _two_ problems,” he clarified.

Edelgard felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. “What’s the second problem?”

“Claude has set Kronya free.”

“He _what?”_

Hubert looked over his shoulder to see if anybody could overhear. His voice came out as a snakelike hiss. “Thankfully, he has handed her over to the Knights of Seiros. Captain Jeralt has her detained. Her story is that Glenn has been lost in the catacombs for a week, which I suppose is true, from a certain point of view. However, this course of action makes me uneasy. Apparently, she’s ready to cooperate as long as we keep her safe from Thales and Dimitri, but to say the least, I do not trust her in the slightest. Nor Claude.”

“I’d like to hope that my pastries did the trick,” Edelgard said to him, “but I doubt it.” She sighed. “I’ll deal with this later. Do the Knights of Seiros have Thales, or rather, Rodrigue detained as well?”

“He is in the infirmary with guards posted at the door. Apparently, he collapsed yesterday afternoon during his interrogation.” Hubert allowed a dark smile to cross his face. “Would that I could have been the one to cause it.”

“I need to speak to him.”

“Is that wise?”

“No, but it’s very important. I have a theory about his true nature that I need to confirm.”

Hubert nodded. “I understand. Hopefully, he won’t try anything with the knights breathing down his neck.” He followed her through the courtyard upstairs to the infirmary. “Out of curiosity… what is this theory you have, Lady Edelgard?”

“Not one I want to believe,” she said. “But I may have no choice in the matter. I’m beginning to suspect that Thales is… like me.”

“You mean…”

They reached the door. There were two guards standing watch.

“Excuse me,” Edelgard said. “Can I speak to Rodri—Lord Fraldarius?”

The two guards looked at each other, and then to her. “No,” one said. “Sorry, Your Highness, but this is a church affair.”

“Captain Jeralt sent me,” she said.

The two guards looked at each other again. “Are you sure?” the other said.

“Ask him yourself.”

Neither of the guards wanted to disobey an order from their captain, so without further ado they opened the door and allowed her to pass. “Stay out here, Hubert,” she said, putting a hand to his chest as he stepped forward with her.

“Lady Edelgard—”

“It’s a personal matter, Hubert.”

Hubert frowned. His gaze slid off of her like oil on water. “I cannot allow you to do that, Your Highness.”

“You can and you will,” Edelgard said. She knew that if Thales was being held captive, there would be wards in the room to keep him from using any magic to harm others or mount an escape attempt. Sure enough, as soon as she stepped over the threshold, she felt an invisible weight descend on her shoulders, soft but firm. It felt as though her sinuses had become clogged, except instead of in her nose, it was in wherever she pulled magic from, which wasn’t an exact spot in her body she could pinpoint. She felt it all over.

The door closed behind her.

“Lady Edelgard von Hresvelg,” Thales said. In his guise as Rodrigue, he laid on one of the cots, his wrists and ankles in shackles. Long chains snaked from the shackles to the bed’s four feet, slack enough that he could move somewhat freely but short enough that he couldn’t leave. “What brings you here? Perhaps it was you who filled my second son’s head with lies, and you are here to gloat?”

“Hello, Thales,” Edelgard said. “You’re a long way from home now, aren’t you?”

He grinned. “I could say the same about you, my dear niece… El.”

Edelgard felt as though the floor beneath her feet had fallen away from her and had to force herself to stand tall. Memories of pain flooded her body and mind, sounds of screams. Before her, wearing a different face, was the architect of her pain, the very same man that had made her into a weapon against the world.

“I started to piece it together in Fhirdiad,” Thales said. “You were just too… _you._ Headstrong, stubborn, principled… indomitable.” He licked his lips. “Even before then, I could _feel_ it, I could _smell_ it. My dear and darling Flame Emperor. How are you enjoying your new life?”

Edelgard swallowed the growing lump in her throat as surreptitiously as possible. “I’ve made do,” she said.

“Such an easy life you were given. You could have spent the rest of it doing nothing at all, you know. Lazing around, slacking off, growing fat and happy with your idiot husband. Being as ordinary as a princess could be. This could have been a vacation. But instead, you had to follow the same path as before. A path that led you…” Thales smiled. “To me. Again. Oh, this is delicious.”

“I just can’t be happy,” Edelgard said, “as long as the two of us share a world. But that won’t be for very long. Your counterpart in my world has been captured. Shambhala and the last remnants of Agartha belong to the Adrestian Empire. And once we set this right, I will have the pleasure of seeing you defeated for the second time.”

Thales laughed. It was a dark, slow laugh that bubbled up from his chest and burst from his mouth in a rising torrent, a wicked and spine-chilling cackle that seemed to turn the air cold. “I suppose you’re laboring under the delusion that your stepbrother will choose you over me and decide to rip my head from my shoulders for you.”

“He’s slipping farther from your grasp every day.”

“So you think. But blood is thicker than water, and the bloodlines of Fraldarius and Blaiddyd are deeply entwined. Do you know how long I’ve been in this timeline, this Fódlan Alpha, setting my pieces about the board and planning my strategies? Do you think I would leave anything to chance… or the machinations of a foolish little girl with delusions of grandeur?”

“You speak with quite a lot of confidence,” Edelgard said, “for someone who has already been defeated once. Need I repeat myself? In our world, Shambhala has fallen. Your army has been routed. Your special weapons have been seized. The citizens of your city who refused to kill themselves on your orders are now citizens of my empire. Everything you once had in our world belongs to me now, Thales. And now I need only root you out of this one.”

“Our world is immaterial,” Thales said. “I’ve already written it off as a lost cause, for now at the very least. Fódlan Beta, the temporal researchers here call it. Because, chauvinistic as they are, they cannot conceive of it as anything other than a pale imitation of this time-line. There may be truth behind that. Perhaps our world sprung from this one like a branch off of an oak tree’s trunk, or you and I are but bubbles of froth on the crest of the wave of reality. Who can say besides the Fell Star?”

“So, knowing your defeat was inevitable,” Edelgard reasoned, “you ran and hid in this one, and set yourself up to avoid repeating the same mistakes as last time.”

Thales’ grin widened. “Oh, yes,” he said, “but when I am finished here, my vengeance will sweep through your world like the nuclear fires that once bathed this planet and turned the desert sands to glass. And should I, by some miracle, fail here, I shall simply move on to the next world. Perhaps in the next world, I will make Claude von Riegan the instrument of my will instead, and when I seize that world in my jaws and swallow it whole, I will wreak my vengeance on this one, and then yours.”

Edelgard laughed. “I see now. You’re utterly delusional. Defeat has clearly addled your mind, dear uncle. To think I ever feared you.”

“You lie,” Thales hissed. “I cannot help but notice how close to the door you stand, dear niece.” He rattled a length of the chain binding his left arm. “Are you worried that these chains may reach farther than you’ve estimated? Or that perhaps you will need to make a speedy exit in case the wards fail to contain my magic?”

“It’s because your stench is simply that revolting.” Edelgard offered him a patronizing smile. “I have said my piece. By the time you are released, your plans will lay in ruins not just in our world, but this one as well.” She reached behind herself for the doorknob.

“Before you go, a parting thought, my dear El,” he said. “The past is immutable, is it not? What has happened has happened, and the consequences for changing those things are dire. Now, ask yourself, what if your future is someone else’s past? Is not your future just as set in stone as your past, then? And ask yourself, if the future is as unchangeable as the past, then does fate not reign supreme?”

Edelgard twisted the knob. Her breath pooled in her lungs. She could feel her own heartbeat pound against the back of her skull like a hammer in time with the dull throb behind her eyepatch. Her eye screamed silently in its socket.

“Then what good is it to defy one’s fate? There is but one destiny, one summit to the mountain, one apex of the world, and all roads lead to it. Just as gravity pulls all things to the ground, so too does fate pull all things toward it. My Flame Emperor… you will serve me yet. That path was decided for you the day the last of your siblings perished. Even now, you still walk down it. Even now, we still own you, body and soul.”

“Thales,” Edelgard replied, armoring herself against his words, “I wonder how you feel, being pulled from one world to another by the whims of the Fell Star.”

She stormed out of the infirmary and slammed the door behind her. Even with the door, thick and opaque as it was, separating her from him, she could still feel Thales’ eyes drilling into the back of her head, penetrating her skull and leeching its poison into her brain. There had been far too much confidence in his tone for his words to be mere bluster, and even if he was completely mad, his rhetoric had the strength of a frightening conviction. Her parting shot, by comparison, felt less cutting and less cathartic with each passing second.

“Are you finished in there?” one of the guards asked.

“I’m finished with him,” she said flatly, taking off down the hall.

Hubert followed her, tailing her like a living shadow. “Lady Edelgard…”

“I’m fine,” she snapped. Her heart was still racing. Despite her best intentions, Thales’ eerie calm had broken her resolve.

* * *

The sun was beginning to set and the sky was turning a dusky purple. The day was ending, though it ended quite early in the middle of winter. Edelgard stood with Byleth outside the dormitories as the darkening clouds gathered overhead and wisps of snowfall fluttered from the heavens. As the sun cast its dying orange light over the horizon, tinting the snow a dull amber, Jeralt approached them with Kronya in hand; the latter, wearing her disguise as Glenn Fraldarius, had her hands bound behind her back and Jeralt’s rough and calloused hand threateningly close to her neck.

“Are you sure about this, my teacher?” Edelgard asked Byleth as Jeralt and Glenn approached them.

Byleth nodded. “We have to seize the opportunity. If things go south, I’ll fix it.”

“Glenn,” Edelgard said to Kronya, “I wish I could trust you as much as Claude seems to. Are you really going to tell Dimitri the truth?”

“Don’t you worry, Edel,” Kronya said, a frail grin disguising her worry. “Squire’s honor. I promise to tell the whole truth to Dimitri and nothing but the truth. But only if _you_ promise that Thales won’t ever lay a hand on me again. And, of course, that I won’t be harmed when sweet little Dima inevitably flies into a homicidal rage upon learning the truth.”

“Of course,” Byleth said. “I can’t let any of my students die. Not even you.”

Kronya let out a sharp and mocking laugh. “Oh, you’re _serious?”_ She laughed even harder.

“No matter what you are, you’ve been my student for the past four months,” Byleth retorted. “I can’t say you’ve been a good student, or a polite student, or a positive influence on the class in any way. But you’re still _a_ student.”

“Oh, you. Oh, Fell Star. I never thought the enemy of my people would be so _funny._ Okay. I’ll tell him that Rodrigue caused the Tragedy of Duscur. That ought to be enough.” Kronya took a deep breath. “If we all die tonight, I’ll pull myself out of my grave, find yours, dig you all up, and desecrate your corpses.”

Snow crunched in the distance, and a hush fell over the lawn as Dimitri and Dedue approached them. Dedue lowered the hood of his cloak. Dimitri held his fur coat tighter around his shoulders.

“It is a lovely day,” Dimitri said. “No one will mind if I leave my room to simply stretch my legs, right, Dedue? Hello, Edelgard. You said you had something to tell me.” His gaze drifted to Kronya. “Glenn… What are you doing with them?”

Dedue squinted at Kronya, his cold eyes scrutinizing her.

“It’s actually Glenn,” Edelgard said, “who wanted to tell you something.”

Dimitri raised his snowy eyebrows.

“Try not to take this personally, Your Majesty,” Kronya said. Her eyes darted back and forth. “But I have something to tell you. Something to tell you about my so-called father.”

Jeralt jabbed an elbow into her rib as though to say, ‘get on with it.’

Kronya looked over Dimitri’s shoulder. “Archbishop Rhea?” she gasped.

A pure white light blazed forth across the lawn. All heads turned toward it. Silhouetted by light as bright and silver as the full moon was the unmistakable form of Archbishop Rhea, her flowing vestments and ornate headdress identifiable at the slightest glance. Catherine followed at her side.

Dimitri’s jaw set. He seemed to be trying very hard not to growl.

“Rhea,” Jeralt growled, a stern glare in his eyes. He looked to Byleth, brow furrowing with worry.

“I’ve got a better idea,” Kronya said. “Fuck this.” Jeralt grabbed her before she could run away.

Edelgard felt her pulse sing in her ears. Her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth.

Rhea spoke. “Oh, young Edelgard. And Professor Byleth. I was just coming to collect you.” There was a hunger in her eyes; her lips parted and curled upward in a vacuous grin. Edelgard half expected her to start salivating. “So what Cardinal Aelfric told me was indeed true. That hair, those eyes… My dear Byleth, my darling, the Goddess has indeed manifested within you. This is a sight I have longed to see for years.”

“Can we help you, Your Holiness?” Dedue asked, laying a hand on Dimitri’s shoulder to calm him.

“It is nice to see you and His Highness safe and sound,” Rhea told him, “but I have no business with you two tonight. Byleth, Edelgard, you are both coming with me.”

“Coming where?” Byleth asked.

“Somewhere special,” Rhea said. “Somewhere holy.” The answer sent a chill up Edelgard’s spine.

“Archbishop Rhea, with all due respect,” Edelgard said, “it is getting late. Perhaps we can go there Sunday morning?”

“Evil is afoot,” Rhea said. “It stalks this very monastery. The preparations have been made and I cannot wait a single night more.”

Catherine stepped forward, as though she knew exactly what Rhea would order her to do next.

“Byleth. Edelgard. Come with me,” Rhea said, reaching out and beckoning them both forward with a crook of her finger. “There is nothing to fear. This is a joyous occasion, my children. Step forward. I shall hear no argument.”

“Bullshit you won’t,” Jeralt said, stepping in front of his daughter. “You aren’t taking her away from me again.” His hand fell to his side and found the hilt of his sword.

Rhea’s gaze fixed on his hand. “You would raise your sword against the Church? _You,_ Captain Jeralt, of all people? I gave you life. For decades you brought the punishment of the Goddess to heretics. Would you really be so foolish as to call that same punishment down upon yourself?”

“Captain,” Catherine said, reaching for Thunderbrand’s hilt, “don’t do this. Step back and put your hands at your side.” She looked shaken, pallid in the glow from the light Rhea had conjured, and her voice came out far weaker than she’d likely intended. “Rank doesn’t matter. If you defy Lady Rhea, I’ll…”

“If you touch her or El,” Dimitri said, ripping Dedue’s hand from his shoulder and stepping forward, “I will kill you both where you stand.”

There was a flash of boundless fury in Rhea’s emerald eyes as her head jerked in his direction and her withering gaze focused on him. “Would you care to repeat that, young Blaiddyd? Need I remind you that the Archbishop herself lends her grace to the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, and its kings serve at my pleasure.”

Dimitri’s fists were clenched so hard that rivulets of blood dripped from his knuckles and left blossoms on the darkening snow. “I said,” he growled through gritted teeth, “if you so much as touch my professor, I will tear your wicked head from your shoulders.”

“Dimitri, calm down,” Edelgard said. “She doesn’t mean to hurt us. I’m sorry, Archbishop,” she said to Rhea. “Dimitri is sick, he’s feverish, he shouldn’t be out—”

“It is true,” Dedue said, grabbing Dimitri and pulling him back. “His Highness has been hallucinating all day. I humbly apologize for his conduct.” He offered Rhea a deep bow, then gave Dimitri a gentle nudge to remind him to bow. Dimitri simply kept scowling.

“H-He, uh, he really d-doesn’t mean it, Your Holy Archbishop-ness,” Kronya stammered, paralyzed by the baleful aura of the Immaculate One like a mouse cornered by an adder. “He—He’ll apologize tomorrow when he’s not running a fever. I swear.”

A fraught silence descended upon the lawn. Dimitri and Jeralt were not yielding, but neither was Rhea. The threat of apocalyptic bloodshed filled the air with an electric tingle. Edelgard saw Byleth close her eyes and take a deep breath, gathering her thoughts and concentrating on calling forth Sothis’ power.

_“Archbishop Rhea! Archbishop Rhea!”_

Alois’ voice, deafening as the tolling of the cathedral’s bells, bludgeoned the silence to death. All heads turned to him as he stumbled through the snow. “And Catherine, and Captain Jeralt, too! I’ve got to tell you—”

“What is it?” Rhea asked, her demands momentarily forgotten. “I am afraid it will have to wait. I am in the middle of something of the utmost importance—”

“Seteth and Flayn just showed up at the front gates,” Alois gasped, catching his breath. “They’re both hurt. Badly.”

 _“What?!”_ Rhea hissed, her composure broken, and for an instant, Edelgard swore she could see talons sprouting from the tips of her fingers and scales blossoming on her brow. “Take me to them at once!” She glanced at Jeralt. “Captain, this is not over between us. We shall continue this conversation in the morning. Catherine, see to it that he and Professor Eisner do not leave this monastery’s walls.”

Catherine put on a grim face. “I’m sorry, Captain,” she said.

“So am I,” Jeralt said.

As soon as Rhea’s back was turned, Kronya took off in the opposite direction, kicking up plumes of snow with every step as she ran across the snowy field.

 _“Hey!”_ Edelgard shouted out, giving chase. Catherine let her go, though Byleth and Jeralt had no choice but to stay behind. _“Kr—Glenn! Glenn, come back here!”_

As the last sliver of the setting sun dipped below the monastery’s walls and darkness flooded Garreg Mach, Edelgard followed the heavy footprints in the snow Kronya left in her wake, following them across the grounds of the Officer’s Academy. Hours seemed to pass as she gave chase, until the trail led her up to the monastery’s ramparts. A bitter northern wind howled over the walls, blistering cold and setting on Edelgard’s cheek like needles as she came closer and closer to Kronya.

“Kronya, stop running,” Edelgard called out as soon as she caught sight of the faint trace of her silhouette against the darkening sky. She lit a fire in her palm to light her way. “What about our promise?”

“You and your time idiots promised to keep me safe from Thales and Dimitri,” Kronya said, shivering in the cold, “not from _her!_ Fuck this! You know that thing can turn into a giant dragon, don’t you?”

“Yes, Kronya, I know,” Edelgard said, “but if we stand together, even the Immaculate One is only a mere mortal. Come back to us! You need to tell Dimitri the truth! I won’t allow you to run from this!”

Kronya kept running. Edelgard kept pursuing her across the monastery walls. The cold seeped into her hands under her gloves and her feet in her boots, stinging her skin and biting her bones. Streams of her breath froze in the air and left an ephemeral trail in her wake.

At last, after what had seemed an eternity, Edelgard closed the gap between herself and Kronya again. Fire flickered in her hand, casting half of the face of Glenn Fraldarius in vivid chiaroscuro but also revealing a towering cloaked figure beside her and the glint of steel.

A sharp scream was cut short and Kronya fell from the edge of the ramparts, limp as a ragdoll.

 _“No!”_ Edelgard hurled the fireball she’d conjured at the cloaked figure. It went wide. For an instant, there was a flicker of detail on the cloaked figure’s face, but it was too fleeting, and the face was consumed by the shadow of its hood too quickly for any detail to register.

The cloaked figure raised a finger to its shadowy face where its lips might have been and melted into the darkness, vanishing without a trace before she could catch up to it.


	27. Web of Subterfuge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Seteth returns to his old job, Jeralt gets a dressing-down from his boss, Raphael goes into psychiatry, and Edelgard and Hubert solve a puzzle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> > at hospital lost fingat
>> 
>> — Goons_TXT (@Goons_TXT) [May 18, 2019](https://twitter.com/Goons_TXT/status/1129808969680211968?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

Edelgard cursed her foolishness—this was all Claude’s fault for releasing Kronya. His confidence, his so-called collaboration with his future self, his secrecy—all of it had led to the death of a key figure to their plans. Who would tell Dimitri the truth now? Who else would he accept it from? If she’d suspected him of being a double agent before, now she was almost certain of it. She had to get back to Byleth and have her turn back time.

The snow was falling faster and thicker now, and she had to be careful descending the stone staircase lining the inner side of the monastery wall. One misstep, one slip of her boot against the slick snow under her feet, and she might crack her skull open like an egg against the stone. As she held her fur cloak tighter around her shoulders, a gust of wind hurled a flurry of icy needles into her face; a crust of white snow dyed her hair. The snow was coming down so thickly that the whole world outside seemed to be draped in a bridal veil. She wished she’d kept a clearer record in her memory of the weather in her world at this time—after over five years, she’d forgotten about this blizzard altogether. If she’d been better prepared to relive her past, she’d have seen it coming—but who in any world could prepare for _this?_

Through the veil and snow was a flicker of white light, and the glint of mint-green hair that shone like polished steel in the light. _“Edelgard!”_ Byleth called out.

 _“Professor!”_ Edelgard lit a flame of her own and held it aloft. _“I’m here!”_

The distant light came closer, and Byleth emerged from the darkness, her cloak and jacket glazed with frost. An orb of light as silver as the full moon sat in her hand. Jeralt was close behind, holding a torch in his hand.

“Where’s Kronya?” Byleth asked.

“Dead,” Edelgard answered. “I saw someone push her off the ramparts.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, Professor. I’d nearly caught up to her, when someone in a dark cloak appeared and threw her over the side. Kronya may not be human, but the walls of Garreg Mach are so tall, and I don’t believe even she could come out of a fall from that height unscathed. And with the weather worsening on top of that…”

“Shit,” Jeralt said. “With this storm getting worse, we probably won’t even find her body until spring. Dammit. Well, let’s go—we don’t have a moment to lose. Catherine’s not happy we ran off after you. Kid, give me a light and follow my lead. The entrance to the catacombs isn’t far.”

He led Byleth and Edelgard away. The flame capping his torch sputtered and sparked as the thickening snowfall lighted on it. For a while, they made no sound except for the crunching of the snow under their boots, and as the veil of snow falling around them thickened and the wind came howling over the walls of the monastery, distant torch and lantern lights winked in and out of view, some vanishing in the distance, others drawing nearer.

“Professor,” Edelgard said.

Byleth clenched her jaw, her face grim. White clouds hissed through her gritted teeth. She didn’t look that much unlike Felix, or even Dimitri.

“Is something wrong?” Edelgard asked.

“Not much farther now,” Jeralt said.

A fiery light blazed in the darkness. Byleth and Jeralt both noticed it first; Edelgard couldn’t see the light until it had fallen out of her blind spot.

 _“Dammit! Run!”_ Jeralt hissed. Edelgard felt his hand curl around her collar and yank her back just as a plume of snow struck her in the face, momentarily blinding her. As her vision cleared, she saw flash-melted snow hiss and sizzle as it fell on the radiant umbral steel of Thunderbrand.

Jeralt drew his sword, twisted it between the blade of Thunderbrand and one of the sharp prongs protruding from its side, and nearly wrenched it from Catherine’s grip. The flickering of fire created deep, skeletal hollows on Catherine’s face as she gritted her teeth and forced Jeralt back.

Catherine hadn’t come alone. Half a dozen knights, armed with swords and lances, circled them. “Captain,” she said, “put down your sword. You’re better than this.” The way her brow furrowed, she looked more sad than upset. “Why would you want to run away from Lady Rhea like this?”

“If you knew the things I did,” Jeralt answered, spitting through his teeth, “you’d be running, too.”

“Then I’m glad I don’t know the things you do, Captain,” she said. “Professor,” she said to Byleth, “you don’t have to go with him just because he’s your father. Come back with us. Whatever Lady Rhea wants with you, it’s the highest honor she can bestow.”

Edelgard conjured a fireball and lobbed it at the nearest snowdrift, filling the air with a plume of wet, hot steam that engulfed the knights. At the same moment, Byleth raised her hand and a flash of silver light lanced through the air and struck Catherine in the chest, knocking her off her feet. In three swift moves, Jeralt disarmed one of the knights and knocked two more unconscious with their comrade’s lance.

“Nothing personal, Emma, Roberto, Apolly,” he grunted as he, Byleth, and Edelgard moved on. “Sorry, Catherine. Dad stuff. You wouldn’t understand.”

The three of them hurried off before Catherine could pick herself back up and managed to slip into the catacombs. The dark and winding corridors closed in on them, bones flickering and writhing in the light.

“I’m beginning to hate this place,” Jeralt said, finding an alcove to sit down and rest in. “But we’ll just have to lay low here for a little bit.”

The three of them settled in for the night.

“Professor,” Edelgard whispered, drawing close to Byleth, “you need to turn back time.”

Byleth shook her head.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been trying,” she said. Her voice sounded hollow. “I’ve been trying since Rhea appeared, but it’s… it’s not coming. It came so easily when I saw Hapi attack you, and I could do it yesterday afternoon, but—” Her chest heaved. “It’s not happening.”

“Professor.” Edelgard put a hand to her shoulder, though her shoulder was not her first choice—she’d had to resist the urge with all her might to put it on her thigh. “I know you can do it. Sothis gave you everything of hers because you had the strength deep down to call upon it. It was not a matter of faith—she _knew_ you, inside and out, and in knowledge, there is no need for faith.” She wondered if, in her world as well, Byleth had had to struggle to relearn how to use the power she had been given. “I know you, too, Byleth, and so I don’t have to _believe_ that you can do this. If you cannot believe in yourself, then believe in me.”

Byleth looked pained, but a slight smile tugged at her lips. “I had to do this in your world, too, didn’t I?”

Edelgard nodded. “And you didn’t have my help that time.” She took Byleth’s hands and curled her fingers around them. They were warm. “Try.”

Byleth squeezed her eyes shut, bowed her head, and clenched her jaw. Edelgard saw a spark of fire beneath her skin leaping through her veins, and the world came to a halt.

The world that replaced this one was soft, warm, and dark. Edelgard realized that she was asleep and envied her counterpart for being so untroubled by her dreams that she could sleep so well even when she was alone. Time crawled by, minutes passed, and for every beat of her heart Edelgard counted another heartbeat backward. How many heartbeats had it been since Kronya had been killed? How many heartbeats back would Byleth have to go? The question swirled and danced in Edelgard’s mind, the way thoughts often became trapped in slow, sluggish vortices when one was falling asleep. She felt her head sink into her pillow and lost track of time.

She woke up cold and shivering, her clothes clinging to damp, clammy skin, her hair plastered to the back of her neck. Her teeth chattered; ice crept into her bones.

 _“She’s awake,”_ she heard Jeralt say. She felt Byleth’s hand—she knew intimately what that hand felt like—gliding across her cheek, so warm on her cold skin that it burned.

She opened her eyes. A far cry from a warm bed, she was lying on a cot marginally less comfortable than the infirmary’s, draped in a coarse but thick blanket. The walls, floor, and ceiling were cold, rough brick; metal bars formed the fourth wall. There was a small window, about the size of a single missing brick from the wall, flush against the ceiling. It let in no light but the occasional drizzle of windswept snow.

For a moment, she panicked. How could she be in Enbarr? In those old dungeons that always haunted her nightmares? Had she fallen into yet another time-line? Or worse? What day was it? What _year?_

The fear subsided, though, at the sight of Byleth and Jeralt; her heartbeat slowed and the lead weight crushing her chest pulled away. Byleth was kneeling at her side, using the blanket to dry her off. Jeralt stood in the corner, arms crossed; if Edelgard hadn’t known any better, she might have thought he was pouting.

“What happened?” she croaked.

The sad furrow of Byleth’s brow told her enough. She hadn’t gone back far enough.

“You ran off after Kronya,” Jeralt said. “We found you unconscious at the base of one of the guard towers. It was hard to tell from how quickly the snow was falling, but it looked like someone had dragged you down from the ramparts.”

Edelgard gathered her wits about her. She’d collapsed atop the ramparts, which meant that the killer had probably still caught up to Kronya. But who had dragged her down from the ramparts? The killer? “Someone pushed her off the wall,” she said.

“Well, shit,” Jeralt answered. “So much for our plan.”

“What are we doing here?” she asked. This, she realized as her mind slowly returned to her, was one of the knights’ holding cells.

“Rhea’s gone off her fucking rocker. Catherine’s keeping us locked up in here until she comes back.”

“Wonderful,” she muttered.

“Yeah. Just peachy.” He sat down cross-legged on the floor. “Never should’ve let myself get dragged back here.” He rapped his knuckles on the floor. “Any ideas, kid?” he asked Byleth.

Byleth remained silent.

“I’m sorry, Professor,” Edelgard said to her.

“I lost another student,” she mumbled, her voice hoarse and husky.

“I mean, did Kronya _really_ count as one of your brats?” Jeralt asked.

Byleth buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders quivered.

“Fuck. Sorry,” Jeralt said. He pulled himself into a crouch and scuttled to her, crablike, and patted her on the back. “Didn’t mean it like that. Kronya was a good… uh… she was _a_ kid. I think.”

Kronya, in her disguise as Glenn, had been quite short on redeeming qualities, but she was still one of the Blue Lions, ulterior motives notwithstanding, and even Edelgard herself had to admit that as irritating and harmful as Kronya was, she had deserved a chance to choose a life beyond the toxic environment Thales had grown her in. She had been as much a part of the class as Edelgard, at the very least, and Byleth took her responsibility to her students deadly seriously. Seriously enough to even stand up to the Immaculate One and tell the head of the Church of Seiros _no._ Of course losing Kronya hurt.

Edelgard sat up and reached down to take Byleth’s wrist and pull one of her hands from her face, revealing a watery emerald eye and tear-stained cheek. “Professor…”

“I have the power of the Goddess,” Byleth choked. “And even then, I still can’t… You were wrong, Edelgard. I couldn’t do it.”

“You were almost there, my teacher,” Edelgard said, taking her blanket and draping it over Byleth’s shoulders. “I never said you would succeed right away.”

Those words seemed to be little consolation to Byleth. The silence that followed was no less morose.

She shook her head. “You were right, Dad. We never should have come here.”

“That’s not true,” Edelgard snapped before Jeralt could do something stupid like agree. “Byleth, you _needed_ to be here. Not just for yourself, but for your class. Set aside your failures and think about the lives that have blossomed under your instruction. In both this world and mine, I have seen you transform people into their best selves. Without you, I would have lived and died a monster. Without you, Dimitri would have no hope. Even Ashe… he became a legend because of _you._ Even with the Goddess’ powers on your side, not every failure can be undone. So dwell on your successes, my teacher.”

Byleth hugged her. It was the most wonderful feeling in the world. Edelgard felt moved almost to tears by the warmth of her professor’s cheek against the slope of her neck and the firmness of her embrace. But then she remembered how every night from the battle of Fhirdiad onward, she had rested her ear against Byleth’s chest and basked in the sound of her heartbeat. No one’s heartbeat could compare to that beauty, because no one’s heartbeat had been a harder-won prize than Byleth Eisner’s. It was more melodious than the first birdsong of spring, steady and strong.

It was a sound that did not yet exist in this world. And Edelgard had never missed it so much.

“We’ve got until morning to figure out a way to get out of here,” Jeralt said. “You’re a tactical genius, kid, and Edelgard, you’ve got future knowledge, so if anyone here can work out a prison break—”

“We’re not leaving the monastery,” Byleth said, sniffling and drying her tears on her sleeve.

“What?”

“Edelgard’s right. I’m not leaving my students behind.”

“They’ll be fine without you,” Jeralt argued. “Edelgard, didn’t you tell her what Rhea wants to do to her? The whole ‘vessel’ thing?” He took Byleth by the shoulder. “Rhea took your mother away from me. You think I’m gonna let her take _you,_ too?”

“I won’t let that happen. Besides, if I agree to go with her, she could teach me to use the Goddess’ powers—”

“No.” Jeralt stood up. “She’s sunk her claws deep enough into you already, kid. I won’t risk it.”

“I must admit Jeralt has a point, Professor,” Edelgard said. “Think of the optics of such a decision. If you let Rhea take you in, there’s no telling how Dimitri could react. He could lose faith in you. He could see you as a traitor. Whatever happens, all of our work will end up being for nothing.”

Byleth thought for a moment, then slowly nodded. “You’re right. But still, we can’t leave. I won’t leave my students.”

“Well, what the hell are we gonna do, then?” Jeralt asked. “Go up to Archbishop Rhea and tell her _no?”_

Edelgard looked out the window. “We may not have a choice,” she said.

The wind howled outside as though to give them an answer.

With a heavy sigh, Jeralt sat down, took out his flask, and took a swig. “Want any?” he asked, offering it to Byleth and Edelgard in turn.

* * *

Dawn came far too soon, and with it came Archbishop Rhea. That morning, Edelgard, Byleth, and Jeralt were brought from their holding cell to the audience chamber, herded like lambs to the slaughter by the Knights of Seiros.

Last night’s snowstorm had come to an end and the clouds had broken; the light of the rising sun made the fresh snowdrifts glitter and sparkle. The snowdrifts had grown, and those that clung to the walls of the monastery’s buildings reached the sills of the windows. The paths had only just started being cleared.

Edelgard had not slept well. A dungeon was a dungeon, no matter where it was or how far above ground it was. She was cold, her clothes were plastered to her skin, her hair was a mess. But when she’d first stepped outside and seen the snow, she suddenly remembered spending this exact same Sunday morning five and a half years ago building a snowman with Dorothea and Bernadetta. Of course, she’d had much more _important_ things to do than waste a Sunday frolicking in the snow, but the classmates who had slowly become her friends had just been so _insistent…_

She had little time for reminiscing, though—Rhea’s audience chamber awaited.

Within the chamber, small amid the stone pillars that held up the towering vaulted ceiling and yet somehow filling the room, Rhea stood at her dais. She looked tired, her face drawn and gaunt, her eyes dull; it was as though she hadn’t slept all night either.

“Captain Jeralt.” Her tone was as icy as the wind howling outside. “I do hope you are well-rested enough now to behave yourself in my presence. Professor Byleth, Lady Edelgard, I must ask that you come with me.”

“With all due respect, Archbishop,” Edelgard said, “I would like to know where you intend to take us.”

“To a safe place,” Rhea responded. “A hidden sanctuary deep within Garreg Mach that I have prepared for you.”

“With all due respect, Lady Rhea,” Jeralt said to her, his tone of voice making it clear he had very little, “I want you to tell me what you intend to do to my girl.”

“Excuse me?” She glared at him. “What gives you reason to think I would _do_ anything to her?”

“Because this isn’t the first time you’ve taken her from me,” he said, “and I know that this time—”

“Would you have rather lost everything?” she snapped.

Jeralt was silent. The rest of the knights stared at him, bug-eyed. Byleth’s hand drifted to her heart, to the stone she knew rested there beneath her ribs.

“Jeralt Reus Eisner,” Rhea announced, “I hereby strip you of your rank and expel you from the Knights of Seiros. As a show of mercy and out of gratitude for your hard work and storied career, I shall forgive you of your heresy and permit you to live.”

The knights in attendance gawped at Jeralt. Even the howling wind beyond the stone walls and stained glass seemed to die down out of shock.

“As for you two,” Rhea said to Byleth and Edelgard, who both found themselves dumbstruck, “you will come with me.”

“What about my students?” Byleth asked. Her voice was small and frail. The sight of Jeralt standing beside her, quieted and with his head solemnly bowed in humility, seemed to have thoroughly unnerved her. “I—I don’t want to… They need me, Archbishop. Please.”

“Professors come and go,” Rhea assured her. “At any rate, you will not be kept long.” Edelgard sensed that she was lying, though admittedly she always sensed that Rhea was lying; if she told her that the sky was blue, she would have looked up to check.

The door to the audience chamber swung open. _“Excuse me, uh, Lady Rhea?”_ Cyril’s voice echoed through the room. _“I don’t mean to disturb you, but I’ve got Mister Seteth here and he wants to see you.”_

 _“What?!”_ Rhea hissed, her face ashen. “I… Send him in, Cyril.”

The man who stepped through the door was recognizably Seteth, but almost barely so. He was gaunt and weary. His forest-green hair, brushed long to hide his ears, was ragged and matted, and half-healed scars and burn marks marred his skin. Weeks of stubble, interrupted by patches of scarred and burned skin, gave him a haggard look. Gauze bandages circled his brow and covered one eye, and a cotton patch was tied to a very deeply bruised jaw. He walked with a pronounced limp and the aid of a cane. The tapping of his cane echoed sharply against the walls and vaulted ceiling with every step he took.

“You should not be up and about, Seteth,” Rhea said, a tinge of warmth creeping into her voice. She stepped down from her dais and approached him. “What is it? Does something trouble you? Is Flayn well?”

“Rest assured, Lady Rhea, I feel far better than I look,” he said to her. “I did have something to say, but it can wait. What is going on here?”

“Nothing for you to concern yourself with,” she said. Her demeanor had changed; in an instant, her heart had melted.

Seteth glanced at Edelgard, then looked to Professor Byleth. He had a look on his marred face that Edelgard knew well—it was the stern, infinitely disappointed glare and furrow of his brow that told the world that he strongly disapproved of whatever was occurring. “If this is a scholastic affair, it is indeed something I should concern myself with. Might I remind you, you never dismissed me from my administrative position before Flayn and I departed.”

“I can explain later,” Rhea said, lifting a hand to cup his cheek, “but you and Flayn must rest. I am simply taking Edelgard and Byleth to a place where they will be safe… and close to the Goddess.”

Seteth stiffened. “That is highly irregular, Lady Rhea. Has Lady Edelgard’s family been consulted? What of Captain Jeralt?” He glanced at Jeralt. “I take it you do not have his approval?”

“Shh. As I said, Seteth, you must not concern yourself with it.”

“I think I should,” Seteth retorted, brushing her hand aside. Edelgard noted that Rhea’s soothing touch didn’t seem to work on him. “It is not proper to remove a professor from their position, or a student from their class, so late in the term unless they have committed some egregious violation of the code of conduct.”

“But it is dangerous. Look at yourself and poor Flayn and tell me we are not in great peril.”

“It is,” he said, “but surely this can wait another six weeks. With all due respect, Lady Rhea, if I have returned to see you withdrawing students and teachers on a whim, then I shudder to think how you have been managing this academy in my absence.”

Seteth seemed to be the only person who couldn’t be cowed or intimidated by Archbishop Rhea, and he seemed to be the only person who in turn could give Rhea pause. It was unlikely bordering on suspicious for him to appear at just the right time to put a stop to her plan, but Edelgard decided she wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

“Professor Byleth, Lady Edelgard, you are excused,” he said. “Captain Jeralt, I know not why Lady Rhea has _you_ here, but whatever the reason, it is outside of my jurisdiction. Good day.”

“Uh… good day to you, too, sir,” Jeralt mumbled, taken aback.

“I have no further business with you, Jeralt,” Rhea said curtly. “Now, Seteth, what was it you wished to discuss with me?”

As Rhea took Seteth aside to converse with him, Jeralt walked out of the audience chamber and Edelgard and Byleth followed.

“Could’ve gone better,” he murmured hoarsely, a sardonic bite to his voice.

“But it looks like we’ve escaped Rhea’s clutches for now,” Edelgard said.

The rest of the knights who had brought them to the audience chamber filed out into the hallway and shuffled past them in awkward silence. One of them stood in place, turned to face Jeralt, saluted sharply, and said, “Cap—er, Mister Jeralt. It’s, uh… It’s been an honor, sir.”

“Uh… yeah. Sure. Thanks, Biggs,” Jeralt said, taken aback.

While the rest of the knights had passed them by, Byleth took her father’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. Jeralt looked down at her hand, shocked, as though unaccustomed to such a simple and subtle expression of his daughter’s feelings.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” she said.

“It’s fine,” he said gruffly, pulling his hand away. “Schedule’s free now. No more patrols… maybe I’ll get a decent night’s sleep tonight.” He took out his flask from under his cloak and took several long swigs from it. “Anyway, I’m gonna check up on Hapi.”

“Okay,” Byleth said. “I have some… bad news to tell my class.”

Down the hall, a dark shadow turned the corner. “There you are, Lady Edelgard,” Hubert said, striding across the hallway with a quickened pace once he’d caught sight of her. “What is going on? You missed supper with Ferdinand and Constance _and_ were not in your room at all last night.”

“Jeralt, can we use your office?” Edelgard asked Jeralt.

Jeralt emptied his flask. “Yeah, sure, as long as it’s still mine.”

The four of them slipped into Jeralt’s office and shut the door, affording them enough privacy to catch Hubert up on the night’s events. There was already a lonely and melancholy taste hanging in the air, as though the room itself knew that its occupants no longer belonged in it. Edelgard had occasionally felt the same feeling in the classrooms and dormitories of Garreg Mach after her army had captured it.

“Well,” Hubert said, digesting the information he had been given, “that is… extremely bad news.” He stroked his chin. “And you did not get a look at Kronya’s killer, You Highness?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t,” Edelgard said.

“Shame. I would suspect our new arrival, but Constance was in the dormitories all night; Ferdinand can vouch for her.” He rubbed his eyes and Edelgard noticed how tired he looked. “I could hear them talking through the wall. I admit I am quite fond of Ferdinand, but _one_ of him is quite enough.”

“I don’t know if it could have been her anyway,” she said. “I can’t quite say, but from what little I could tell, they were taller than her.”

Hubert nodded. “I see. Who else in this place has a connection to Those Who Slither in the Dark, then, and who would have the motive or means to kill Kronya? Perhaps Dedue?”

Byleth shook her head. “I don’t think that would work. After Kronya made a break for it, he was busy hauling Dimitri back to his room before he could hurt himself again.”

“That leaves one other person,” Hubert said, and as soon as the words had left his mouth, Edelgard knew who he was talking about. “One person who has already admitted to having a connection to our enemy. And one whose baffling decisions have already raised questions about his motives and allegiances.”

“You think Claude did it?” Jeralt asked. He rubbed his brow wearily. “Dammit.”

“But why?” Byleth asked. “What would he have to gain from killing Kronya?”

“Instead of asking what _he_ has to gain,” Edelgard said, “we should ask what his ‘confidential source’ has to gain. Perhaps engineering Kronya’s death was something he had to do in exchange for the codebook. Either way, we cannot afford to let him keep his secrets any longer.”

“Yes,” Hubert said, “his clandestine actions and double-dealing have brought us far too much pain already.”

There was a sharp knock on the door to Jeralt’s office. At once, all talk of conspiracy and plot vanished from everybody’s lips as Jeralt went to the door. “Who’s there?”

_“This is Seteth. I would like to have a word with you, Jeralt.”_

Jeralt stepped back. “Door’s open.”

The knob turned, the door swung open, and Seteth hobbled over the threshold. Seeing him up close made his poor health even more apparent. He was pale, too, and sickly. “Ah. Lady Edelgard. I see we match,” he said, lifting a hand to scratch at the edge of the bandage covering his eye. “Goddess willing, you did not lose your eye the same way I did.”

Hubert was aghast at the sight of him. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out, and he simply let his jaw hang for a few seconds. He bowed his head. “Forgive me, sir. It is impolite of me to stare,” he finally mumbled.

“What the f—” Jeralt cut off the curse that had been about to leave his mouth. “What happened to you?”

“May I sit down?”

“Can’t say no to someone in as sorry a state as you. Uh, sir.” He pulled the chair away from his desk and offered it to Seteth.

Seteth sat down, leaning heavily on his cane. “Thank you, Cap—Jeralt. First things first, allow me to apologize on behalf of Lady Rhea.” He scrutinized Byleth, clearly focusing on the color of her hair. “I think I understand now why she was so intent on hiring you, despite your lack of qualifications. Clearly she has had plans for you from the very beginning. However, she hired you as a professor, not for Goddess-knows-what, and as long as I have any say in it, a professor you shall remain. Unfortunately, Jeralt, my authority does not extend to the Knights of Seiros. The most I could do was persuade her to allow you to remain here until the end of the month.”

“Um… thank you, Seteth,” Byleth said. “So, what happened to you?”

Seteth sighed. There was a faraway look in his eye. “On Saint Cichol Day, Flayn and I were attacked in our home by soldiers wearing the Hurricane King’s colors. We barely managed to escape and have spent the past few weeks struggling to keep ahead of them. As you can see, I was… heavily injured in the pursuit.” He lifted one heavily bandaged hand, and Edelgard noticed that underneath the gauze two of the fingers on his left hand had been reduced to stumps, one lopped off at the first knuckle and the other at the second. “Flayn did for me what she could, and I for her… and fortunately, we arrived here more or less in one piece.”

“Well, sorry to say this,” Jeralt said, “but the monastery might not be much safer. There’s been a lot going on.”

“So I have heard,” Seteth said. “However, this was our only option. We dared not lead our pursuers to any other potential havens.”

Edelgard ruminated on Seteth’s story. Those Who Slither had aimed to capture him and his daughter. Considering his and Flayn’s true natures, they would no doubt have been prized catches. Yet another way in which Thales was making up for past mistakes and oversights—in her world, Solon had done enough damage with just a few samples of Flayn’s blood, and having an entire corpus of one or more of the Immaculate One’s kin to work with would have produced far more devastating results.

A chill ran up her spine. Thales was in the monastery _right now._ Jeralt was completely right about Garreg Mach being just as dangerous as the Rhodos Coast had been.

“Is Flayn okay?” Byleth asked Seteth.

“She is in far better shape than I am, much to my relief,” he replied, curling his pristine right hand around the stumps of his missing fingers. “I saw to it that I would defend her at any cost to myself. But by the time we reached the Oghma Mountains, she was the only one of us fit to walk. We stowed away on a merchant’s wagon to traverse the mountains; once we had arrived in town, she carried me the rest of the way to the monastery gates. And thank heaven for that.” He glanced out the snow-frosted window. “An hour later and we would have frozen to death on the way.”

Somebody else knocked on the door. _“Hello, Captain Jeralt?”_ Manuela called out. _“Have you seen Seteth?”_

“Yeah, I’ve seen him,” Jeralt answered.

Seteth pulled himself back up to his feet. “I suppose I should return to the infirmary. Thank you all for your company.”

Jeralt opened the door and let Manuela in. She caught sight of her patient and stormed into the room. “I swear, Seteth,” she huffed, though she struggled to hold back a wry little smile, “of all the patients to misbehave, I never thought _you_ would be among them. At least you didn’t go far.”

“I would not dream of it, Manuela,” Seteth said, allowing her to take him by the arm. “You did give me this cane so that I could walk around, though.”

“Not _unsupervised!_ Lady Rhea would have my head on a silver platter if I allowed you to fall and break what few unbroken bones you have left! Never mind how devastated your little sister would be,” she said. “But I digress. It seems the tables have turned, and now _you_ need to be carried back to your room.”

“It seems so,” he answered, allowing himself the faintest smile. “I apologize. The allure to bring myself up-to-date with my work was simply too strong even for me to resist.”

“We’ll see if we can’t get those bandages off of you by the end of the day, at least,” she said. “If I may speak freely, I think you’ll be looking quite rugged once the rest of these scars and burns heal. Like the dashing Captain Jeralt over here.”

“With no offense meant to Jeralt, that is hardly the aesthetic I would like to cultivate,” Seteth sputtered, and Edelgard could swear he had started to blush. She could swear Jeralt’s cheeks were turning a bit red, too.

“Oh? Just give me one chance to persuade you to keep growing out that beard,” Manuela said. “I’ll even sit through one of your dreadful lectures in exchange.”

Seteth rolled his eye. “Perhaps I can entertain your argument, Professor Manuela,” he said, and the two of them walked back out of the hallway. “But you must stay awake while I say my piece, or I shall not hear yours…”

Once Seteth and Manuela had left, Jeralt started collecting his few personal effects from around his office, a few battered books off the shelf here and there, a battered leather bag hanging from the coat rack, a handful of miscellaneous trinkets, and set them down on his desk.

Edelgard took a deep breath, trying to expel the tension from her body. But too much of it remained, coiled like a nest of vipers in the pit of her stomach. Part of her felt relieved that Seteth and Flayn were alive, albeit not quite well, but Thales being so near spoiled that relief.

Byleth put a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll break the news to the rest of the class. You need to rest.”

“Thank you, Professor,” Edelgard said. “I’m going to visit Flayn in the infirmary first.” She coughed into her elbow.

She set out into the hallway, with Hubert trailing as close behind her as her shadow. She would probably never be rid of him now. The infirmary was only a few doors down the hall, but crossing the hallway felt as though it took an eternity. The thought that Thales might be behind the door, quietly and silently observing two of his enemies while they laid there helpless and wounded like a cat waiting to pounce on a pair of unsuspecting mice, caused her a surprising amount of distress.

She knocked on the door. Manuela answered. “Edelgard! Here to check yourself in? Have you been outside all night again? Maybe I’ll have to force you to stay in your room for a few days, like I did with Dimitri.”

“Was that a hint of sternness in your voice I detected, Manuela?” Seteth asked from one of the cots. “I am proud of you.”

“I’m here to see Flayn,” Edelgard said, “if she would like to see me, of course.”

“She’s asleep,” Manuela told her, “but since you look so miserable, I’ll let you see her.”

“Thank you, Professor.” Edelgard followed her into the infirmary.

She surveyed the room. Seteth was lying in one of the cots, his cane propped up against its side, and Flayn laid in the cot beside his, a blanket draped over her small and frail body.

Flayn. This had all started, funnily enough, because of Flayn. Because for one moment about four months ago, Edelgard had seen the look on Seteth’s face and felt a sharp and guilty pang of pity for her enemy. Because of Flayn, Rhea was convinced that she, like Byleth, had some nebulous connection to the Goddess. Because of Flayn, she was a part of the Blue Lions. Because of Flayn, she was embroiled in the plots surrounding Dimitri.

But of course, could Edelgard really blame Flayn? Those had all been _her_ decisions, not Flayn’s. Flayn had only been a catalyst, and she had hardly _chosen_ to be one at that.

She did indeed seem to be in much better shape than Seteth—fewer bruises, scrapes, scars, and she appeared to have all of her fingers. One arm was bound in a sling. Her long hair, once kept in such elegant loose curls, was dirty and matted, thick emerald locks choked with twigs and dirt. In her placid repose, she looked like an abandoned porcelain doll that had been abandoned and left to weather the elements.

“You have my thanks, Lady Edelgard,” Seteth said. He looked to Flayn. “She often spoke fondly of you. As much as I was against allowing her to fraternize with the student body, I am not certain we would have made it back if the thought of seeing you and the Blue Lions again had not galvanized her.”

“Is that so?” Edelgard asked, feeling flattered.

“Oh, yes.” Seteth chuckled. “‘Just a few steps more, big brother,’ she would say every dozen miles or so, ‘and we will see Professor Byleth and Princess Edelgard again.’ Every time, she was quite insistent it would only be a few more steps. After a few days I would find myself almost believing her, though I may have simply been delirious from the pain.”

Edelgard found herself smiling and, realizing that something about the infirmary had her feeling much lighter and more unburdened than she’d felt yesterday, noticed a conspicuous absence in the infirmary. “Professor,” she asked Manuela, “wasn’t Lord Fraldarius here yesterday?”

“He was,” Manuela sighed, “but Catherine had him moved back to the holding cells not too long before these two showed up. I don’t know why.” She shrugged. “But aside from fainting every so often, he seemed perfectly healthy, so it’s no skin off my back if they take him off my hands.”

The knowledge that Thales had been in the holding cells along with her last night sent a chill up her spine. No wonder she’d had trouble sleeping. He had probably slept like a baby just to spite her.

Seteth cleared his throat. “Lady Edelgard, I would ask that you visit Flayn later in the day, when she is awake. I expect you to shower and change your clothes first, of course. One must look presentable.”

Edelgard nodded. “Of course. Thank you, Seteth.”

Hubert offered Seteth a polite bow. “Mister Seteth, I would like to extend to you my condolences that you and Flayn had such a perilous journey here, but it is good to see the two of you again. I wish you both a swift recovery.”

Edelgard felt another chill run up her spine. Hubert had been growing more and more like his counterpart in these past few weeks, which made hearing him speak respectfully to agents of the Church of Seiros even more unnerving.

The two of them left the infirmary. “Now that I have found you,” Hubert said to Edelgard, “Ferdinand _will_ expect you to join him and Constance for breakfast. Shall I escort you to the bathhouse and bring you a change of clothes?”

“Yes,” she replied, “but I would rather you didn’t join me for breakfast. Instead, I want you to tail Claude. Keep an eye on his movements and alert me if he exhibits any unusual behavior.”

“As you wish, Lady Edelgard.” Hubert bowed curtly.

* * *

As soon as she’d cleaned herself up and put on a fresh uniform, Edelgard joined Ferdinand and Constance for breakfast. It was obvious from the start that she had made a mistake. She sat back and occupied her mouth with breakfast (as much as she could—she wasn’t hungry) while Constance prattled on. If Constance was the new agent—and how could she _not_ be?—then her task here would be to observe Edelgard’s mannerisms, her body language, the way she spoke, in order to develop a better facsimile of her. So, to thwart her attempts, Edelgard needed only not speak and react as little as possible. This wasn’t difficult, since Constance had a way of monopolizing conversation that made Ferdinand seem reserved by comparison, but the laconic and frosty attitude Edelgard had adopted was definitely attracting Ferdinand’s attention.

“What is the matter, dear?” Ferdinand asked her, watching her pick at a plate of eggs and fried sausage. “You have been quite silent all this time. And you have hardly touched your food. And you look pale! Has your cold been getting worse?”

“Perhaps she simply cannot get a word in edgewise,” Constance said. “I _have_ been going on and on and on, haven’t I?”

“You were out all night again, were you not, Edelgard? It is only a matter of time before you catch pneumonia.” Ferdinand turned to Constance. “You should hear about all of the _mischief_ Lady Edelgard has been getting herself into.”

 _“Mischief?”_ Constance gasped and placed a hand over her heart. _“Her?_ No!”

“It is true. Just the week before last week, she challenged Justine to a duel and broke her arm.”

“My, my!”

“And she was hauled away by a wild beast the size of an Albinean moose just a few days ago!”

“An _Albinian_ moose?”

“On top of that, the Hurricane King and the Death Knight have laid hands on her thrice— _thrice!”_

“Oh, goodness!” Constance stared at Edelgard, her jaw slack. “What a colorful life you have been leading.”

“I almost find myself preferring when she was lazy.”

 _“Edelgard?_ Lazy? Why, I never!”

“Worst of all,” Ferdinand said, “Hubert insists on going on all of these dangerous escapades with her. He has been an adjutant in so many of Professor Byleth’s missions that he is practically an honorary Blue Lion!”

“You should be thankful that Hubert isn’t here to hear you say that,” Edelgard said coolly.

Ferdinand and Constance both laughed.

“Your sense of humor has not changed one bit, Lady Edelgard,” Constance said. “Why, you were _just_ as witty as when you were eight years old!”

Edelgard wasn’t sure whether or not that was meant to be a backhanded compliment.

“Sharp of wit and sharp of tongue,” Ferdinand said. “The other day—oh, I told you about the letter to my father we wrote together the other day, did I not? I do not know when she became such an incredible orator, but her command of rhetoric was simply breathtaking! Why, I would not be surprised if after that display, my father makes _her_ emperor!”

“I should hope not!” Constance replied. “I am depending on Lord Burkhart’s status to make House Nuvelle great again; I cannot be a consort to a man who is not emperor!” She turned to Edelgard and leaned forward. “Speaking of Burkhart, are you not excited, Lady Edelgard? For my house to have his ear is a great honor indeed. And such a handsome ear it is! _And_ I shall be his treasure among treasures. I swear it upon my honor as the last daughter of House Nuvelle, for I am Constance von Nuvelle!”

“I think his _wife_ would be his treasure among treasures,” Edelgard said. “Speaking of, who _is_ he marrying? From what I have seen, he and Anselm have been sending off marriage proposals and consort requests left and right, trying to snatch up as many noblewomen as they can.” As long as Constance was trying to get information out of her, _she_ could try to do the same.

“I have not heard anything about Burkhart offering a marriage proposal to anybody,” Ferdinand said, scratching his chin thoughtfully. “But you are right: he must have asked _somebody_ to fill the position. Any house would be fighting over such an opportunity, normally.”

Edelgard tried to force another forkful of egg down. Her stomach revolted, but she pushed herself past that. She knew how to make herself eat when she didn’t feel hungry. Sometimes the mind had a tendency of tricking itself, and it was important to know how and when to trick it back.

There was a flash of carrot-red hair amid the crowds milling around the dining hall, and Annette popped up at Edelgard’s side with a full plate in her hands. “Oh! Hello, Edelgard. Is there, uh…” She looked at Ferdinand and Constance. “Is there room at your table?”

“Certainly!” Ferdinand said, all smiles.

“Oh, well, hello there,” Constance cooed. “Are you one of Lady Edelgard’s friends from Faerghus?”

Annette nodded and sat down next to Edelgard. “Yep! Annette Fantine Dominic, nice to meet you!”

“I assume you are already acquainted with Ferdinand von Aegir. And _I_ am Constance von Nuvelle—” Constance stopped mid-sentence. She leaned forward, her eyes wide. “Did you say… Annette _Dominic?”_

 _“Constance von Nuvelle?”_ Annette repeated, shocked. Her eyes lit up. “Oh my gosh! _Constance!”_

“You two know each other?” Edelgard asked her. Her mood, already souring, grew worse.

“We went to the Royal School of Sorcery together! Well, sort of,” Annette said. “There was a little bit of an overlap.”

“Enough for us to become fast friends!” Constance cheered. She reached across the table and took Annette’s hands. “Oh, Annie! I hardly recognized you! And how is Mercie? Where is our dear Walking Phantasm?”

Annette’s mood deflated. “Oh, um… I… She was enrolled here, but her condition was growing worse, so… so Lady Cornelia took her h-home.” She looked as though she were about to cry.

Constance frowned, a sympathetic furrow to her brows, and clasped Annette’s hands tighter. “I am so sorry. I did not intend to upset you.”

“I-It’s fine,” Annette said. “It’s fine! I’ll be fine! Mercie’s gonna be fine, too!”

“That is the spirit! Never lose hope, dear Annette!”

“Who knew you were such a cosmopolitan woman, Constance?” Ferdinand asked. “I did not know you attended the Faerghus’ sorcery academy.”

“Well, nothing but the best for me! I will have to be the greatest spellcaster in all of Fódlan if I am to bring House Nuvelle to its former heights of glory and beyond!”

Breakfast dragged on for what seemed like an eternity until Annette had wolfed down enough of her breakfast that Edelgard felt comfortable leaving the table with her, bidding a farewell to Ferdinand and Constance that could not have come sooner. She and Annette left the dining hall together.

“Of all the people I thought I’d see today, I’d never expected Constance,” Annette said as the two of them stepped out into the snow-covered courtyard. The evergreen hedges and thorny rosebushes were blanketed nearly to the point of unrecognizability by the last night’s heavy snowfall; the gazebo was buried up to its steps. “It’s so nice to see her again.”

“Yes, it must be nice,” Edelgard muttered. She would not relish Annette’s situation whenever the truth came out about Constance’s true identity; the poor girl had lost too many friends already. “I’m glad you two could reconnect. I didn’t have anything to say to her.”

“Yeah, you looked like you were dying while she and Ferdinand were talking with you. Constance can be… a lot.” Annette giggled. “I have plenty of stories.”

Edelgard barely got her handkerchief out in time to sneeze into it. “Excuse me. It’s this blasted cold. I keep getting dragged out in the middle of the night and missing sleep, so it’s no wonder I haven’t beaten it yet.”

“Well, it’s Sunday, and you know what _that_ means!” Annette hooked her arm around Edelgard’s. “Let’s go put the books and the axes away and go relax for a few hours!” Her cheer sounded false.

“I just wish I didn’t have so many obligations,” Edelgard said, “or so much to worry about. Even if we spend the rest of the day braiding each other’s hair, everything troubling me will still dwell on my mind.”

“Do you, uh… _want_ to spend the rest of the day braiding each other’s hair? I mean, I know how you feel. These past few days, well, I’d do anything to stop worrying.”

“About Mercedes?”

At the sound of Mercedes’ name, Annette’s smile turned fragile and wobbly; her entire face looked as though it was going to collapse. “H-How did you know?” she croaked, swallowing a lump in her throat. “Okay. Yeah. I—I heard what happened in town, what Lady Cornelia did to Hapi, why the knights are out looking for her. And since Mercie hasn’t been writing me back, I—I—” She threw her arms around Edelgard and buried her face in her shoulder. “Oh, poor Mercie! Edelgard, what do you think Cornelia’s done to her? D-Do you think… do you think she’s turned _her_ into a monster, too?”

Edelgard stroked her hair. “I don’t think so. But even if she has, then there’s no need for despair. No matter what happens, Mercedes will never forget her friends.”

“Y-You think so?” Annette sobbed into her cloak.

“It isn’t a question of theory or belief, but of _knowledge._ I _know_ so.” Edelgard patted her on the back. “Would you like to meet Hapi?”

Annette nodded. _“Can_ I?” she asked, her voice muffled by the thick fur cloak she’d been crying into.

“Yes. Why don’t I take you to her?”

She pulled away and dried her face on her sleeve. “But… she’s a monster.”

“A very tame one. I’ll show you.”

Annette acquiesced, and Edelgard led her along. Hapi wasn’t hard to find, not in the least because bright scarlet fur stood out in stark contrast to featureless fields of virgin snow. A cat introduced to a new environment filled with unfamiliar and untrustworthy new people tended to find a familiar place to hide until it was acclimated to its surroundings, and Hapi was no different: the area around the guard tower was her sanctuary. Hapi was lounging in the snow outside the tower, her scarlet fur dusted with a powdery white, while Jeralt tended to her with a horse brush. Edelgard could hear the beast’s purring from a long way off, and it grew louder with every step she took.

“Oh, she’s cute!” Annette gasped. “Is she _purring?”_

Edelgard nodded, happy to see a smile on her face again, and stepped forward. “Let me go first. She hasn’t met you yet.” She approached Hapi slowly, cautiously—

Hapi lifted her head, sniffed the air, twitched her whiskers, and bounded across the snow toward her, whacking Jeralt in the face with her bushy tail. She loomed over Edelgard for a split second before she bowed her forelegs, lowered her head, and rubbed her cheek against Edelgard’s side.

“That’s right, it’s me,” Edelgard said.

Hapi meowed irritably at her and pushed her over with a nudge of her snout, then put a massive paw over Edelgard’s chest to keep her down. The snow stung Edelgard’s skin.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been around,” she replied, scratching at Hapi’s chin with one finger. Hapi snuffled and kept rubbing. “And I’m sorry I took a bath and got rid of your scent,” she added, giggling as Hapi’s whiskers tickled her skin.

Annette laughed. “She’s just a big kitty?!”

At the sound of her voice, Hapi shot up, rising to her full height. Her ears and whiskers twitched; her tail swished back and forth as she assessed the danger surrounding her. Annette froze. Her breath came out in little frozen puffs as Hapi assessed her.

“It’s okay,” Edelgard said, standing up and brushing the snow off of herself. “Hapi, this is Annette. She’s a friend.”

Hapi inched toward Annette, skeptically appraising her the way any cat would. Annette cautiously held out her hand. “Uh… hi, Hapi. I’m Annette. Mercedes’ friend. Do you remember Mercedes?”

In response, Hapi sniffed her hand, then acquiesced and lowered her head. Annette scratched her behind one ear for a little bit, and then, satisfied, Hapi turned around and began to walk back toward Jeralt.

“Tolerance,” Edelgard said as she led Annette onward after the beast, “is a good first step.”

“She seems to really like you,” Annette said.

“Because she remembers me. The night she dragged me off, she was holding me by the scruff of my neck as though I were a kitten.”

“That’s adorable!”

“In hindsight. For the first few minutes, though, it was terrifying.”

Jeralt gave Hapi a vigorous scratch behind the ears. “Get your fill of me now, kiddo,” he said to her, ruffling her fur as she curled up at his side. “I’ve only got a bit over a week or so left here. Rhea’s kicking me out. You’ll have to be good for Hanneman, okay? I know you don’t like the guy, but he’s working hard to change you back so you can do human things again instead of shitting in a sandbox.”

Hapi let out a disinterested chirrup.

“Yeah, I know you don’t like doing that.”

Annette knelt beside her. “Captain Jeralt, do you think she’d let me brush her?” she asked him.

Jeralt shrugged. “Just be careful. If she stops purring, back away slowly.” He handed her the brush and Annette set to work.

“It’s hard to imagine the last time I saw you was in Remire,” Annette said to Hapi, slowly and softly combing her fur. “Did Cornelia make you fight us back there? Did she make you do all those terrible things? You know, Mercie hardly ever talked about you. She said Cornelia would keep the two of you apart from each other. That’s too bad. Maybe we’d have all been great friends.” She started singing one of her little songs. _“Are you blind when you’re born? Can you see in the dark? Can you look at a king? Would you sit on his throne? Can you say of your bite that it’s worse than your bark? Are you the cock of the walk when you’re walking alone? Because jellicles are and jellicles do, jellicles do and jellicles would…”_

Jeralt stood up and looked down at Hapi while Annette serenaded her. “Maybe I’ll take her with me,” he said, crossing his arms. He seemed a little unsteady on his feet, and Edelgard wondered how many more flasks he had emptied between now and earlier this morning.

“Back to the Blade Breakers?” she asked. She couldn’t say the thought of dragging a beast into a mercenary company sounded wise. “Pardon me for saying this, but it sounds like a bad idea.”

“Dunno. I feel like with her around, we’d never have to worry about getting stiffed again.” Jeralt scratched his scruffy beard. “Hmm… but then we’d have to feed her. Better to just leave her here and hope Hanneman can do his science, then.”

Having had her fill of brushes and pets and Annette’s singing, Hapi got up, walked over to the door to the tower, and sat down in front of it, warily watching her visitors at a distance. Annette began to creep toward her.

“I’d better get back to the office,” Jeralt said. “Got a lot of paperwork to do. Make sure the next captain can pick up where I left off. That’s one thing I won’t miss about this shit. Edelgard, you can take care of Byleth when I’m gone, right?”

Edelgard nodded.

He laughed. “Hell, I shouldn’t even need to ask. You two have gone without me in your world for a while now already. Just keep her away from Rhea for me. No matter what.”

_“Captain Jeralt! Captain Jeralt!”_

A reddish blur darted over the snow and Golden Deer student Leonie Pinelli came to a halt in front of Jeralt, huffing and puffing for breath, her cheeks as red as her hair. She looked as though she’d sprinted here from the other side of the monastery. Spooked by the sudden intrusion, Hapi scampered into the tower and up the staircase into her little sanctuary, much to Annette’s displeasure.

“Captain… Captain Jeralt…” Leonie took a deep breath. “I heard from one of the knights that you were expelled from the order! They said you weren’t captain anymore! Is that true?” She looked at Jeralt with pleading eyes, desperate to be told the knights were lying.

Edelgard had to admit that she didn’t know Leonie very well, but she did know that she held Jeralt in very high regard. The news had to be devastating.

“Afraid so,” Jeralt said.

“They can’t do that! I mean—you’re a _legend,_ Captain! You’re the best there’s ever been! Who could they possibly replace you with?”

Annette caught up to them. “Wait, wait, _what?”_

“Whoever they replace me with, that’s _their_ problem,” Jeralt said. “Yeah. It’s true. Rhea herself kicked me out earlier this morning.”

 _“Why?”_ Leonie wailed.

“Let this be a lesson to you, kid.” Jeralt patted her on the shoulder. “Never—and I mean never, ever, _ever_ —disagree with an Archbishop about what she wants to do to your daughter. In fact, archbishops, bishops, cardinals, whatever—best to just ignore ‘em entirely. Don’t _ever_ become a Knight of Seiros. Stay away from the church entirely. Believe in the Goddess or not, I don’t care, but just get yourself as far away from here as possible once you graduate.”

Leonie and Annette both stared at him, dumbfounded.

“Well, they’re making a huge mistake,” Leonie said, thumping her fist on her chest. “You’re still the captain in my heart, Jeralt. Always will be.”

“Thanks,” he said. He looked to the guard tower. “Hey, kid. You wanna help me out with something?”

* * *

Dimitri was haggard, weary, and worn, but when Edelgard found him later that morning, she found him with a smile on his face. His arms were wrapped around his professor, one hand pressed to the small of her back, the other cradling the back of her head and supporting her as she rested her cheek on his chest. Edelgard felt jealousy—and guilt—wash over herself. That was how she longed to hold Byleth, but that was _his_ Byleth, not hers.

Clumps of snow dripped from the eaves above them as the two of them stood outside the door to Byleth’s room. As Edelgard approached them, she could hear Dimitri’s quiet murmuring in Byleth’s ear.

He caught sight of Edelgard. _“El!”_ he cried out.

He looked so simple and innocent, so uncomplicated, when he smiled like this. Ten months with Byleth and four with Edelgard had done so much to melt the heart of the boy who, at the beginning, had been hiding inhuman rage and lust for revenge beneath a polite, but cold exterior. The rage and pain was still there, strong as ever, but there was no longer such a thin facade over it.

Edelgard felt Dimitri embrace her. “El,” he said, “I had horrible dreams last night.” Fingers twirled around a lock of her hair. “This… green as mint and luminous… and your eyes like cursed emeralds, beautiful but terrible.” He lost himself; his grip tightened, and Edelgard felt a painful tug on her scalp. “I wanted to cry out for you, but I was too frightened to even scream.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, placing a gentle hand on his wrist and guiding his hand from her hair before he inadvertently scalped her.

“I could have killed the archbishop that night,” he said. “I could hardly think straight. But when Dedue pulled me away, I began to think… I remembered your deliberation. I remembered what you said about making careful moves, measuring twice and cutting once. I… for a night, I felt I could control the boar.”

“I’m proud of you,” Edelgard told him, returning his smile. “I noticed you also have not destroyed the training hall again.”

“I have not,” he said. “I found a new outlet, and it worked much better. Now, about Glenn…” He looked to her, then to Byleth, then back to her. “I… I heard you saw him die.”

“Pushed off the ramparts.” She nodded.

“Felix… Ingrid… they will be devastated.” He looked down at his boots. “What did he want to say to me?”

Edelgard steeled herself. She’d always operated out of caution under the assumption that he would need to hear the truth from one of his allies among Those Who Slither in the Dark. But would he believe her if he heard the truth from _her?_ He trusted her, after all. She was precious to her. So why couldn’t she convince herself that she alone was enough to deliver the truth to him?

She had always struggled to think that she was enough.

“Your Majesty.” Dedue put a hand on Dimitri’s shoulder. It never failed to astound Edelgard how such a big man could move so silently and without being noticed. And yet here he was, standing at his liege’s side without the slightest warning. He was wearing a long white cloak that blended in with the snow; had Edelgard simply not noticed him because of that? “I have something urgent to discuss with you.”

Edelgard felt a burning frustration deep down inside her. What was Dedue doing? It was as though he didn’t _want_ Dimitri to know the truth about who had massacred his own people. “Dedue,” she said, “I’d like to tell Dimitri something first.”

“I am sorry, Your Highness, but that will have to wait. To my quarters, please, Your Majesty.”

“Er—sorry,” Dimitri said to Edelgard and Byleth as Dedue led him next door. “This will have to wait.”

Dedue looked over his shoulder. His cold eyes met Edelgard’s. In that coldness, colder than the icicles hanging from the eaves, was a message— _be silent._

“It can’t wait,” Edelgard said, stepping forward. Before the door swung shut behind Dedue, she grabbed the knob and held it open. “It _won’t_ wait. Dimitri, Dedue—”

Her skull split open. White-hot fire poured from her eyes and nose and ears and mouth. Her back arched. A scream tore itself from her lips. For an instant, she saw herself and Lysithea in a carriage, feeling it rock and shudder over rough mountain roads. A split second later, she was back at Garreg Mach, engulfed in a snowdrift, her fingers clawing into the dead grass and frozen soil beneath the snow.

“Professor! _El!”_ she heard Dimitri cry out as the explosive headache filled her body with a throbbing pain. The knowledge that Thales must have been experiencing this timequake, this tremor in the bedrock of reality, as well was little comfort to her as she writhed in the snow.

What were Those Who Slither in the Dark doing? What terrible turn was their experiments in time travel taking?

When she became aware of her surroundings again, she felt herself being carried up a flight of stairs. The dormitories’ second floor hallway greeted her. The strong arms carrying her were unfamiliar at first, until her eye made sense of the blur looming above her and coalesced it into Dedue’s face.

He brought her to her room, laid her in bed, and backed away, putting a finger to his lips.

Edelgard sat up. Her head throbbed, and the room spun around her. “Don’t you want him to know the truth?” she asked Dedue before he could leave the room.

“The time is not yet right,” he answered, his tone low, slow, and carefully measured, his words painstakingly chosen.

“You are running _out_ of time,” she retorted. “Why don’t you want him to know who killed your people? Why don’t _you_ want to know? Does the fact that you might be wrong about who murdered everyone you knew _frighten_ you?”

Even though Dedue had his back to her, Edelgard could somehow still feel his piercing gaze pinning her in place.

“Tread carefully, Your Highness,” he replied. “You are only alive today because certain people have decided, against the interests of others, that you would be more useful alive… and more dangerous dead. See to it the balance of power does not shift. The truth will have its day. But when that day comes is out of your hands.”

“I don’t like being a pawn in someone else’s game.”

“Neither do I.”

The door closed behind him.

Edelgard pulled herself out of bed and crossed the room, pulling the door open after him, but he was already gone. On the floor, she found a small, thin slip of paper he had left in his wake:
    
    
    15 | BLN RQVC XOC FQNWSHOE VTAJQMGOH ULB LPQ CLQ RNKK RBVW

She couldn’t stop herself from letting out a groan. This would require _Claude’s_ help to translate. Strange, suspicious, treacherous Claude.

She tidied herself up, combed her hair (again), and set out to find him. Hopefully, Hubert was still tailing him. The thought occurred to her, however briefly, that if Claude were a double agent he might have fled the monastery, but she wasn’t sure his pride would have allowed that. Or, more accurately, Lorenz’s pride.

On her way to the courtyard, two knights passed her by, conversing among themselves in hushed whispers. A snippet of their conversation reached Edelgard’s ears as they moved in and then back out of earshot.

_“…how someone could do that to Cardinal Aelfric.”_

_“I know. How many times?”_

_“Thirty-seven. He was stabbed thirty-seven times last night.”_

_“Indech’s beard!”_

_“He was dead after the first one. Everything after that was just corpse desecration. One of the monks said he woke up in the middle of the night and saw the Hurricane King…”_

Edelgard pondered the knights’ words. Aelfric… Where had she heard that name before?

She found Volkhard von Arundel in the courtyard, pacing a worried furrow into the snow, streams of his frozen breath trailing behind him as he worriedly marched around the perimeter. “Uncle Volkhard,” she said. “Have you seen Hubert?”

Snapped out of his funk, Volkhard looked up and broke his stride. “El, dear, there you are. Why are you looking for Hubert? He should be by your side, shouldn’t he?”

“I sent him off to run an errand for me earlier this morning,” she said.

“Ah. I think I saw him in the library,” Volkhard said. His gloved fingers fumbled anxiously with the brass buttons of his winter coat.

“Is something the matter, Uncle Volkhard?”

“Oh, um… I just heard a distressing report. Apparently, those rumors of unrest in Enbarr are true, and it is spreading to other parts of the Empire. With this turn in the weather, I do not know if I can make it back to Castle Arundel before the situation worsens. Do you think Lady Rhea would authorize the Black Eagles to travel with me and help keep the peace? As a… learning experience? Of course, you would be welcome to accompany us as an adjutant.”

To say the least, Edelgard was perturbed. “I… suppose I could put in a good word for you. You aren’t considering turning your soldiers—or the Black Eagles—on the citizenry, though, are you?”

“I would hope it does not come to that. No, what worries me is the thought that bandits may take advantage of the people fighting among themselves to loot and pillage. Arundel territory does share a border with Faerghus, after all, and those who cross that border are not always model citizens.”

“Now that he’s returned, Seteth typically handles matters of class assignments. You’d probably be better served speaking to him,” Edelgard said, “provided Manuela allows you into the infirmary.”

“Ah, that is right. I had heard that he had returned last night in frightful shape.”

“Frightful is right. But he’s better now and, so it seems, itching to get back to work.”

“Thank you, El.” He took her by the shoulder. “I am sorry to burden you with my troubles, dear. Do not worry about Arundel territory. I will take care of it.”

He hurried off, leaving Edelgard alone in the snowy courtyard. She followed him at a distance to the main hall, then upstairs, and when he turned the corner in the hallway and headed for the infirmary, she headed for the library.

She found Hubert in the library. Linhardt was also there, with his nose in a book. _Very deep_ in his book, actually, because he had fallen asleep while reading and planted his face right between the pages.

“Lady Edelgard,” Hubert said, standing up from his seat and bowing. “You have just missed Claude, in case you were wondering. He spent all morning in this library.”

“Doing what?”

“I watched him while pretending to study with Linhardt. He was rearranging the books in random order. The books which are alphabetically ordered quite painstakingly every night by the librarian’s assistants.”

Edelgard looked down at the ‘notes’ Hubert had been taking. A hastily drawn chart of the library’s shelves, with numbers indicating where Claude had changed the books. Thirteen shelves had been messed with in total. “Perhaps a signal or code.”

“My thoughts exactly, Lady Edelgard. Let us see what he is trying to say.”

The two of them searched the library, studying each shelf. In each of the thirteen shelves Claude had touched, one book had been slipped out of order. Hubert took down the title of each book. Edelgard looked at the titles: _Cantos of Saint Indech, Trails and Roads of the Oghma Mountains, Nymphs of Lake Teutates, In the Court of the King of Lions…_ there didn’t seem to be a pattern.

“Perhaps,” Hubert said, “the first letter of each word…” He wrote them down:
    
    
    C T N I R E H Y B U T R E T

“It’s nonsense,” Edelgard said. “Or perhaps an anagram?”

“Precisely. And I know somebody who is very good at anagrams,” Hubert said.

The two of them fled the library and found Ferdinand and Constance chatting in the main hall, just outside the entrance to the dining hall.

“Well, well, Edelgard and Hubert!” Constance drawled. “Would you like to meet us for lunch?”

“Perhaps some other time,” Hubert said. “I have a brain-teaser for the both of you.” He showed them both the thirteen letters he had written down. “Can you make any anagrams out of this?”

 _“Any?”_ Constance laughed. “You should add an ‘M’ to that, because we can make _many.”_ She took the paper from him and looked at it for a while. “Inert butchery.”

Ferdinand gave the paper a good, long, hard stare. “Thereby in curt,” he added. “Do you two have any?”

“No,” Edelgard said. “Go on.”

“Enrich buttery.”

“The century rib.”

“Cheery rub tint.”

“Cherry bunt tie!”

“Buyer rich tent!”

“The briny cuter!”

“Tin berry chute!”

“Ethnic nut berry!”

“Can you find any anagrams that make _sense?”_ Hubert asked, interrupting Ferdinand and Constance as their excitement reached a fever pitch.

“Nice try, Hubert,” Constance said, handing the paper back to him.

“Excuse me? I would like to know what you are accusing me of ‘trying’—”

“No, no, that is an acronym that makes sense,” she said.

Ferdinand looked at the paper. “You are right, Constance! ‘Nice try, Hubert’ _is_ an anagram of ‘inert butchery!’”

“I win again!” she crowed.

“Thank you,” Edelgard said, disappointed.

“Come along,” Constance said. “Join us for lunch!” She hooked her arm around Ferdinand’s and the two of them turned their backs to Edelgard and Hubert and made for the dining hall.

Hubert stared at the paper for a few seconds, then crumpled it into a tight wad and shoved it into his pocket. “‘Nice try, Hubert,’ indeed,” he grumbled under his breath.

* * *

That afternoon, Byleth gathered the Blue Lions together. Breaking the news of ‘Glenn’s’ death to them was, of course, not easy. Some of the more perceptive students like Sylvain and Ignatz picked up that something was horribly wrong as soon as she had them all gather in the classroom. By the time her voice cracked, before she’d even gotten to the news, everyone knew that they were not going to hear something pleasant and waited with agonizing dread for her to continue.

Edelgard had taken a seat at Ingrid’s side, prepared to console her when the news broke, to offer her a shoulder to cry on, a hand to hold, or whatever else she might need. A spare handkerchief, at the very least. But all Ingrid did was stare blankly ahead, unmoving, her hands folded calmly in her lap.

Then, a subtle furrow of her brow, a quiver of her lower lip, a flutter of her eyelashes. She bowed her head and shuddered.

Edelgard heard a quiet sob wrench itself from her chest and rested her hand atop hers. To say the least, she didn’t envy Ingrid in the slightest. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Ingrid brushed her hand aside and stood up. “How do you know he’s dead?” she asked Byleth sharply, masking the quaver in her voice that threatened to erupt into another sob. “I want to see the body. I won’t believe he’s gone until you show me his body, Professor. Where are the knights? Are they looking—”

Felix crossed his arms, sullen. “Idiot,” he scoffed. “After last night’s blizzard, no one will find anything until the snow thaws in spring. If wild animals don’t carry it away first.”

“Shut up, Felix! Don’t you care? He’s _your brother!”_

“He was wrapped up in something shady and got killed for it. I’ve got as much sympathy for him as I do for my father. It’s his own damn fault he’s dead.”

 _“You heartless barbarian!”_ Ingrid snarled, throwing herself out of her seat and lunging at him.

Dedue intercepted her. “Calm yourself.”

“Get your filthy hands off me!” She tore herself away from him and stormed off. The doors slammed shut behind her as she stomped into the snow.

In the aftermath, the rest of the classroom was left in a daze. Even though Kronya had hardly been as universally liked as Ashe had been (in fact, ‘Glenn’ had been just about universally disliked except by Raphael, who couldn’t be said to really dislike _anyone),_ to have yet another dead student on everybody’s consciences was sobering at the very least.

“I can’t believe it,” Ignatz said. “Is there something about our class that just attracts tragedy?”

“I’d bet it was the Hurricane King,” Bernadetta wailed, pulling her hood tight over her head. “First he tried to get Edelgard, now he’s killed Glenn… Who’s next? I-Is Bernie next?” Her fear earned her a concerned glance from Dimitri.

“Stay out of trouble and you’ll live,” Felix said. “I don’t think you’ll have any problems doing that. Right, Professor?”

“Um… Felix? Are you sure you’re not at least a _little_ sad?” Annette asked. “I-It’s okay if you’re sad.”

“Sad?” he snapped. “Why would I be _sad?_ If anything, I’m glad that idiot got himself killed in the dumbest way possible. There’s no honor in getting thrown off a wall. I won’t have to listen to Father prattle on about how valiantly he gave his life anymore.”

Raphael spoke up. “Uh… I can’t say I’m an _expert,_ but that sounds… really unhealthy.”

“Oh, come on, quit it with the posturing,” Sylvain said. “Even I was a little fucked up after Miklan bit it, and he was _the worst.”_

“Because you’re weak.” Felix got up from his desk and walked to the door. “Professor, next time, don’t bother me unless something _actually_ bad happens. If you need me, I’ll be in the training hall.”

Edelgard stood up. “I’ll go make sure Ingrid’s okay.”

“Good idea!” Raphael stood up. “Want me to come with you?”

He looked so eager that she couldn’t quite bring herself to say no. Raphael was a bit of an oaf, but he was at times quite an emotionally mature and practically minded oaf. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt,” she said, and so the two of them headed after Ingrid together. The thick snow blanketing the ground made her trail obvious and easy to follow—there was a wake cutting through it like the wake of a boat, which thankfully made the snow easier to trudge through.

The path led from the classrooms to the dormitories, curving through the courtyard, and the churned-up snow came to a halt at the steps to the second floor. Edelgard climbed the stairs to Ingrid’s room and knocked on the door.

After a long silence, the door slowly creaked open. Ingrid’s eye, red-rimmed, slid past the slit. “Edelgard?”

“And Raphael,” Raphael said, offering her a smile.

“Raphael and I are worried about you,” Edelgard told her. “May we come in?”

“There’s… no need to worry about me,” she replied. Her voice was hoarse. “I’m—” She swallowed a lump in her throat. “I’m sorry. You’re good friends—you’ve _been_ good friends. But you don’t need to be here right now.”

“Being here to comfort you is a welcome respite from everything else going on,” Edelgard said. “I know this must be hitting you hard. I know I can’t imagine the pain of losing someone so close to you twice. I _want_ to be here for you.”

Ingrid opened the door. “You’re stubborn as a mule, Edelgard,” she sighed, beckoning her inside.

“She kicks like one, too!” Raphael added.

“I prefer ‘tenacious’ over ‘stubborn,’” Edelgard said, stepping over the threshold and closing the door behind her.

“Okay.” Ingrid stood in her room, her arms straight at her sides, head bowed. Her eyes seemed to want to look in any direction but right in front of her.

Edelgard laid her hands on her shoulders. “May I—”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Ingrid said flatly. She sat down at her desk. “So… Glenn got pushed off the ramparts. You and Professor Byleth didn’t see who did it.”

“Unfortunately, no,” Edelgard said. “We don’t know who killed him.”

Ingrid was silent for a while.

“It doesn’t matter,” she finally said. “It doesn’t matter who killed him.”

“You know what, that’s exactly right,” Raphael said. “Did I tell you how my parents died a couple years ago? When we first met up in the Golden Deer, Ignatz was terrified of me— _me,_ his best buddy since we were kids—all because he thought his parents were responsible for their deaths. But I didn’t blame him or his parents. And then, just before Gronder Field, we went on a mission and met some guys who suggested that Lorenz’s dad might have had something to do with it. But you know what? I didn’t care! Caring about who’s responsible, blaming people, all that won’t bring Mom and Dad back. What’s done is done, so we’ve just got to move on and keep living.”

Something told Edelgard that his positivity came off as just a little forced. Perhaps it was the beads of sweat on his brow.

“I wish I was as strong as you, Raphael,” Ingrid muttered.

“Huh? But _you’re_ one of the only five students in Garreg Mach who can knock me down! You’re plenty stronger than me!”

There was the oafish part of Raphael again.

“I don’t mean physically,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re just… you seem to enjoy living. And that takes a lot of strength.”

“No, it takes practice. Like building your muscles!” he retorted. “Yeah… when Mom and Dad died, it hurt. A lot. But it hurt a lot worse for my kid sister, so I had to practice being positive. For her. So she could look at her big brother and know that everything was gonna be okay.” He furrowed his brow. “Hey, you’ve got big brothers. Didn’t they do that for you?”

A fleeting laugh breached Ingrid’s lips.

“I think Raphael has a point, Ingrid,” Edelgard said. “It’s hard work, when you’re in pain, when you’ve known loss, to teach yourself again that life is worth living.” She reached out to her and offered a hand to her. “You have to teach yourself to trust that there is still light in the world, even when all you can see is darkness. If you need help…”

Ingrid looked at her hand and let out a despondent sigh. “When I said it doesn’t matter who killed Glenn,” she said, closing her eyes as though that would be enough to stop tears from falling from them, “I meant that—that I might as well have killed him. Ever since we found him in the catacombs, these past four months, I’ve just—I’ve wished he would just die, or that we’d never have found him at all, and sometimes I’ve thought about hurting him or worse. Because almost every time he opened his mouth, I just felt… I felt him defiling all the memories of the old Glenn. I felt all the times I’d felt happy around him turn to ash. It was like he died a little more every time I remembered him. I hated him, hated him, _hated_ him, and now—now I’ve gotten my wish. It’s as though the Goddess wanted to punish me for my wicked thoughts. Now I’ve lost him twice, but it won’t bring my happy memories back.” She took a deep, shuddering breath, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I’m a monster.”

“That’s silly,” Raphael said. “I mean, even if you prayed to the Goddess that he’d die—she doesn’t answer _those_ kinds of prayers, does she? You had nothing to do with it!”

The Goddess didn’t answer _any_ kinds of prayers, in fact, but Edelgard kept that to herself. “You’re not a monster, Ingrid.”

Ingrid looked up at her. She bit her lip. “You look at me,” she said, “and see a beautiful woman, someone you’re desperately trying not to fall in love with. You don’t see how ugly my soul is, Edelgard. Don’t act like I’m so beautiful now, when I’ve exposed my deepest and most disgusting thoughts to you.”

“Ingrid, if you could see all of the things I’ve done, you would call me a monster, too,” Edelgard said. The vision of Aymr’s bony blade cleaving through gleaming armor, human and pegasus, and golden hair with a shower of blood in its wake came to her. “For the longest time, I thought that, like you, the monstrosity of others had made me a monster as well. But that isn’t true. Deep down, the light of your soul still shines. It isn’t ugly at all.”

She came closer to Ingrid, put her hands on her shoulders—this time, Ingrid didn’t protest or fight back—and wrapped her arms around her in a tight embrace. “You can wallow in your misery and self-hatred alone, Ingrid. Or you can work to pull yourself out of that mire. Choose the latter, and I promise you that we will be there to help you out.”

Ingrid rested her head on her shoulder. Edelgard couldn’t deny that the way it felt for her breath to ghost across the naked skin of her neck felt the way strong wine tasted, but fought to ignore it.

“Uh… yeah. What she said!” Raphael said. “You can always count on my muscles to pull you away from the swamp of your ugly thoughts, Ingrid!”

Edelgard heard a noise halfway between a snort and a wheeze burst from Ingrid’s mouth. Her shoulders quivered and her chest heaved, and when she pulled away from her, her laughter was as golden as her hair.

Ingrid dried her tears. “Thank you, both of you. I needed that. I’m sorry I’ve caused you both so much trouble.”

“It’s nothing! Walking up stairs is good exercise,” Raphael said, prompting another laugh.

“Your happy memories of Glenn might be gone,” Edelgard said to Ingrid, “but someday, you’ll have happy memories of someone else. Someone you love. Hopefully, someone you’ve chosen of your own free will, not someone who’s been forced upon you.”

Ingrid rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. “There you go again, Edelgard. It might be a while before I feel okay, but… I do feel better.” She looked around her room, which was of course as neat and tidy as one would expect her room to be, as though she were seeing it for the first time. “The first time I lost Glenn, I would shut myself up in my room for hours every day. I let the world pass me by for weeks, months, feeling like I’d never be happy again.” She sighed. “I’ll see you both in class tomorrow.”

“If you don’t, I’ll bring my lecture notes over to you,” Edelgard said.

“Yeah! Great idea!” Raphael said. “Uh… could you make a copy for me, too?”

The two of them left Ingrid’s room, leaving their friend in higher spirits.

“You know,” Raphael said to Edelgard as they descended the stairs, “After my parents died, I _did_ wish I could’ve found who killed them. I felt awful, and sometimes I’d think about how much I wanted to just grab ‘em by the necks and squeeze and, uh, watch their eyes pop out or something. But eventually, I got sick of thinking those kinds of thoughts, because it made it hard for me to make my sister feel better when I was stewing in them. It wouldn’t change anything anyway. I mean, it was probably an accident.”

“There’s something to be said, though,” Edelgard replied, “about justice. When someone inflicts great pain on someone, or kills them, you could say you have a responsibility to stop them from hurting or killing even more people.”

“Well, yeah, of course! I mean, I wouldn’t be working to be a knight if I didn’t want to protect people or fight for justice.” Raphael shrugged. “I’m just saying, if you or Ingrid never find out who pushed Glenn off the wall, that’s okay. You can move on.”

“It _is_ probably healthier to move on,” Edelgard admitted, “than to chase justice or vengeance for your whole life. But sometimes that drive can inspire you to make a better world. Vengeance need not be a destructive force. Otherwise, why would they say that the best revenge is a life well-lived?”

“Oh, I get it! So, in a way, by getting stronger, studying, and protecting my little sis, I _am_ getting revenge on whoever killed our parents!” Raphael nodded sagely. “Maybe the real revenge… is the friends you make along the way.”

Edelgard laughed. He wasn’t wrong. If the best revenge was indeed a life lived well, then Byleth, Lysithea, Dorothea, and the rest of the Black Eagles Strike Force were indeed the best vengeance against Thales she could have… although she _did_ still need to foil whatever his evil plot was nevertheless.

“You know, helping people with their emotional problems feels pretty good,” he added. “Wanna go to the training hall and help Felix process his grief?”

“I think tending to one troubled psyche is enough for one day, Raphael,” she said. She had to admit that she was exhausted, and Felix was quite an exhausting person.

* * *

After supper, with the sun hanging low in the sky and the clouds turning a brilliant orange and dusky violet, Edelgard returned to the infirmary.

Seteth allowed her in. “Flayn will likely talk your ear off,” he warned her, “but you should be quick about this. In case you have not heard or you plan on flouting the rules, I have spoken with Lady Rhea and implemented a _strict_ curfew from sunset to sunrise from now until the Hurricane King is apprehended, with severe consequences for delinquency.” He glanced out the window, rubbing his neck apprehensively, and Edelgard wondered if he could still feel any phantom pain from when Dimitri had choked him within an inch of his life. “You have about fifteen minutes, I would say. Be sure to lock your doors and windows.”

“I understand,” Edelgard said, stepping into the room. “I will be quick about it.”

 _“Edelgard!”_ Flayn cried out, sitting bolt upright and throwing aside her bedsheets. She wore nothing but a simple nightgown, and as she tried to pull herself out of bed the mottled bruises on her legs became visible.

“Flayn, don’t stand up for my sake,” Edelgard assured her. “It is good to see you again.”

Flayn remained seated at the side of her cot, her legs dangling over the side. Seteth had combed and braided her hair between now and this morning, from the looks of it. Aside from a few persistent scrapes and scars that hadn’t completely healed yet, and of course the sling wrapped around her arm, she looked like the same girl who had said goodbye to the Blue Lions in Arianrhod months ago.

She smiled broadly. “Our paths have converged again, my… friend. Although I did not take destiny into my own hands, I am afraid.”

“You most certainly did,” Edelgard said. “I hear you dragged your big brother to Garreg Mach yourself. And all that with a broken arm?”

“Yes! I—I had no other choice. I…” Flayn took a deep breath. “I was so afraid. I could feel their knives against my skin again, and… I was so, so afraid. But now you are here!” She tried to stand up. Her legs immediately crumpled under her weight.

 _“Flayn, no!”_ Seteth cried out, rushing to her side to steady her. He could only hobble, though, his cane tapping a frantic tattoo on the floor as he tried to steady himself.

“I’ve got her,” Edelgard consoled him, catching her in her arms. She helped her back onto the cot. “You will need plenty more rest before you can be out and about,” she said to Flayn.

Flayn nodded. “Thank you, Edelgard. You are, and continue to be, a good friend. I was hoping I would feel this good when we reunited.” Her smile was still wide and cheery. “May you bring the rest of your class here? I would like to see Annette, Ingrid, and Mercedes again. If my big brother wills it, perhaps another slumber party?”

“That may not be for a while,” Edelgard said. “But I would like that.” She crouched down and drew the bedsheets to her chin.

Flayn reached out with her unbroken arm and took Edelgard’s hand in hers. Her hand was warm and soft, like a child’s. “I owe you my life twice over now. Thinking of you would make me forget how much my feet hurt at the end of every long day. When I broke my arm, I thought about you and your friends and it dulled the pain. When we arrived in town and I had to carry Seteth from the town square to the monastery gates, seeing your face in my mind’s eye made the snow feel as warm as a bath. We both would have died if not for you, Edelgard.”

“I’m flattered to hear it, Flayn.”

“Has much happened while I was gone?”

Edelgard laughed. “More things have happened in the past two and a half weeks than typically happen in an entire year.”

“You must tell me.”

She looked out the window. The last rays of the sun were dipping under the walls of the monastery. “Tomorrow, after class,” she said.

“Oh…”

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “You’ll wake up tomorrow. I’ll see you then.”

“Bring the others, too,” Flayn said.

“I will.”

“Professor Byleth, especially.”

“Of course.” Edelgard stood up and offered her a bow. “Sleep well, my friend.”

“I bid you a pleasant sleep as well,” Flayn said, and she settled back into bed and closed her eyes.

“Thank you,” Seteth said as Edelgard made for the door. “Now, go right back to your room, _lock_ the door, and make certain that nobody can enter or exit through the window.”

“Of course. Take care and stay safe.”

Edelgard left the infirmary, shutting the door behind it. She heard the muffled sound of a latch locking from the other side. Of course, Seteth would take no chances with the Hurricane King on the loose. Though if Dimitri was as compliant as a good student _should_ be about the curfew, nobody had anything to worry about.

The downside of a dusk-to-dawn curfew in the dead of winter was that dusk came at about five o’clock and dawn was not until about seven, but Edelgard had studying to do and books to read and, if she could be quite honest, at least one night free of scheming and plotting was something she desperately needed.

Her plans for a simple night in were immediately derailed when she spied Claude ambling down the hall. It looked as though he had just paid another visit to the library, likely to erase the evidence of the little practical joke he had played on Hubert.

She reversed course, raced down the hallway, and before Claude could flee she had his collar clutched in her fists and had him pinned to the wall. “If I was angry at you before, Claude, I am _furious_ now. Kronya is dead. Did you know that would happen? Did ‘Future Claude’ tell you?”

“He doesn’t tell me details,” Claude said evasively, sweat beading on his brow.

“I don’t think there _is_ a ‘Future Claude,’” Edelgard said. “You’re hiding something else. Do you know why I think that?”

“Because you’re a naturally distrustful person?” he asked.

“Because I _respect_ you,” she said. “The Claude von Riegan I know isn’t so fatalistic, nor is he so _credible._ If you were truly taking orders unquestioningly from someone claiming to be yourself from the future, then you have sunk to an abominable low.”

“If you got a message from your future self, wouldn’t you heed it?”

“I wouldn’t _trust_ it. How do you know these messages are from your future self if they don’t tell you any details? Why are they written in Hilda’s handwriting—Hilda’s _disguised_ handwriting— _your_ handwriting, disguised as Hilda disguising her handwriting? Do you realize how _asinine_ that sounds?”

“Think about it,” Claude said. “The first letter you received was written by Hilda. When that alone wasn’t enough to motivate you to seek me out, the second letter arrived. It had to look like it came from the same source. But since it was written in the future, it also had to be written exactly how it had been written in the past. Future Claude writes these letters the way he does because Past Claude—me—reads them the way I do. That’s the thing with time travel. When the future starts to influence the past, then the past starts to control the future.”

Edelgard recalled Thales’ chilling words, the words that had seeped into her bones despite her best attempts to cast them aside as nonsense. “That doesn’t prove anything,” she said, ignoring Claude’s entire argument. “Your reasoning is completely circular. You aren’t even _trying_ to convince me. _How do you know it’s you?”_

“Oh, come on, Edelgard. If you can’t even trust yourself, who _can_ you trust?”

She thrust him against the wall. “What if Thales is leaving those messages to trick you?”

“Why would he? Each message I’ve gotten has only made things worse for him.”

“Has it? They’ve made things worse for _us,_ too. What’s your agenda? Are you merely mindlessly following the instructions of your so-called future self out of faith? Are we all just cats-paws for some nebulous man from the future?”

“What’s so bad about that? I’m bound to like the cut of Future Claude’s jib.”

“You’ve allowed your own free will to be completely subsumed by someone else’s ‘higher purpose’ when it should be _you_ who chooses that higher purpose.”

“Obviously, I _did_ choose my higher purpose, and Future Claude just wants to make sure I succeed at it.”

“How? By killing one of our strongest assets? Which of our plans are you going to sabotage next?” She tightened her grip on Claude’s collar. “I want to know why Kronya had to die last night. And I will not accept _fate_ as an answer.”

“Who says she’s dead?” he asked. “You only said you saw her fall.”

“Are you saying she faked her death? Was _that_ the plan?”

“I’m saying it’s possible.”

 _“Lady Edelgard!”_ The voice that cut through the hallway like an arrow flying straight and true belonged to Lorenz Hellman Gloucester. “What are you doing?!” he gasped, scandalized. “I can assure you, I have entertained the _thought_ of manhandling this Claude von Riegan quite often, but to _do_ it is simply unbecoming of nobility!”

“Will you shut up?” Edelgard snapped at him.

Lorenz looked perturbed by her rudeness. He self-consciously adjusted the rose on his lapel. “I am going to ignore that uncharacteristic outburst, Lady Edelgard. At any rate, you two should be heading back to the dormitories. Did you not hear that a curfew is in effect?” He brushed his violet bangs from his brow with a dismissive flick of his wrist. “It is no wonder the Empire and Alliance are declining with _you_ two setting the standards for nobility. Both of you, come with me before all three of us are punished for your… cavorting.”

It was only when Lorenz had started leading them to the dormitories that Edelgard remembered the message Dedue had slipped her. _“Claude,”_ she whispered, _“I may strongly disagree with your actions, but you are still our sole codebreaker. I have a message that needs decrypting. Tomorrow, after class, before nightfall. Hubert and I will watch you decode it every step of the way. If you want us to have any faith in you, you’ll agree to this.”_

 _“You drive a hard bargain, Your Imperial Highness,”_ Claude replied.

As the last rays of the setting sun vanished under the horizon, Edelgard, Claude, and Lorenz went their separate ways and locked themselves in their rooms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Claude's codebook](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1g46LewA5hBokCT7oSmeFAxuMEzHi6VFwgEbsLwBsbho/edit?usp=sharing)


	28. As Dangerous Allies as Enemies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Time Squad struggles to balance conspiracies and classwork, Edelgard and Dedue do lunch, and the Blue Lions receive an unusual assignment.

That night, Edelgard had a dream.

At first, she thought she had woken up in the middle of the night, but then she realized that the bed she was lying in was bigger than the bed she’d fallen asleep in. The blanket was warmer, just short of uncomfortably warm, and the sheets were soft and smooth silk.

And she was not alone.

Moonlight streamed through the window, faintly illuminating the contours of what Edelgard gradually grew to recognize was Archbishop Rhea’s bedroom. Panic struck her for a moment until her eyes wandered to her side and caught sight of the faintest trace of dark, feathery seaweed blue-green hair.

She knew intimately the bare hand that rested on her cheek, the slender fingers, the rough and calloused palm, the warmth bleeding from flesh to flesh. She lifted her own hand and rested it atop the hand caressing her cheek, feeling the familiar bumps of old and new scars against her skin. It almost felt real.

Edelgard parted her lips to speak. _“My love,”_ she whispered, _“am I dreaming?”_

She thought she saw a glint of azure in the moonlight, but it was fleeting, and her question was met with silence.

She reached out, fumbling half-blind in the dark, and found Byleth’s chest, feeling beneath her breast the slow and gentle pulse of a heartbeat throb against her palm. Soon she was lulled to sleep, and when the sun greeted her in the morning, she was alone.

* * *

“I know it doesn’t feel like it,” Byleth said to the Blue Lions in class the next morning, “but our time here is almost over. There is one full week left in this month, then next month… and then, in the Lone Moon, you all graduate.”

Edelgard had never graduated from the Officer’s Academy at Garreg Mach. She’d cut the term short just a few weeks early at the end of the Pegasus Moon when she had revealed her true self amid the bitter and blustery winds of winter’s worst and most treacherous month. Her Black Eagles Strike Force, as well as the students of the two houses that had remained, had graduated in the baptism by fire that had been the Empire’s assault on the monastery, but technically, none of them were alumni. She wondered if Dimitri really could hold off the war until everyone had graduated. A sentimental part of her thought she might like finally having that metaphorical feather in her cap.

“Your final certification exams will be the week before the graduation ceremony,” Byleth added. “I’m proud of all the progress you’ve made. You’ve all gained at least one intermediate certification, so I expect you to choose an advanced class to work toward. Those of you in advanced classes already can choose another advanced class, or aim for a master level class if you want a challenge.” She took out the worn book containing the certification standards and study material for each class and placed it on her desk. “Let me know which class you’re going to study for by the end of the lecture period. If you need my help with anything, just ask.”

She sat down behind her desk. She still looked weary; the entire class did. But when the Blue Lions started gathering at the front of the classroom to peruse the class offerings and talking among themselves, the mood in the classroom lightened just a bit as they allowed themselves to forget the chaos and pain in their lives and remember that for the moment, at least, they were students.

“Graduation,” Annette squealed as she waited in line behind the rest of the class. Somehow, in the scramble, she and Edelgard had ended up at the back of the line even though the two of them sat in the front row. “I can’t believe we graduate in only six weeks, Edelgard! Which exam are you going to study for?”

Edelgard thought about the path she’d taken in her world. She’d taken a fairly straightforward path into the advanced classes, focusing on her axe proficiency and leadership, knowing that she would soon don the gold and crimson battle armor that had been passed down the Hresvelg line for generations and command the forces of an entire empire. In this world, though, she was lagging behind her past academic achievements—she’d had to quickly make up for the other Edelgard’s six months of loafing around and had barely managed to pass the intermediate mage certification before Gronder Field and the brigand certification before the winter ball. No master classes would be on the table for her.

It all seemed petty right now anyway; she doubted today’s uneasy peace would last until graduation day.

“I’m not sure yet,” she answered Annette. “You?”

“Let’s see…” Annette started idly playing with her hair. “I guess with all the faith and reason I’ve got under my belt, gremory would be a good capstone. But I dunno… I kinda feel like my training in axes and close combat would go to waste then.”

“Might I say you’d look great in the gremory outfit?” Sylvain said, flashing them a roguish grin over his shoulder. “That fur and feather boa. _Mrrrrowl.”_

“S-Shut up, Sylvain!” Annette retorted, her face turning as red as her hair as she gave him a not-so-playful shove.

“I don’t need to look through this,” Ingrid said to Byleth at the front of the line, which had rapidly transformed into an amorphous cluster. “Professor, I’ll be working toward the falcon knight certification.”

“It is the same with me,” Dimitri said. “I shall be taking the wyvern lord certification exam. I fear it might be difficult to raise my axe proficiency, though…”

“Do we really have to take another exam?” Bernadetta mumbled. “They’re so nerve-wracking… the way the proctors just… _stare_ at you is so—Ugh, what to do? Bernie’s already a sniper; isn’t that good enough?”

“Hmm… if I work on my sword proficiency,” Ignatz said, “I think I could pass the assassin exam. Maybe you should give it a try, too, Bernie.”

Sylvain peered at the book over Bernadetta’s shoulders. “What about going for a bow knight? That’ll let you get away from your enemies even faster. If you need help with lance and horseback training, I can help you.”

“Professor, which one is gonna make me punch things better?” Raphael asked.

“Grappler,” Byleth said to him.

“Perfect! Hey, Dedue! You’re big and buff. Do you wanna be a grappler, too?”

“I will be an assassin,” Dedue said.

“Uh, Dedue, don’t you need to be good at archery to do that?” Sylvain asked him. “I’ve never seen you pick up a bow in your life.”

“I will be an assassin,” he repeated, and that was the last word on the subject.

The cluster of students shifted, and eventually Edelgard and Annette had their chance in front of the class offerings. In the pages of the worn old book Byleth had set out on her desk were descriptions of each of the advanced and master classes, the subject mastery needed to pass the certification exams, and woodcut illustrations of each class’s armor and dress for those students who chose their classes based on aesthetic value and not utility.

Annette flipped to the page for the gremory class. Gremories, masters of light and black magic, wore ornate and flowing gowns with luxurious fur and feather boas. It wasn’t a practical outfit, but then again, gremories were expected to avoid the front lines and decimate their enemies from two hundred or more paces away. And, Edelgard had to admit, if she ever saw Byleth wearing an outfit like that, somebody would need a mop and a bucket to clean her off the floor.

At the sight of the outfit, Annette went pale. “Uh… I-I dunno,” she mumbled, flipping back a few pages into the section on advanced classes. “Ooh, what about this? War cleric!” She tapped on the illustration. War clerics were proficient in white magic and grappling, and as that would imply, they were more heavily armored than the average warlock or mage… though Edelgard questioned the value of wearing a metal wire-frame hoop skirt into battle. “It’s perfect! I already meet the magic standards, so I’ll just have to spend the next six weeks learning to punch things!”

“Hey, I can help you out with that!” Raphael said.

Edelgard looked through the advanced classes. Given the general proficiency in swords, lances, and axes she’d accrued, along with her newly mastered skill with black magic, very little was actually off-limits to her. The swordmaster or warrior classes would both be a cinch, and if she worked hard, the warlock certification wouldn’t be out of reach.

“Hey, you’re pretty good on a horse, aren’t you?” Annette asked her, grabbing her hand before she could turn the page. She realized she’d just grabbed Edelgard’s hand, blushed so intensely her ears blended in with her hair, and let go. “U-Um, anyway, hey, look at this!” She pointed to the entry for the valkyrie class. The valkyrie was a mounted soldier who cast magic spells on horseback, clad in sleek and light armor that made her swifter and more maneuverable than the typical holy knight or dark knight.

Sylvain popped up over her shoulder and let out a low whistle. “Damn. She’s a beauty,” he said, staring at the illustration for the valkyrie.

“She’s a drawing,” Edelgard pointed out. “Though I shouldn’t be surprised that does nothing to deter you.”

Defeated, Sylvain beat a hasty retreat.

“I’m going to take the valkyrie certification,” she told Byleth.

Byleth nodded. “Good choice. I’m glad I started having you learn magic. It seems it’s opened a lot of new possibilities for you.”

Edelgard bowed. “Thank you, my teacher.”

Byleth turned to Annette. “Have you decided?” she asked her.

Annette nodded. “Yup! I’ll be going for the war cleric certification,” she said.

Byleth’s mint-green eyebrows arched. “That will require a grappling and brawling rank of… um…” She took the book from Annette and flipped through it. “B.”

“Yeah?”

“Your rank is currently at E. You’ve never studied that.”

“I can cram it in six weeks,” Annette said. “I just have to advance by one rank every two weeks. I’ve got the muscles for it!”

“If you think you can do it, I believe you, and I’ll do whatever I can to help you,” Byleth said. “But it’ll be a lot more work than if you focused on bringing your faith and reason skills up to A rank for the gremory certification. Take your time to decide.”

“I’m gonna be a war cleric,” Annette insisted.

“Okay,” Byleth said. She wrote that down in her notebook. “You two are free to go. Enjoy a few extra minutes before your next seminars.”

Edelgard and Annette left the classroom as the rest of the Blue Lions slowly trickled out of the classroom. She had to admit, worrying about school did help distract her at least a little bit from everything else. For a few minutes, at least, she’d only been worried about fitting in the extra practice she’d need to raise her riding rank.

Now that she’d left the classroom, though, she was worried about Kronya’s killer, Claude, Future Claude (how ridiculous), Thales, Seteth and Flayn, Hapi’s fate, and Rhea’s plotting. There was enough weighing on her mind that it would have crushed a lesser man.

“I can’t believe we have less than fifty days left here,” Annette said. “It’s gonna go by so quickly…”

“Why should it?” Edelgard asked. “The past two weeks have felt as though they lasted forever.”

“Good point. In that case, I hope it never ends.”

Felix was waiting for them outside. “I need a word with you,” he said to Edelgard. His amber eyes were hard, cold as his demeanor and sharp as his tongue. His attitude was even frostier than it had been before he’d learned what had happened to his ‘brother.’ Edelgard wondered if she’d been so cold in her past. She’d gradually felt her icy heart melt to flesh, but Felix’s had only gotten harder.

“What is it?” she asked.

Felix looked to Annette. “Alone,” he said.

“Is it really that private?” Edelgard asked him. “If it’s something embarrassing—”

“I need to raise my rank in reason by two to pass the mortal savant exam,” he said with a put-upon sigh and a roll of his eyes. “Your dancing lessons improved my swordplay. So maybe you can teach black magic, too.”

Annette looked like she was about to explode.

“I’m a bit… preoccupied, I’m afraid,” Edelgard said to Felix. “I don’t think I have much time to spare. But Annette seems quite happy to give you lessons. I don’t suppose you could teach her grappling in exchange?”

“I can tutor you, Felix!” Annette blurted out, shaking her fists.

He sized her up. There wasn’t much of her to size up. “Fine,” he said.

She was speechless for a while.

“If you’re going to stare at me with your mouth gaping like that,” he said to her, “I’ll change my mind.”

“Uh… G-Great!” she stammered, finally finding her voice. “H-hey, why don’t we meet for lunch today to discuss the curriculum?”

“The training hall after our afternoon battalion drills,” he said, and without another word he did an about-face and walked away.

“Okay, see you then!” she called out after him as he turned a corner and cut through the courtyard on his way to the training hall. One of the consequences of the curfew in effect was that everyone who usually spent their time in the training hall or library well after sunset was forced to cram all that extra time into what little remained in the nine or ten hours of daylight they had between dawn and dusk. Or perhaps Felix simply needed to put some distance between himself and Annette’s bubbly personality.

Edelgard consulted her schedule for the day. She had about half an hour until the morning’s drills, which she could have used to visit Flayn, but the time she would have spent working out after dinner today would have to be shifted to that blank spot due to the curfew.

“What do you have next?” Annette asked her. “I’ve had to do a lot of creative rearranging to get everything to fit. Honestly, I don’t know how I’m gonna pull this all off unless I can figure out a way to be in two places at once! Oh, hi, Hubert!”

Edelgard turned her head and spotted Hubert approaching from her blind spot.

“Lady Edelgard,” he said, bowing. “Some of your siblings are in the main hall.”

* * *

In the main hall, Edelgard was met with the sight of four of her siblings—Joachim, Heidemarie, Gerlinde, and Justine. They were all wearing thick woolen traveling coats and all had their retainers at their sides with their bags packed. Joachim called out to her, waving from across the hall as Edelgard approached.

“You’re leaving?” she asked him.

“Sorry, but we have no choice,” he said. “With things as they are, we can’t stay. Since the four of us flew here, all the snow won’t be an obstacle. We need to take off before another storm rolls in… or before the Hurricane King decides to fucking kill one of us.”

“Language, Joachim,” Justine chided him.

“Thirty-seven times. He stabbed Cardinal Aelfric thirty-seven fucking times. In a _row._ Pardon me for being a little profane. I’d have left here yesterday morning if I could’ve.”

 _Aelfric._ Edelgard remembered where she had heard that name. He had been the one to inform Rhea about Byleth’s ascension while she had been hiding away in the Holy Tomb. Had Dimitri really gone out in the middle of a blizzard in his Hurricane King outfit and mutilated his body in a fit of pique? It seemed excessive, even for him.

“I don’t suppose you’ve learned how to ride a pegasus, have you, El?” Heidemarie asked, darting in to wrap her up in a warm, firm embrace. “If you have, I’d suggest you and Hubert leave the monastery with us. You can complete your studies and graduate next year. I’m sure Seteth would allow it.”

“I’m afraid not; Hubert is afraid of heights,” Edelgard said, “and gets terrible vertigo.”

Hubert looked down at the floor sheepishly. “I am working on that.”

“Shame,” Justine said. “Hedy and Pasky are stuck here until Uncle Volkhard’s ready to leave. Try not to be a bad influence on them.” She and Edelgard had hardly said a word to each other since Edelgard had broken her arm, and her frosty tone made it clear that she wasn’t over that.

“It’s a shame you couldn’t get me in with Archbishop Rhea,” Gerlinde said. “But perhaps some other time. Stay safe, El.”

“Yeah, stay safe,” Joachim said, reaching out and tapping roughly against her eyepatch. “Don’t go losing this for real, okay? You’re too pretty to be missing an eye.”

Edelgard was at a loss. She wasn’t sure how to respond. Her siblings, nearly half of her siblings, were _leaving_ her. Would she ever see them again? There was a chance that by the time she had another opportunity, she’d have already returned to her world and returned this world’s Edelgard to her proper time and place. Or, with the unrest in the Empire, perhaps an uprising would claim their lives.

She wanted to stare at them, to fix them into her memory, to brand their faces—their worried, but smiling faces—into her mind’s eye so that they would never leave her again. She didn’t want to forget Gerlinde’s flax-gold hair or Justine’s severe, knife-like face. She didn’t want to risk losing the warmth of Heidemarie’s embrace or the charming grin that crossed Joachim’s chiseled face again. But their images wavered before her, like reflections disrupted by ripples on the surface of a pond, as tears welled up in her eyes.

“El,” Joachim said, taking her by the shoulder. “It’s just goodbye. We’ll be back for graduation. Just hang tight for a few more weeks.”

She flung one arm around him and wrapped the other around Heidemarie, drawing them both close to her. Her tears fell like rain, dampening her eyepatch and rolling down her cheek, the salt stinging her lips. She felt like a child; she cried like a child.

“Oh, El, darling, it’s okay,” Gerlinde said, circling around her and stroking her hair. “We’ll be back before you know it.”

“What if I never see you again?” she blurted out.

Heidemarie’s hand moved in small, soft circles over her back. “Don’t you worry about that. Everything is going to work out, dear. You must have faith.”

“If you haven’t gotten killed yet, you most certainly aren’t going to within the next two months,” Justine said.

“Justine, hug your baby sister,” Joachim said.

“You can’t tell me what to do.”

“Justine, hug your little sister,” Gerlinde said.

“Fine. Asshole.”

 _“Language,_ Justine.”

Edelgard felt Justine give her a very halfhearted pat on the back. She held Joachim and Heidemarie closer. “Don’t leave me again,” she whispered. “I’m not ready.”

“There, there.” Gerlinde stroked her hair. “It’s all going to be alright. You’ve gotten along without us well enough already. Be strong for Hedy and Pasc, okay?”

Unfortunately, there was little any of her older siblings could say to her that would be more upsetting than _be strong for Hedy and Pasc,_ and Edelgard felt every last pillar of strength within her crumble to dust. She would have fallen to her knees if Heidemarie wasn’t hugging her so tightly.

“Maybe… we should stay for another day?” Heidemarie suggested.

“Fuck that. I don’t want the Hurricane King to kill me,” Joachim said.

Edelgard let go of them. “No. Go,” she said, sniffling as she tried to compose herself. “It’s fine, I just… I… I missed you all. And I haven’t spent enough time with you. After Ashe died, and now with Glenn’s passing, I’ve realized that every goodbye might be your last goodbye. I love you all… and wish you a safe journey home.”

Gerlinde gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Don’t be so dramatic, darling. We love you, too.”

The four elder Hresvelg siblings left Garreg Mach that morning. From the stables, with Hedwig and Pascal in her arms and tears in her eyes, Edelgard watched the girls’ pegasi and Joachim’s wyvern leap into the air with a beat of their mighty wings and rise above the monastery walls. She waved goodbye to them as they dwindled into the azure sky. When they had disappeared, Edelgard felt as though her heart had crumbled away into dust and left nothing but a void behind.

* * *

The sun began to set far too soon after far too busy a day, and with dusk and the ensuing curfew falling upon them, Edelgard and Hubert watched Claude fiddle with Solon’s encryption machine with his notebook turned to an empty page and Dedue’s latest message beside it.

“You see,” Claude said as Hubert’s glare bored into the back of his head, “there are eight rotors here, but each cipher only uses three of them. So for this message, we’d set rotors one, four, and two in that order.” He began to carefully and slowly turn the rotors, his fingertips slotting into the shallow grooves in the metal. The letters of the alphabet scrolled beneath his touch. “The first set of numbers defines the starting position, and then the second determines the final position. Oh—and one last thing.” His hand slipped off the rotors to the cables and plugs at the bottom of the machine. “The letter pairs in the code refer to these little things here. You join each of the letter pairs together with these plugs. So, let’s see here… EJ, OY, AQ…”

“You figured all of this out through trial and error?” Edelgard asked. The visible mechanisms themselves seemed incredibly unintuitive to her, let alone whatever invisible machinery, more complex and more delicate than anything even the most specialized clockmaker could create, lurked inside the wood panels of its container. “Or did ‘Future Claude’ give you a hint?”

“Maybe he did. Maybe I’m just a genius,” Claude said. “Okay. We’ve got our settings. Now here’s where the magic happens.” He depressed one of the steel pedals with the letters of the alphabet on them and one of the glass beads, labeled with a different letter, glowed amber. It was a long and painstaking process. Slowly but surely, B became T, L became H, N became E, R became O, Q became N, V became E…

“Excuse me,” Hubert said. “How can both N and V stand for E? A substitution cipher cannot have multiple letters standing for the same letter.”

 _“A_ substitution cipher can’t,” Claude replied. “I think that the machinery in here rotates through multiple ciphers. That’s why these messages are impossible to decrypt without the right code.” He kept taking notes, painstakingly translating the strip of paper and writing down the results one letter at a time.

Edelgard watched the message take shape. _The ones who…_

“I wonder why their alphabet begins with Q,” Hubert mused, eyeing the two alphabets as Claude’s fingers slowly glided over them.

“Maybe the answer is in this message,” Claude answered. He finished the translation. “There we go.”

_The ones who returned yesterday are not who they seem._

Hubert furrowed his brow. “‘The ones who returned…’ This would have been referring to Saturday. For Constance, an alumnus of the academy, we already suspected she was an impostor, i.e. not who she seemed. Lady Edelgard, why would Dedue send you a message telling you what you already knew?”

“He’s talking about multiple people,” Edelgard said. A chill ran up her spine. “Seteth and Flayn…”

“…Are not who they seem,” Claude finished. He squinted suspiciously at the message.

“That cannot be right,” Hubert snapped, taking a step backward as though recoiling from the message in fear. “He—He cannot be saying that _all three_ of them are impostors! Lady Rhea would have rooted out a false Seteth and Flayn immediately.”

Edelgard had to admit that the idea those two could have been replaced was far-fetched, to say the least. Unlike Tomas, who had kept his head down and avoided detection by being little more than the unassuming head librarian for years, Seteth and Flayn were close to Rhea, and it would be extremely difficult for agents of Those Who Slither in the Dark masquerading as them to avoid giving themselves away to her. “You’re right, Hubert. If they weren’t the genuine article, they wouldn’t have survived to yesterday morning.”

“Maybe he means something else by ‘not what they seem,’” Claude said.

“I suppose this is where I tell you,” Edelgard said, “that Archbishop Rhea, Seteth, and Flayn are not exactly what you would call ‘human.’”

“This is… a strange heresy from you, Lady Edelgard,” Hubert said. It seemed he was trying to keep a straight face.

“You’re familiar with the legend of the Immaculate One, correct?” she asked him. “The great white beast of legend that defended our empire in the War of Heroes? It and Lady Rhea are one and the same.” She decided that perhaps, given how pale Hubert’s face had become, that it was not yet time to inform him that Rhea and the Immaculate One were also Saint Seiros herself, the cornerstone of the church. “Seteth and Flayn are of the same species, hiding in plain sight in human guises. That is perhaps what Dedue wishes to warn us about.”

Hubert was speechless for a while. His jaw hung slack. “But… But that would mean,” he said, “that Lady Rhea is at least a thousand years old!”

“Maybe more,” Claude said.

“I saw it for myself with my very own eyes in my future, Hubert,” Edelgard said. “I have no reason to believe it isn’t true here as well.”

Hubert took a deep breath. “Lady Edelgard, you are a time traveler from another world’s future. Claude, you are apparently taking advice from your future self. Dedue is a secret spymaster for an underground society. Cornelia, Tomas, Constance, and Lord Fraldarius and his eldest son are demons wearing human masks. And now you tell me that Archbishop Rhea, Seteth, and Flayn are holy beasts in human form? Is _anybody_ in this monastery who they appear to be?”

“Perhaps not,” Edelgard said.

“Very reassuring, Lady Edelgard. Are Seteth and Flayn…” His brow furrowed worriedly. “… Dangerous?”

Claude shrugged. “They’re opposed to the No-Eyes, at the very least, which is good for us. And Seteth doesn’t seem to approve of whatever Rhea wants to get her hands on Teach for. That could make him a… potential friend?”

“Perhaps,” Edelgard said. “But we’ll have to be wary of him. At the very least, he’s a strict enough administrator that he might get in the way of our plans.”

Hubert rested his forehead in his hands. “So, Dedue’s message told us nothing we already knew. Thank you, Claude. You have been _very_ helpful,” he muttered, his raspy whisper of a voice dripping with sarcasm.

Edelgard took Claude’s notebook and, before he could protest, flipped through its pages and started looking through its contents. “Since Hubert and I came here for information, we’ll get it one way or the other. I hope you understand, Claude.” Past his table the thirty-one different decryption machine settings, he had transcriptions of both the encoded and decoded messages he had intercepted so far:

> _two temporal incursions detected_
> 
> _research into random temporal incursions and dirac tidal surges inconclusive_
> 
> _incursions may have resulted in transfers of consciousness between fodlan alpha and fodlan beta_
> 
> _breach of research facility epsilon in fodlan beta likely related but more observations must be made before taking action_
> 
> _severe dirac tidal surge has damaged tachyon detection array immediate repairs necessary_
> 
> _new research suggests dirac tidal surges possibly related to causality violations fell star may be responsible_
> 
> _research shows trans-timeline transference of matter completely impossible but cis-timeline transference yielding positive results_
> 
> _further refinement of teleportation system will allow recovery of materiel from antediluvian epoch_

Claude snatched the book out of Edelgard’s hands and snapped it shut. “Ah-ah-ah.” He wagged his finger at her. “You didn’t say the magic word.”

“My patience with you is wearing thin enough as it is,” she retorted. “Give me the book or House Gloucester will find all of its dreams have come true. Trust me, Hubert knows how to make it look like an accident.”

“At least one of those words is magic enough,” he said, handing the book back to her. Edelgard read on. She recognized a few of the messages from what she’d uncovered in Solon’s study months ago, but everything past those was new—no doubt intercepted at the rookery and snatched off the legs of the occasional messenger pigeon.

> _radiation leaks at provincial research facility xi causing suspicious sicknesses bound to puzzle local physicians and will endanger operation antediluvia if immaculate one finds out_
> 
> _additional lead and boron carbide shielding needed to prevent future exposures requesting death knight and cornelias pet as security detail_
> 
> _lorentzian bridge generation attempt nearly successful but caused minor resonance cascade intel suggests fell star negatively affected_
> 
> _future resonance cascades may be intentionally used to incapacitate fell star if damage minor_
> 
> _upcoming test run aims to transmit saturnalia to fodlan alpha imperial year 735 to engineer bootstrap paradox_
> 
> _to ensure all goes as planned fell star must be terminated_
> 
> _team in position extraction date set for twenty seven ethereal moon_
> 
> _full scale lorentzian bridge generation experiments to be continued at research facility tau upon completion of facility all church activity is to be diverted from location_
> 
> _extraction operation underway at rhodos coast targets alpha and beta in pursuit_
> 
> _extraction operation update targets alpha and beta acquired and neutralized_
> 
> _compromised asset solon unit two terminate on sight_
> 
> _as of today full scale progress on operation antediluvia has recommenced_
> 
> _compromised asset hapi von rusalka terminate on sight_
> 
> _extraction operation update target alpha lost search attempts will continue_
> 
> _compromised asset kronya unit six one two terminate on sight_

There were more messages, too. All terse and laconic; speaking in clipped fragments of sentences about sabotage operations, supply stockpiles, troop movements and positions; naming cities, towns, castles, garrisons, and fortresses scattered across Fódlan, in Leicester, in Faerghus—and most worryingly, across the Adrestian Empire.

“These are messages that Dedue was meant to receive,” Edelgard said. Her eye hurt. “Updates on orders he’s given to people all across the Empire and Alliance. Sabotaging local barracks, diverting food and supplies… it’s as though he were waging asymmetric warfare on us.”

“But we are not at war,” Hubert said.

“We will be,” Claude said. “Obviously, he’s been setting up guerrilla cells across Fódlan for months now. And if every cell has a machine like this one, then they can all communicate without worrying about their messages being intercepted and decoded. It’s a perfect strategy.”

Edelgard felt insulted. “Did ‘Future Claude’ tell you not to inform me of this?” she huffed. “It’s possible Dedue might even be responsible for inciting or exacerbating the divisions between my brothers. He’s systematically dismantling my empire ahead of the No-Eyes’ planned war.”

 _“Your_ empire?” he asked with a mocking little grin.

“Forgive me for being a little possessive,” she retorted. “It’s a force of habit.”

“Claude,” Hubert seethed, “the more we learn of what you have kept hidden from us, the more damning your silence becomes.” He clenched his fists. Edelgard could see ice crystals creeping across his white satin gloves. “How long have you been keeping this news a secret?”

“Most of these messages I didn’t translate until last night, or even this morning,” Claude said. “I’d have told you sooner, but we’ve all been pretty busy.”

There was a loud, sharp knock at the door. _“Claude!”_ Lorenz called out, his voice muffled behind the door. He sounded upset at Claude, but then again, that was highly unusual. _“I do hope you are in your bedroom right now to set a good example for your fellow students, but I must have a word with you!”_

Claude rolled his eyes. “Of course you do, Lorenz. Of course you do.” He stood up, took the notebook back and hid it away. Then he closed the lid of the machine, set it under his bed, and strolled leisurely across the room to the door. “Coming, coming! Hold onto your corsage.”

Lorenz barely waited until the door was open to speak. “In case you have not yet noticed, Claude, it is nearly sunset. As house leader, you have an obligation to see to it that everybody is in their proper locations and their windows and doors properly locked. Or are you going to let Ferdinand and Prince Dimitri do all of the work themselves?”

“Well, you seem to have it under control, buddy,” Claude said, patting him on the shoulder, “so why don’t you handle it for me?”

Lorenz’s lip curled in disgust. “Foisting your responsibilities off on me? I see Miss Hilda Valentine Goneril has rubbed off a bit too much on you. You are acting like a disgrace to your station.”

“Fine, fine, I’ll do it,” Claude groaned. “You win, Lorenz. Now go to your room and lock yourself inside like a good boy.”

“I shall,” Lorenz said, rolling his eyes, “but I do not appreciate your tone.” He looked over Claude’s shoulder. “Ah. Lady Edelgard, Hubert. Ferdinand has been looking for you. Please return to your bedrooms.”

Claude sighed. “Hooray, curfew, fun,” he muttered.

Hubert led Edelgard out of the bedroom. “This is not over, Claude. We will be watching you.”

Hubert’s quarters and Edelgard’s were not far from Claude’s, and as Edelgard had expected, Ferdinand was standing in front of her bedroom door with his arms crossed and a disappointed frown on his face.

* * *

Curfew was most definitely _not_ fun. But Edelgard had lecture notes to study and books to read, and she supposed that going to bed early would likely do her quite a bit of good. She wasn’t quite sure she remembered how it felt to not be tired. She was already in her pajamas by the time the bell tower rang seven o’clock. The only question was how easily she would sleep after what she’d learned from Claude. She supposed she could at least _try._

Just before she could snuff out the candle on her nightstand, someone knocked on her door. Her mind raced. Who would be breaking curfew? Constance, perhaps? That was the logical assumption—and now, when everyone was expected to be in their beds, was perhaps the perfect opportunity for an agent of Those Who Slither to corner her alone and have her replaced. But Constance hadn’t been observing her for a week—she’d barely been observing her for two days. That wasn’t enough time to create a convincing disguise…

Edelgard crept to the door, grabbing a letter opener off her desk. “Who’s there?”

 _“It’s me, Hilda,”_ Hilda whispered from the other side of the door. _“Let me in!”_

“Go back to bed, Hilda.”

_“It’s urgent!”_

“It’s curfew.”

_“Oh, look who’s suddenly a stickler for the rules when it’s convenient. Let me in. It’s urgent, I’m serious. Please. There’s a knight coming up the stairs and if he catches me in the hall, Seteth will—”_

With a groan reciprocated by the door’s squeaky hinges, Edelgard let Hilda in. “So, what is it?”

Hilda flopped onto her bed facedown. “I’m bored,” she said, her voice muffled by Edelgard’s pillow.

“Get out,” Edelgard said.

“I’m _bored!_ Besides, I can’t leave your room until the knight finishes checking the hall.” She rolled over onto her back. “Let’s hang out.”

“Why?”

“Because your room is the only one I could make it to without getting caught.” Hilda started idly twirling a lock of her pink hair around her fingers. “Why don’t I show you some better hairstyles you can take back to our world instead of wearing those grandma buns?”

“I do _not_ have grandma buns.”

“The other Edelgard has probably tried all sorts of better hairdos on you. You’ll come back to our world and everyone’s going to say, ‘Your Majesty, you looked so much more beautiful and stylish in pigtails than with those silly buns.’”

“I hardly think anyone cares how I wear my hair.”

“Also, you need to do more with your bangs. Do you have any idea how huge your forehead is? You could build an extension to your palace on it.”

Edelgard self-consciously raised a hand to her forehead. “It is _not_ that big.”

“I wonder if there are rumors going around that Emperor Edelgard has a receding hairline. Come on, Edelgard. Let’s do _something.”_

“I _was_ going to go to bed _early_ for once.”

Hilda let out a long sigh. “Okay. Fine. I’m not just here to annoy you. I want to talk about Claude. But you need to let me do your hair.”

“You’re not doing my hair.”

“I want to talk about Future Claude.”

Edelgard sat down on the side of her bed. Hilda sat behind her. “Fine.” She felt Hilda’s fingers worm their way through her hair and desperately hoped that the two of them wouldn’t be possessed by their doppelgangers tonight. “Tell me.”

“It’s… It’s weird. You think it’s weird, too, right?”

“Of course it’s weird. Does he show you the notes?”

“No.”

“Do you know anything about ‘Future Claude,’ then?” Edelgard asked, realizing that Hilda was probably wasting her time.

“I know that he brought Nader over here.”

“He gave Claude the order to start sneaking Almyran warriors over Fódlan’s Throat?

“No, _literally,_ he did it himself. Nader said Claude sent for him and helped establish his cover story in town. But Claude didn’t remember doing anything like that. Then the messages started arriving. Or, at least, that was when Claude first told me about them. Ugh. It makes my head hurt.”

“It does sound like a headache.”

Hilda was silent for a while. “Why do you think Future Claude would be sabotaging us?”

“Because it’s not ‘Future Claude,’” Edelgard theorized, “but rather Thales or some No-Eyes agent playing a trick on him. But he’s Claude, so that option is unlikely. Perhaps Claude and the No-Eyes are playing a trick on _us.”_

She felt the fingers threading through her hair stop.

“But… if Claude would betray us like that…” Hilda said. “I mean—he’s _Claude._ I _know_ Claude. If we can’t trust him, then… I guess I’m not as good a judge of character as I thought I was.”

“Yes. If you’re wrong about Claude, then who knows? You might even be wrong about _me,”_ Edelgard said. “Personally, I think ‘Future Claude’ is a cover story. I think he and Claude’s ‘confidential source’ that he got the codebook from are one and the same.”

“You think he and his source are working together?”

“It’s the only explanation that makes sense. But then again, what you said about Nader makes it seem as though there’s more than one Claude running around…” Edelgard shuddered, more unnerved by that notion than she expected. It was hard enough dealing with just _one_ of him.

“I want to trust Claude,” Hilda said. “I want to believe that he’s on our side, but… that’s just becoming harder and harder. I’m starting to think we’re all just his pawns, and that’s not the Claude I know—”

She stopped in mid-sentence.

“Do you think,” Edelgard asked her, teasing out of her the thought that had struck her dumb, “that Claude might be one of the No-Eyes? That everything pinning our attention on Constance or other possible impostors has been nothing but a smokescreen?”

Hilda remained silent for a while longer, and then, suddenly, Edelgard felt her arms curl around her waist, hesitantly at first, then tightly.

“Edelgard,” Hilda confessed, her voice quiet and fraught, her breath prickling the skin on the back of Edelgard’s neck, “I’m scared…”

Edelgard felt Hilda’s head slip onto her shoulder and tears begin to dampen her nightshirt.

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that,” she assured Hilda. “I jabbed him in the neck just the other day and nothing happened.”

Hilda stopped crying and let go of Edelgard. Then she grabbed Edelgard’s pillow and swung it at her face with enough force to knock her over.

Edelgard sputtered, pulling the pillow away from her face. “What the—”

“You _jerk!”_ Hilda snarled at her.

* * *

The week seemed to both crawl and rush by. Everyone was busy, either with their studies or with cramming time with friends into whatever gaps there were in their schedules. Nobody threw themselves harder into their training, though, than Ingrid, who was giving Felix a run for his money when it came to the quiet intensity she brought with her in the training hall.

As Edelgard worked on conjuring a complex dark magic spell—perhaps, assuming she made it to the final exam, the proctor might be more impressed if she knew more than fire magic—she tried to block out the rest of the students at the training hall. Ingrid’s lance cut through the air with a frenetic and almost anxious swiftness as she sparred with Leonie, who was doing her best to keep her defenses up. In the corner, Annette was practicing grappling and brawling with Caspar and Raphael, making up in enthusiasm what she lacked in size and stature. In addition to helping her with her fists and footwork, they were also teaching her battle cries. As a result, the hall was very noisy, to say the least.

Edelgard shut the noise out of her mind, focused on the magic seal she’d studied and traced endlessly, and felt wisps of black and violet smoke swirl around her wrist and trace helical patterns around her hand. Clouds of cold moonlight flickered before her, coalescing into a roiling orb about the size of her fist before shuddering and breaking apart.

She fell to her knees, sweat dripping from her brow. She panted for breath, each puff of air making a cold white cloud appear before her as if to mock her. She’d been trying to learn this spell since she’d come back from Fhirdiad, but it continued to vex her, even with Annette’s help.

Edelgard stood up, brushed the sand off her knees, focused on her target again, and held out her arm toward the target she’d been aiming at, palm out, fingers splayed. She took a deep breath and tried to clear her mind.

Constance’s voice stabbed at her ears. “Ah, Lady Edelgard, Your Highness, my soon-to-be sister-in-law! What spell was that supposed to be?” she asked her as she slipped through her blind spot.

Edelgard cursed her eyepatch. With a surprised jolt, she whirled around to face her. “Constance. You startled me.” She wiped her brow on her sleeve. “The spell is Luna Λ. It’s dark magic, so it should be quite impressive… if I can pull it off.”

“Oh, yes!” Constance’s eyes lit up. “Dark magic… _dark_ magic! A _most_ challenging magic indeed! So few people dare to learn it.”

“I had a classmate who was a master at it, actually,” Edelgard said. Her world’s Lysithea and Hubert, and this world’s Mercedes… It seemed that dark magic came naturally to those influenced by Those Who Slither in the Dark. In her world, Edelgard wondered, she might not have so much difficulty mastering this spell—she had simply never _tried._

“Oh? Mercedes, I presume?”

“Yes.”

“And she withdrew from class before she could teach you. A pity.”

“I don’t suppose you would happen to know it?”

Constance laughed. “You would be right not to suppose! Too much dark magic can do terrible things to your skin, and I want mine to be fair, smooth, and unblemished forever! But I _am_ going to be the greatest spellcaster of all time, so perhaps I can tutor you, my dear little sister-in-law-to-be. What are you having trouble with?”

“Well… I’m doing the forms right,” she said, “but the energy I need just doesn’t seem to be flowing through me properly.”

“And what seal are you working with?”

Edelgard picked up her notebook and flipped through it. “I have the equations here—”

Constance snatched it out of her hands. Edelgard was thankful there was nothing suspicious or incriminating in there—it was just one of her many notebooks for her classes, completely innocuous. “Hmm… I see… Yes, yes, yes, yes…” She raised an eyebrow. “Ah! Here is your problem! You should be doing a cross product of these two vectors, not a dot product. The cross product always results in a scalar value, and you need a vector quantity for your seal to turn out properly. No wonder it was not working for you! You drew this seal all wrong! You cannot expect to project sufficient magical force through your body like _this.”_

“A bit harsh, don’t you think?” Edelgard asked, taken aback by Constance’s blunt—not to mention haughty—criticism. She was too used to the way Byleth would criticize. True, Byleth could be blunt, but her criticisms never reeked of someone trying to show off or belittle. “But that is helpful. Thank you, Constance.”

“We should meet at the library later today,” Constance said, handing the notebook back to her. “The calculus required for dark magic is a step above the trigonometry used to construct black magic seals, and it is clear you could use some extra tutoring. I would love to show you some of the special, unique spells I have been working on as well! I have invented an incredible one that makes ordinary tea shimmer with all the colors of the rainbow! Oh, and, in addition to that…”

Edelgard let Constance ramble on for a bit. “I would love to, Constance, my soon-to-be sister-in-law,” she said, “but I’m afraid I’m quite busy today. Perhaps some other time.”

The elation vanished from Constance’s face. “Oh. I see. Perhaps some other time. Yes. I see how it is. I have yet to prove myself to you. Well, I shall.”

“I don’t mean that at all,” Edelgard said. “What I mean is that I am _very_ busy, because I have a _lot_ of studying to do and _very_ little time to do it, so my schedule is full.”

“No, no, I understand completely. You doubt the magnificence of my sorcery, as I come from a house that has sadly grown poor and lost its grand social standing in the aftermath of the war. You wish for me to prove my prodigious skills! It is simply not enough for you to _know_ that I was the only student in a decade to gain an S rank in black magic at this academy, _no,_ because _seeing_ is believing!”

“You are putting quite a lot of words in my mouth, Constance.”

“That is because I shall make you _eat_ them, dear sister-to-be!” Constance crowed. “You shall see that I am the best tutor you could possibly have!” She grabbed Edelgard by the wrists. “I will show you a better form that will help you draw more magic from your body! Work with me! Put your right foot like this! No, like _that!_ No, your _other_ right! Now, arc your left arm—yes, good, _very_ good—extend your right arm, make a claw with your hand—good, good—Now, crossing your non-dominant hand over your dominant hand—”

“I’m ambidextrous—”

“—cast a spell! It sounds counter-intuitive, I know, but I _swear_ by the results!”

Edelgard was relieved when Constance’s hands left her body. She felt unclean. Taking a deep breath and trying to steady her racing pulse, she did as Constance had instructed and cast a fire spell. The burst of flame that spat from her left palm was indeed stronger, came more easily to her, and zipped across the training hall like an arrow, scorching the target she’d aimed for.

“Thank you, Constance,” she said, amazed at her performance.

“Now do you still doubt my greatness?” Constance asked with a haughty laugh. “My methods shall revolutionize spellcasting in Fódlan! Surely now you will want to be my apprentice.”

“I would love to,” Edelgard said, “but like I said, I am swamped with work. Perhaps we can meet up tomorrow.”

“I would _love_ that,” Constance said, grinning a particularly sinister grin. “We must spend more time together; I feel as though I hardly know you, and I very well _should_ know you inside and out, if we are to be family!”

“That’s a shame.”

Across the training hall, Annette let out another battle cry with Raphael and Caspar’s encouragement, prompting Constance to throw a bemused glance her way. “Ah! Hello there, Annette! Dear, what are you _doing?_ You sound like a Brigidan berserker! Are you in terrible anguish? Do you need a healing spell? I am on my way, my friend!” she cried out, rushing over to her and mercifully freeing Edelgard from her clutches.

Edelgard went back to spellcasting, trying out the new conjuring stance Constance had taught her. Annette was doing her best to match Raphael’s and Caspar’s battle-roars and Leonie had Ingrid on the ropes. She ignored them as best she could and focused her attention on the black and violet smoke swirling around her arm—her left arm this time. Motes of light, as cold and bright as sunlit snowdrifts, sparkled and condensed into a more solid silvery orb for a few seconds. The orb shrank, grew denser and cloudier, and shot forward like an arrow. It vanished against the target in a shower of white sparks. There was a tiny splotch of a black scorch mark on the target’s surface, but nothing more.

Ah, progress. Exhausted, Edelgard went to the nearest bench and took a seat, taking a moment to catch her breath.

Across the hall, Ingrid fell flat on her back, the lance knocked from her hand.

“Gotcha!” Leonie crowed. She offered her hand to her sparring partner. “Good match. Need a break?”

“No,” Ingrid said, taking her hand and pulling herself up. She was covered in cold sweat and her golden hair was fighting its way out of the braids that kept it tied back and out of her face. “Another round. I’m fine.”

“If you say so.”

The door to the training hall swung open and Seteth hobbled through, his cane loudly tapping on the stone tile until it reached the sand. He looked much more like his old self. Most of the bandages that he’d worn a few days prior were gone now, leaving only the gauze mitten that hid the missing fingers on his right hand. His hair was straight and clean; his beard, though much longer and thicker than the chinstrap he had once sported, was neatly trimmed; a small black patch covered his right eye.

Everyone fell silent in his presence.

Seteth looked around the hall. “Do not mind me,” he called out to the students. “Be as you were.”

The training resumed. Ingrid and Leonie took their stances—

“Wait,” he said, hobbling over to Ingrid. “Ingrid, if I may offer some suggestions to improve your stance?”

“Um… certainly, Seteth, sir,” Ingrid said. “And if I may say so, it’s good to have you back.”

The smile on Seteth’s face was something Edelgard had never seen before. “Though the circumstances could have been better, it is good to be back. Thank you. Now, if you keep your feet spread just a bit farther apart,” he said, using his cane to nudge her into place, “loosen your shoulders just a little—no, no, that is too much—and twist your elbow just a bit this way, you will have an easier time.” He took a few steps back. “See if that helps.”

Edelgard watched Ingrid and Leonie spar. This time, despite how hard Ingrid had been pushing herself earlier and how worn out she was, her movements were noticeably looser and more fluid.

Seteth limped to the bench and sat down beside her. “Good morning to you, Lady Edelgard,” he said.

“Good morning to you as well, Seteth. I see Professor Manuela convinced you to keep the beard.”

“I am simply trying it out.” He took his eye off the action for a second to appraise her. “How is it that you came to… lose your eye?”

“Oh, it isn’t lost,” she said. “Something’s been irritating it fiercely, though; the patch is just to keep me from rubbing it.”

“Ah. I see. Thank goodness. Losing one’s eye is a terrible thing. Sometimes I can still feel it stinging.” He gingerly rubbed his mutilated hand. “It is the same with these fingers. You would do well, Lady Edelgard, to keep your body as intact as possible.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

There seemed to be a wistful look on his face as he watched the students sparring, particularly Ingrid. “This Sunday there will be a funeral service for Glenn Fraldarius following the service for Cardinal Aelfric. You have my condolences—I hear he is the second student in your class to have passed away.”

“Thank you. It’s been a very hard few months.”

“I know. I have read the reports regarding the Remire calamity and the operation in the Sealed Forest. It is hard to believe that such evil could come so close to the monastery. And now, with the Hurricane King running amok within these walls yet again… perhaps Flayn and I should have hid elsewhere.” He frowned. “However, we cannot leave now. We shall have to hope that the monastery can be made safe once again.”

Ingrid and Leonie continued their sparring match. The hollow snaps and clacks of their wooden training lances parrying each other’s blows echoed through the hall. For a while, the two of them seemed to be evenly matched until Ingrid struck at Leonie’s ankle and sent her tumbling to the ground. Ingrid immediately apologized, but Leonie didn’t seem upset at all. She was laughing.

Edelgard smiled. She’d never seen Ingrid use a dirty trick like that before. It seemed she was rubbing off on her.

Seteth stood up. “Take care, Lady Edelgard. Now, if you will excuse me…” He approached Ingrid again and drew her away to the corner of the room.

Edelgard left the training hall, watching Seteth and Ingrid out of the corner of her eye. The two of them conversed in low voices. Ingrid seemed to grow upset, and Seteth put a comforting hand on her shoulder.

A chill ran up her spine, as though she were being watched. She looked over to where Annette and Constance were, but Constance was absorbed in conversation with her back to Edelgard, chatting away without a care in the world.

* * *

On Thursday morning, Edelgard practiced her riding. The sky was bright and clear again, dazzling the snow that crunched under her horse’s hooves. Behind her, Ferdinand’s words of encouragement as he spurred a sleep-deprived Linhardt echoed through the brisk, crisp air. Hubert flanked her on his favorite sable mare. Ahead, Leonie rode onward, competing fiercely with Lorenz, and Marianne’s mount weaved through the field as though dancing.

Edelgard found herself looking to the sky often. The leathery wings of wyverns and the feathery wings of pegasi formed Vs in the air, circling the cathedral’s spires and the bell tower as they kept lookout. She could see a daub of deep blue atop one of the wyverns and brilliant yellow upon another—Dimitri and Claude. Ingrid was likely one of the pegasus riders, and one of the other wyverns might have been Petra’s.

The sky was the only place in the monastery where Dimitri could go and Dedue would not follow; otherwise, Dedue clung to him like a shadow whenever possible, seeing to it that His Majesty was never alone. Up there in the sky, Claude had a golden opportunity to tell him _everything._ But he wouldn’t. It wasn’t part of his plan, evidently. Dedue wanted the truth to be hidden from Dimitri for the meantime, and apparently, Claude was in agreement.

Edelgard missed the Black Eagles. There was no group of people she trusted more, or trusted unconditionally. Here, who did she have? Byleth, Jeralt, and Hubert. _Perhaps_ Hilda. Everyone else was suspect.

And now, with her older siblings gone, she felt even more alone. With so few resources at hand, who could she trust?

The morning’s ride came to an end and the students returned to the stables, saw to their horses, put away their riding gear, and prepared for the next items on their schedules. As she left the stables, Edelgard briskly rubbed her hands together to warm them up.

“Excuse me, Edelgard,” Linhardt said to her, stifling a yawn.

“Yes, Linhardt?” she asked. “It’s unusual to see you doing anything physical this early.”

He blinked blearily. Dark gray bags hung under his eyes, darker than usual, and his long forest-green hair was haphazardly tied back. “You can blame Ferdinand for that. Or, more accurately, you can blame the curfew. I do all of my best work between six in the morning and noon on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and between seven in the evening and the witching hour on Mondays and alternate Thursdays, but this new schedule has even less regard for my body’s natural rhythm than he does. Anyway, I’ve been doing some research about Hapi’s Crest with Professor Hanneman, and I think I’ve found something.”

“Have you?” Edelgard briefly allowed her spirits to lift themselves.

Linhardt took out his notebook. “In the library last weekend, I found a reference to an apocryphal saint in a footnote to an appendix of a moldy old book about the War of Heroes that got lost behind one of the shelves. His name was Timotheos. I looked him up in another book and found a vague reference to his Crest in a chart of the Lamine bloodline. Did you know that Mercedes is a distant descendant of Lamine? And she and Hapi were both adopted by Lady Cornelia. Funny, isn’t it?”

“Is this all relevant?” Edelgard asked. Linhardt did like his tangents.

“I’m just setting up the necessary background, Your Highness. At first, I thought perhaps this Saint Timotheos had married into the Lamine family—did you know that House Ochs and House Edmund are also distant offshoots of that family, along with the former House Martritz?—but it seems more accurate to say his bloodline simply vanished. He must have left Fódlan and settled in an extremely remote place.” Linhardt flipped through his notebook. “The book I found this in isn’t in the library anymore. I think Seteth found it and disposed of it. But I copied down the relevant passage.”

“I’m listening.”

He cleared his throat. “‘Saint Timotheos could converse fluently with birds and land-borne beasts, and he considered these creatures his friends. He sometimes rode over hills atop an obliging deer or called wolves to encircle him in battle. His sigh, inflected with the power of the night-bringer’s star, was immensely sonorous.’ That sounds like Hapi, does it not?”

Edelgard had to admit that she was quite impressed with Linhardt’s research. “That does sound like her.”

“It seems like Cornelia’s experiments made the Crest of Timotheos in her blood much more powerful and much more difficult to control,” Linhardt said. “However, it does not quite explain why Cornelia was able to transform her into a beast. It’s possible, sadly, that un-corrupting Hapi’s Crest may only fix one of her problems, and not the most pressing and immediate one.”

“Ah. I see.” Edelgard’s spirits sank. “Well, every small piece of information brings us closer to the truth. Thank you, Linhardt.”

“No problem, Your Highness.” Linhardt stifled another yawn. “Now, if you will excuse me, my body is supposed to be asleep right now,” he said, and he trudged toward the dormitories.

Ferdinand rushed after him. _“Linhardt, wait! I have more lance work to teach you! Come back!”_

As low as Edelgard’s spirits were, that, at least, made her smile.

Her good mood was short-lived.

“Lady Edelgard.” Dedue appeared from out of her blind spot, towering over her. His form blotted out the sun, reducing him to an ominous silhouette looming like a monolith overhead. “You and I shall have lunch today.”

“I’m thankful for the invitation,” she said, “but I’m not sure I have the time—”

“In the greenhouse,” he said. His cold scowl told her he was not asking.

* * *

And so, later that day, Edelgard met Dedue in the greenhouse, taking to the back of the building where Ashe’s little spice garden was kept. He held two ceramic bowls of soup in his hands and offered one to her. She took it and sat down beside him. The steam from the soup cleared her sinuses in an instant.

“This is good for colds,” he told her. “I have been attentive to your heat tolerance. It will be strong, but not torturous.”

She still hesitated. If he wanted to poison her here, he had the perfect opportunity. She doubted he would try to kill her here; however, if he tried anything, she was fortunate that plants would provide ample food for an inferno.

Sensing her discomfort, Dedue took a spoonful from her bowl and ate it. “No poison, Your Highness. Not today. Gods willing, not ever.”

“Gods willing?” Still a bit skeptical, Edelgard took a slow and cautious spoonful and raised it to her mouth. It was Duscur chicken and lentil soup—rich, creamy, both savory and pleasantly sour, and above all, _hot._ Her lips tingled as though she’d just been kissed.

“Duscur had many gods,” Dedue said. “We prayed to a pantheon of them, gods and goddesses of fertility and pestilence, of war and peace, of sun and moon, fire and rivers. When we wished prosperity upon our neighbors south of the mountains, we even prayed to the Goddess Sothis.” He kept eating.

“Did you wish to talk to me about something?” Edelgard asked as she picked at her own food. It was delicious, but eating it was not something to be done quickly. The hot and acidic spices demanded patience.

“I wished to help you rid yourself of your cold. You still sound congested. Eat.”

“Thank you. You’re an amazing cook, Dedue,” she told him. As always, Dedue’s cooking left her tongue-tied. Still, she tried not to lower her guard. He was trying to soften her up for something.

“I learned from my mother. But I was meant to follow my father, the village blacksmith.” Dedue took another spoonful of his soup and thoughtfully held it in his mouth. “It has been a long time. I no longer remember my father’s teaching. It is easier for me to cook than to forge steel, so my mother’s recipes remain in my mind.”

“They are wonderful recipes,” Edelgard said. “I’m sure your mother would be proud that something of her lives on within you.”

“Every time I make them, they taste different,” he said. “One day, they will not be her recipes at all.”

When Dedue ate, he savored his food, as though studying every bite. Edelgard savored her food, too, but only because Dedue had made it as hot as she could possibly handle; each bite made her need to catch her breath.

“The people of Duscur spoke in their own tongue,” he said after a few more bites. “Our language was not unlike Albinean or Srengish, but different enough that they were not mutually intelligible. I have not spoken a word of Duscurite in over five years. I no longer recall our prayers to the gods, nor the stories our parents told our children, only crude translations into Fódlanish. Even my mother’s recipes are fading. They are the only words I clearly remember. But soon I will recite them in your tongue. Nothing of the original will remain.”

“I’m sorry,” Edelgard said.

“Do you know why I am His Majesty’s retainer?”

“I assume the Men in Black assigned you to him.”

“Yes, but that alone would not be enough. The nobles also approve of my position, begrudgingly. I stand by his side as his retainer as proof that men from Duscur can be good subjects of the King. That they can be… ‘civilized.’”

“You are an olive branch to the people who destroyed your home. Not by choice, I take it?” Edelgard asked.

“It is my choice to serve His Majesty,” Dedue deflected.

He fell silent to take a few more carefully studied spoonfuls of his soup. Edelgard took out a handkerchief and blew her nose. “Excuse me,” she said.

“Compared to other parts of Fódlan,” he eventually said, “the steel in Duscur is of low quality. It must be forged and folded hundreds of times to approach the strength of your steel swords and axes. My father showed me the art and patience that went into constructing tools and weapons as beautiful as they were useful. Like our steel, what remains of my people has been beaten and folded again and again into a new shape. A tool unrecognizable from the ore it once was.”

Edelgard set her bowl down onto her lap. “But people are not weapons or tools,” she said, wishing that the spicy food and her dripping nose didn’t make her sound so stuffy. “You can make a person into one as best you can, but there will always be a spark of their humanity within—something that yearns to be free, to shape itself according to its own whims, to be loved. No blacksmith’s forge can erase that, literal or metaphorical.” Like her family—no matter how much she forgot of them, there was always something that remained, no matter how small. Nothing could be erased forever.

Dedue slowly nodded. “Thank you. Continue eating, Your Highness. It will not do to only half-cure your cold.”

Edelgard picked up her bowl and kept eating until there was nothing left but golden broth and a few stray bits of lemongrass. Dedue watched her like a mother hawk would watch its chicks. Her head felt clear for the first time in over a week.

“I have worked hard to keep you alive,” he said. “But you make it difficult. You involve yourself in too much. If you do not close your eyes and cover your ears to what is going on, I will eventually fail to protect you. This is not a threat, but a warning. The agent designed to replace you is already here, waiting. If you cease to be a threat, I may persuade them to spare you.”

“I can’t help but get involved.”

“That is a lie you tell yourself. You can and you know it. It is easy to turn a blind eye. I would know. You have done far too much under mine.”

Edelgard felt as though he was trying to get under her skin. “Dimitri is important to me, and so is the truth. I can’t bear to watch him labor under a delusion as long as I have the power to stop it. Why don’t you want him to know the truth?”

 _The King of Delusion._ In the wartime propaganda, that was what she had called Dimitri. It was a title that had fit him like a glove. He had seemed to do nothing but seethe about her culpability in the Tragedy of Duscur, despite the inconvenient fact that she had been about twelve and convalescing from her torture at the time. Rhea had taken advantage of that delusion to turn his kingdom into her new church, its knights into her crusaders, his throne into her altar, his palace into her cathedral. She had usurped him with his willing and eager participation. He had died a wild animal raging against a fantasy of his brain’s own design, encouraged by his allies to destroy himself for their sake without even realizing it.

Edelgard liked Dimitri enough now that she didn’t want that fate to befall him again.

“What delusion,” Dedue asked, his low and deep voice growing colder, “is he laboring under? Tell me who you think caused the Tragedy of Duscur. Tell me what you intend to tell him. What do you know about it that you think he does not?”

Edelgard felt sweat on her brow from more than just the spicy peppers in Dedue’s stew. Her throat tightened; her ribs felt like fingers curling against her heart and lungs. “Rodrigue… The Men in Black… are behind it all.”

Dedue was silent. He picked at his food slowly, carefully, deliberately, finished the last few bites, and then raised the bowl to his lips to drain the leftover broth. Edelgard felt her heart try to squirm up her throat as she waited.

He set the bowl down. “No,” he said with gut-wrenching finality.

“Then who?”

“The steel in Duscur is of low quality, but it is rich in other minerals. Copper, gems, alum, gold. The head of House Kleiman wished to own the land and become wealthy. Our trade with the people of Faerghus was not enough, so he and a cabal of noblemen engineered the attack on King Lambert and his family, blaming the people of Duscur as a scapegoat. Other noble houses eagerly conspired with him so they could remove the king from power and stop his promised reforms from being put into place. Duscur was purged and became the estate of Viscount Kleiman. The Church feigned neutrality, refusing to either praise or condemn the pogroms, but on every level it covertly encouraged them, using the incident as cover for its experiments. The nobility and the clergy erased my people, my gods, my language from the world. All for a few handfuls of metal and stone.”

Of course, it all came back to the nobles and the church, the twin poisons that had spread through Fódlan unabated for one thousand years. Edelgard could empathize with the icy notes of cold anger that seeped into Dedue’s carefully managed monotone. The faint note of disdain for his oppressors she heard in his voice, the nostalgia for all that had been taken from his people and all that had been ripped from his own memories, was all too familiar to her. But there was one glaring lie in his story that she couldn’t overlook.

“That isn’t the whole truth,” she said.

“It is.” Dedue stood up. “We are finished. The one laboring under a delusion is you.”

“You can’t lie to me, Dedue,” Edelgard retorted. She rose to her feet, though he still towered over her. “Kronya told me everything.”

“And for that, she was silenced. As was Hapi. As _you_ will be, in a few days.”

“You _know_ that it was your own ‘Men in Black’—”

“The Men in Black are as dangerous allies as they are enemies. If you refuse to turn back, it will put more than just your own life in danger,” he said, turning his back to her and walking away. “Recant what you believe. Cease your investigations. Live a simple and easy life. Then, perhaps, you will be spared. This is the most I can do for you now. If you truly care about His Majesty—or your _mother—_ you will keep your silence.”

Dedue’s words struck Edelgard like a blow to the gut, freezing her for a moment long enough for him to distance himself from her. Her _mother?_ “What about my mother?” she called out after him, hurrying to catch up with his long strides. “Wait! _Dedue!”_

But the door to the greenhouse slammed shut behind him, and when she caught up to it and opened it again, he was nowhere in sight.

* * *

She didn’t see Dimitri again until breakfast the next morning, when she found him sitting at a table with Bernadetta and Marianne. Dedue, of course, was at his side, and his cold and piercing gaze latched onto Edelgard as soon as she came into his orbit.

“Bernadetta,” Dimitri was saying, “I cannot thank you enough. Ever since Saturday night, my nights have been so restless, but—” He caught sight of Edelgard and stood up. “Good morning, El! How are you feeling? Please join us,” he said, a warm smile on his cold face as he gestured to an empty spot beside him.

“Thank you, Dima,” Edelgard said, taking her seat beside him. “And a good morning to you as well.”

“You sound much better. Dedue’s cure for the common cold is quite effective, is it not?”

It had been. Edelgard hadn’t so much as sniffled once since yesterday. “It is. Oh, but I don’t mean to interrupt. What were you talking to Bernadetta about?”

“Um, I-I’m sure it’s nothing,” Bernadetta stammered. Her cheeks were already red from the cold air outside, but they became even redder.

“It is not nothing. I would have lost my mind otherwise,” Dimitri said. He reached into his satchel. “El, last week, Bernadetta made a valiant attempt to teach me crocheting. Please take a look at this.”

Edelgard watched him pull a misshapen blob of thick red yarn out of his satchel, and as he unraveled it eventually realized that it was a scarf, or at least a valiant attempt at a scarf. The holes between the stitches were wide enough that she could fit her thumb through them.

“Oh!” Bernadetta shrank into her seat as though she were trying her hardest to sink beneath the floor. “Y-You made that, Your Highness?”

“Well, with this curfew, how else can we spend our evenings?” Dimitri handed the scarf to Edelgard. “I made this one for you. I began working on it the night Archbishop Rhea came. I was so frustrated and so afraid that night, but making this helped me calm myself.”

Edelgard took the scarf from him. He seemed completely earnest to her. But was he lying, or had _this_ been the new form of stress release he’d been talking about? If so, then who had killed Cardinal Aelfric? Had someone else worn the Hurricane King’s disguise in an attempt to frame Dimitri for yet another heinous crime?

“Um… that is lovely for a first attempt, Dima,” Marianne said to Dimitri. “Or, I’m sorry, Your Highness.” Edelgard did not miss the slip of her tongue. Poor Hilda.

“Oh… well, actually,” he said sheepishly, “my first attempt was a hat. I broke three sets of crocheting needles and decided I needed to make something simpler.”

Bernadetta looked as though she’d rather be anywhere else. “Um… G-Good for you!” she said to Dimitri, though clearly she was thinking about how poorly the thing he called a scarf reflected on her as a teacher.

“Go ahead, put it on,” he said to Edelgard, who was still holding the scarf in her hands like a dead fish. “Do you like it?”

“I do,” Edelgard said, wrapping it around her neck. It was soft, warm, and snug at least, inelegant as it was. “Thank you, Dima. I’m flattered. And thank _you,_ Bernadetta, for having the patience to teach him.”

Dimitri laughed. “Yes, Bernadetta, thank you for tolerating my clumsiness. Whenever Mercedes tried to teach me to sew, I kept breaking the needles, and she eventually stopped trying. I had thought I was a hopeless case.”

“You’re welcome,” Bernadetta squeaked, still unaccustomed to receiving compliments. “Oh, and, um… Dedue?”

“Yes, Bernadetta?” Dedue asked.

“Ah! I’m sorry! I mean, um…” The poor girl caught her breath, nervously kneading the drawstrings of her hood. “Sorry. You spooked me. It’s just that… you said you knew a few sewing patterns from your home, and I thought maybe we could go through them together? Ah, f-forget it! Never mind! I know you’re busy!”

Dedue glanced at Edelgard, then back at Bernadetta. “I am indeed busy, but next week I will not be.”

Edelgard knew exactly what his glance in her direction had meant. One way or another, before next week, she would no longer be a thorn in his side, either because she had been replaced or because she had surrendered.

She had no intention of allowing the former to happen, nor did she plan on doing the latter. She would show Dimitri the truth, no matter what, even if she had to take a strategic loss here. She only needed to know how she could make him believe.

After breakfast, the five of them left the dining hall. Marianne broke away from the group to return to the Golden Deer, while the other four headed to the Blue Lions’ classroom for Byleth’s morning lecture.

She and the others were met with a peculiar sight out on the lawn in front of the classroom. Flayn, bundled up in a thick winter coat and hat, was building a snowman out on the lawn with help from Princess Hedwig von Hresvelg, while Seteth watched them like a hawk.

Dimitri stiffened and tensed at the sight of them, his jaw and fists clenching as though his fingers yearned to wrap themselves around Seteth’s neck once again. He looked as though he had just smelled something rank, if he could have.

“G-Good m-m-morning, El!” Hedwig called out. “L-Look at our s-s-snowman!”

Flayn caught sight of Edelgard and marched up to her, putting her hands on her hips and a pouty frown on her face. “You, Lady Edelgard,” she said sternly, “are _late.”_

“W-We’re late?!” Bernadetta gasped. “But I didn’t hear the bells toll…”

“You have not been visiting me,” Flayn scolded Edelgard. “I have been waiting!”

“I’m sorry, Flayn,” Edelgard said, taken aback, “but we’ve all been busy with our studies, and none of us can leave the dormitories after five o’clock right now.”

“You are fortunate tomorrow is Saturday,” Flayn said. “I want to spend the entire weekend with you and your friends! We can go ice fishing on the pond. We can go ice _skating_ on the pond! And we can go into town and visit the bakery, and make fish tarts, and—” She caught sight of the look on Dimitri’s face. “Oh, um, hello, Prince Dimitri,” she said, offering a polite curtsy. “I apologize for getting carried away. Are you well? You seem to be in pain.”

“It is nothing, Flayn, just indigestion,” he grunted, and Dedue led him past her and into the classroom.

“Nice snowman,” Dedue said to Hedwig as he passed her by. Hedwig beamed with pride.

It _was_ a nice snowman. Picturesque, in fact, with little bits of coal for the eyes, mouth, and nose and spindly sticks for the arms.

“It looks very good, Hedy,” Edelgard said, patting Hedwig on the shoulder—it was still hard for her to wrap her mind around how _tall_ she was for her age; she’d likely be as tall as Hubert in a few years. “You and Flayn made this?”

“We did indeed!” Flayn said, taking Hedwig’s hand. “We are friends now.”

“Oh? Seteth has allowed it?” Edelgard looked over at Seteth, who had yet to take his eye off them. She wondered how long he had gone without blinking, or how much longer he could go.

In the distance, the bells tolled eight o’clock, and a few stragglers milling around on the lawn rushed to their respective classrooms.

“I’m afraid I can’t spend any more time outside right now,” she said. “I will see you both later today. Try to stay out of trouble!”

“C-Can I s-s-sit in on your class?” Hedwig asked.

“If Professor Byleth allows it.”

“Th-Thank you! I will not b-be a d-d-distraction, I—I p-promise!”

“Come with me, then, Flayn,” Seteth said, striding onto the lawn. “I will not have you out here alone.”

“Oh, can’t I sit in on the Professor’s class as well?” Flayn pleaded.

He pondered her request for a moment. “I suppose. Edelgard, watch over Flayn very carefully and see to it she stays out of trouble.”

“Of course, sir,” Edelgard said, and she led Flayn and Hedwig into the classroom. “Professor,” she said, “I hope you won’t mind if I bring a few guests—”

Her voice caught in her throat.

Like a nightmare made flesh, Thales was standing at the head of the class where Byleth should have stood, wearing his disguise as Rodrigue Fraldarius.

“L-Lord Fraldarius,” she said, keeping her voice from cracking. “My apologies, sir. You startled me. Where is Professor Byleth?”

Thales, of course, knew exactly how frightened she was behind the polite facade she kept up. “Oh, don’t worry about your professor, Lady Edelgard. She’s gone off to fetch Felix for me. For whatever reason, he is unusually tardy this morning. I hope it isn’t outside of my authority to tell you to take a seat? I am sure she will not be long.”

Instead of the front where she usually sat, Edelgard took a seat near the back. Hedwig sat beside her and Flayn took the empty desk directly behind her. Her mind raced. What was he here to do? Why had the Knights of Seiros released him?

A fraught silence filled the classroom. It felt like an eternity before Byleth returned with Felix in tow. As soon as Felix caught sight of Thales, he paused mid-step and took a step back, his brow furrowing and lip curling.

“Hello, Felix,” Thales said. “I hear you are not typically this late to class.”

“He was trying to get a cat out of a tree,” Byleth said, patting Felix on the shoulder. Felix glanced down at the floor, embarrassed.

 _“Aww,”_ Annette cooed.

“How commendable. Well, Felix? Aren’t you going to say good morning to your father?” Thales asked, spreading out his arms.

“What’s good about it, old man?” Felix asked. “And why did the knights let you out of your cell?”

“Because,” Thales said, walking down the aisle past the rows of students whose heads turned to follow his every move as though entranced, “I was investigated and interrogated quite thoroughly over this past week and no evidence of wrongdoing or malfeasance could be found. It is customary for innocent people to be released, in case you were unaware.”

Byleth kept a protective hand on Felix’s shoulder, but he nudged her aside and stepped forward. “So much for knights, then. So, what do you want? An apology?” he sneered.

A thunderclap tore through the room as Thales struck Felix across the face with enough force to drop him to his knees. “You and I,” he hissed, “need to have a _long_ talk about loyalty, my son.”

Felix lifted his head. His cheek was bright red where Thales’ palm had struck it, and blood dribbled from a split lip down his chin. “Oh… so _now_ I’m your son?”

Before Thales could take a step forward, the tip of Byleth’s sword was at his throat. “Don’t you think that’s a little extreme?” he asked her, arching his eyebrows as though daring her to stab the blade an inch forward.

“I won’t have you laying hands on my students in my classroom,” Byleth said coldly. Edelgard could tell that she was strongly considering slaughtering him right then and there and saving everybody a great deal of trouble, regardless of the heavy consequences of murdering the lord regent of the kingdom. “If you need to discipline your son, you won’t do it in front of his friends.”

With the side of his finger, Thales nudged the sword away from his neck. “I had no idea you were so soft, Professor. Did your father never teach you, ‘spare the rod and spoil the child?’”

“My father taught me how to kill a man ten different ways by the time I was twelve,” Byleth replied.

“I see. However, those of noble stock raise their children quite differently. I would say a little public humiliation is exactly what my brat needs.”

“Then find somewhere else to do it. Felix is my student and this is my classroom.”

“Very well. Then I will. I am long overdue to return to Fhirdiad and get on with my work anyway.” Thales grabbed Felix by the arm and hauled him to his feet. “Come along, boy.”

The entire classroom stared aghast at the family conflict playing out in front of them.

“You can’t just withdraw a student from my class without permission,” Byleth said.

“I can do as I please,” Thales said as Felix squirmed out of his grasp. “That includes choosing to remove my son from this academy if I feel its students and faculty have been a bad influence on him.”

Seteth stepped into the classroom. “You certainly can, Lord Fraldarius,” he said, “but I must question your decision. So far, I have seen no breach of conduct or objectionable behavior on young Felix’s part, save perhaps for his brooding demeanor.”

“He had me put in jail for a week,” Thales growled.

“He suspected you of wrongdoing and alerted the proper authorities. I am hardly surprised by his suspicion, given Lady Cornelia’s recent conduct and your close ties to her. At any rate, his behavior is to be commended, not punished. You, of course, are free to go, but I will not see such a bright young student leave this academy without cause.”

“You cannot stop me from withdrawing my own son.”

“No,” Seteth said, “but I expect you to fill out all necessary paperwork before I allow you to. I also would have thought that you would least stay here long enough to attend _your eldest son’s funeral service.”_

Thales’ scowl transformed into a pleasant, fake smile. “Ah, you are right. In my rage, I nearly forgot.” He let go of Felix. “I shall meet you in your office this Sunday afternoon, Seteth. I expect you to have all of the necessary paperwork prepared.”

Seteth nodded. “Of course. Now, I would ask you to allow Professor Byleth to teach her class. The students have quite a lot to do.”

Hiding his rage, but just barely, Thales strode out of the classroom, pausing for just a moment beside Edelgard as though to gloat at her. He reached over, tousled Flayn’s hair, and went on his way.

Seteth glared at him all the way out the door. He cleared his throat. “I am sorry for that, Professor. Please do continue,” he said, and he followed Thales out.

Byleth sheathed her sword. “Are you alright, Felix?”

Felix wiped the blood from his lip onto the side of his hand. “Fine, Professor,” he muttered as he trudged to an empty desk far away from everyone else, turning to hide his face.

Hedwig clutched at Edelgard’s arm. _“D-D-D-Does this, uh, u-usually h-h-happen?”_ she stammered.

“No,” Edelgard assured her. “No, it doesn’t.”

That was the third time in the same week Seteth had swooped in to save Byleth and her students from a catastrophe. Why, Edelgard wondered, did he always seem to be at the right place, at the right time?

The lecture went on as normal from there—Byleth was finishing yesterday’s analysis of the pivotal battles of the Crescent Moon War—with little incident, except that Hedwig, completely enraptured, sometimes leaned too heavily on Edelgard’s shoulder and made it harder for her to take notes.

But the lecture didn’t _end_ normally. Just as Byleth finished speaking, the doors to the classroom swung open yet again and Archbishop Rhea glided into the room, followed by Catherine, decked out in her armor, and Volkhard von Arundel. Volkhard wore a worried furrow on his brow and a disconcerted frown.

“Professor Byleth,” Rhea said. Her presence filled the room, suffocating. “I am sorry to bother you at such an inconvenient time, but I have an urgent mission for your class. This will take the place of the monthly field training session you have scheduled with the knights.”

Byleth eyed her skeptically. “Okay,” she said.

“Lord Arundel, if you would,” Rhea said.

Volkhard took a step forward. “There have been reports of unrest in Arundel territory. I have requested that your class accompany myself and the Knights of Seiros to keep the peace,” he said, shuffling his feet uneasily. He cleared his throat with a phlegmy cough. “I thank you and the Archbishop greatly for considering my humble plea.”

“There’s little time to delay,” Catherine said. “Castle Arundel is about two and a half days’ travel away from here. If we move quickly, we’ll be back by midweek. Everyone, pack your supplies and ready yourselves for battle.”

“Except—” Rhea lifted her hand. “Byleth Eisner and Edelgard von Hresvelg, you two are not to accompany the Blue Lions on this assignment.”

Dimitri shot to his feet. _“What?!”_ he snarled. “That’s absurd!”

“Uh, what I think His Highness _means_ to say, Your Holiness,” Sylvain said, “is that, uh, if we don’t go out on a mission with our teacher, then what’s the point?”

“The point is assisting the Knights of Seiros to spread peace through Fódlan,” Rhea said calmly, though Edelgard could see a twitch of her lip that masked her ire. “Your teacher has taught you well enough by now, I would hope, that you can take orders from Acting Captain Catherine for one mission.”

“But why, Lady Rhea?” Ingrid asked. “I don’t mean to challenge you, but isn’t it our teacher’s job to lead us in battle?”

“Unfortunately, your professor has more pressing obligations this weekend.”

Edelgard raised her hand. She didn’t like the sound of Rhea’s ‘more pressing obligations’ one bit. “Excuse me, Archbishop Rhea,” she said, “but while I cannot speak for my professor, _I_ would at least like to accompany my own class. I am an Arundel on my mother’s side, after all, and I would say it is important for me to defend my own home.”

Rhea gave her a beatific smile, though there was no disguising the hunger in her eyes. “It is precisely _because_ Arundel is your home, dear Edelgard, that I wish to spare you the sight of the turmoil that has been brought to it. Besides, while Lord Arundel is gone, you will have to look after your younger siblings.”

She had a point there. Judging by how long it would take to reach Castle Arundel, the Blue Lions would be gone well into next week. Who would watch over Hedwig and Pascal? Jeralt would have to leave the monastery in less than a week, and Edelgard was running out of other people she trusted unconditionally.

“I understand, Lady Rhea,” she said. Hedwig anxiously clung to her arm.

Byleth masked her concern with an impassive frown. “Okay,” she said. “Class, from now until you return, you take orders from Cath—from _Captain_ Catherine. Show her as much respect as you do me.”

 _“Acting_ Captain Catherine,” Catherine clarified, as though she were uncomfortable to have had Jeralt’s former title offered to her. She saluted. “Thank you, Professor. I’ll guard your students with my life.”

Rhea left, but Volkhard remained behind. He approached Edelgard and crouched down beside her desk. “El,” he said in a low voice, “I’m sorry. I requested the Black Eagles and was going to ask you to accompany them as an adjutant, but Lady Rhea overrode me. Take care and do not worry about home. I have the utmost faith in Rhea’s decisions.” He took her in his arms. “I love you, El.”

“Take care, Uncle,” Edelgard said, worrying for a completely different reason.

“B-B-Be c-c-careful,” Hedwig stammered.

The classroom emptied out. Byleth started erasing the blackboard.

“This is not how morning lectures normally go,” Edelgard assured Hedwig as the girl whimpered into her shoulder.

“I am sorry,” Flayn said, patting Hedwig on the shoulder. “This is terrible news to receive.”

Dimitri and Dedue remained behind after the rest of the students had left.

“You’d better get going,” Byleth said to them.

“I don’t like this,” Dimitri said, shaking his head. “I… All the knitting in the world will not stop me from worrying. Please be careful, Professor. I don’t want to lose you to—”

Dedue put his hand on his shoulder and subtly gestured to Hedwig and Flayn.

“—to your… pressing obligations. Promise me you and El will be safe.”

Byleth clasped his hand in hers. “Trust me. We’ll be fine.”

Dimitri took a deep breath before removing his hand from hers and then, with a fragile set to his jaw, headed out of the classroom with Dedue as his ever-present shadow. He mustered a weak smile to Edelgard on the way out. “I shall probably have another scarf ready for you by the time I return,” he said to her, his grin unable to hide the pain in his eyes. “You and your siblings look after the Professor, okay?”

Edelgard nodded. “Don’t be so dramatic, Dima. We’ll be fine,” she said, masking her own worry.

She studied Dedue’s face as he followed Dimitri out. Briefly, her eye met his, and she wondered how much of a setback this unexpected turn of events was to his plans, and for whom it would bode ill.

She put her arms around Hedwig, threaded her fingers through her hair, and held her close, as much for her own sake as for her youngest sister's.


	29. The Face Revealed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Hapi has kittens, Flayn has a sleepover, and Hubert has a breakdown.

That night, Edelgard had the dream again. A different bed this time—no, not a bed at all, but a seat in a carriage in motion, wrapped in a blanket to ward off the cold. The carriage continued onward through the night, the clip-clopping of the horses’ hooves outside muffled and faint, the rocking of the carriage as steady and soft as a heartbeat. An arm hung across her shoulders with a comforting weight and warmth. The windows were closed and the blinds drawn, but she could see faint silhouettes surrounding her. Not frightening shadowy figures like the ones who came to her in her nightmares—no, these were different; she felt comfortable and safe with them. Like there was nothing in the world that could hurt her.

* * *

In the waking world, of course, there were plenty of things that could hurt her; one of those things, unfortunately, being the monastery’s resident beast.

As a low growl and a vengeful hiss cut through the winter air, Edelgard stumbled down the guard tower’s staircase, slipping and falling backward as a set of claws as sharp as knives cut through the air where she’d been standing only a moment ago. With a sharp cry, she hit the stairs and tumbled head over heels. The world spun around her in a whorl of stone bricks and wood panels for a few seconds that seemed to last forever before she found herself lying facedown in the snow.

 _“Edelgard!”_ Byleth cried out, rushing to her side before Hubert could and helping her up. “Are you alright?”

“Have you been wounded, Lady Edelgard?” Hubert asked.

Edelgard spat a strand of her own hair out of her mouth and wiped the snow clinging to her face onto her sleeve. “Only my pride,” she said, her elbows, knees, and head already throbbing and sore.

“You can’t get to her either, huh?” Jeralt noted, crossing his arms as he stared up at Hapi’s impromptu lair in the tower abutting the monastery wall. “What the fuck are we going to do, then?”

“How long has she been like this?” Edelgard asked him.

“All morning. Won’t even come down to eat,” he said, eyeing the bloody carcass of a goat that had been laid just to the side of the door. If Edelgard had fallen a few inches to the left she would have landed right on top of it.

“I think she might be sick,” Leonie said, rubbing her thumbs on the hem of the oversize cloak draped over her shoulders. Over the past few days, Jeralt had been slowly introducing her to Hapi so that she could look after her after he left the monastery, mainly by letting her borrow old cloaks and gloves of his so that she could have his scent. Things had been going well, apparently, until today.

Alois strode across the field toward them. “What’s going on here?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “Is everything alright with your… _pet_ project?”

“I wish,” Jeralt grumbled. He sighed. “She’s sick, or angry, or something. Won’t even eat.”

“So you’re saying it’s more like a… _pet_ peeve?”

“Not now, Alois.”

Alois frowned and furrowed his brow, realizing that his joke had been in poor taste. “Right. Sorry, Jeralt. And you, Lady Edelgard, are you okay?”

Edelgard pressed a lump of cold snow to one of the more painful aches. “I’ll live.”

“As long as she didn’t hurt you. You know we can’t keep Hapi if she hurts someone, Capt—er, sorry. Jeralt.”

“I understand, Alois,” Jeralt said.

“Honestly, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if Seteth finds out about this, I’m worried it won’t matter if she hurts someone.”

“What if she doesn’t leave?” Byleth asked him.

He didn’t answer.

“I can take care of her,” Leonie insisted.

“We have no choice but to keep her here,” Edelgard replied. “Locked within her mind is everything we need to know about Cornelia, Rodrigue—Hanneman thinks he can find a way to change her back by the end of the term. That isn’t an opportunity we can afford to lose.”

“I know, Lady Edelgard, but try telling Seteth that!”

“Alright.” Jeralt sighed. “She’ll leave the monastery with me, Alois. Promise.”

“If Hapi is sick,” Hubert said, “then I do not know what option we would have but to send for Professor Manuela. If she can treat sick and wounded horses and wyverns, then a beast would hopefully not be beyond her capabilities.”

“But how could Manuela get close enough,” Byleth pointed out, “if she won’t even let Edelgard near?”

Leonie stroked her chin thoughtfully, the same way Jeralt would stroke his scruffy beard. She took after him far too much. “Marianne’s great with animals,” she said. “Raphael told me she can talk to birds.”

“Anybody can talk to birds,” Hubert pointed out.

 _“She_ understands them when they talk back. Or so Raph said.” Without the slightest hesitation and without waiting to be given any permission, she rushed off to find Marianne. It didn’t take long for her to come back, though with the gray sky and uniform cloud coverage blotting out the sun overhead, it was hard to tell how long it took.

Trailing behind Leonie, Marianne trudged through the snow, glum and withdrawn, her head bowed and eyes downcast. She seemed to shrink in the presence of the Knights of Seiros. “Um…” She smoothed out her skirt and thumbed the edges of a very familiar-looking fur-lined winter cloak Edelgard eventually recognized as one of Dimitri’s. “Hello. I’m sorry, but Leonie says you have a monster…?” Her voice was so timid and mousy that Edelgard expected Hapi to come bounding right out of the tower and chase it away.

“She’s in the tower,” Jeralt said. “We think she might be sick or hurt, but none of us can get close enough to…” He looked Marianne up and down, seemingly disappointed. “Fuck. What am I even doing?” he muttered.

If Marianne could have shrank by a foot or more, she would have. “I’m sorry… I… I don’t think there’s anything I can do.”

“No, I think you can help,” Edelgard said, pulling herself up to her feet. Her brain pounded against the inside of her skull. “Marianne, from what I hear from Dimitri, you have a real gift for calming savage beasts.”

A pink tinge spread across Marianne’s cheeks. “That’s just what he calls himself,” she mumbled.

“You just need to have some confidence in yourself,” Leonie said, clapping her on the back. “Come on! No one’s better with animals than you.”

“I’m sure I’ll just make things worse…” Marianne said to her, shaking her head.

“Look. Hapi is a magnificent and graceful creature that used to be a person,” she replied sternly, “and if you can’t help us, the Knights of Seiros are gonna kill her. You’re our only hope.”

Marianne turned pale. “U—‘Used to be a person?’” she repeated.

“What Leonie means,” Edelgard said, taking care to speak far less brashly and more diplomatically than Leonie, “is that you have a special gift here that nobody else has. No one else here can understand Hapi’s mind better than you can.”

Marianne lifted her head and looked to the top of the tower. “She… used to be a person?” With a deep, nervous breath and a heavy sigh, she approached the tower and began climbing the stairs. As she slipped out of sight, Byleth clenched her fists and closed her eyes, her breath pouring slowly and rhythmically from her mouth as she prepared, just in case, to call upon her power and turn back time.

Everyone waited with bated breath.

Eventually, Marianne climbed the stairs back down and emerged from the shadows.

“Half a dozen kittens,” she said.

Jeralt let out a relieved sigh, his shoulders slumping as he relaxed. Edelgard could feel his relief. If Hapi had been ill or badly wounded—

Marianne’s words finally registered in her brain.

_Kittens?_

“Wait,” he said. “What the _fuck?_ What th—She’s only been a cat for two weeks; how can she have _kittens?”_

“You’re right; it’s impossible,” Leonie said. “I mean, if she were _that_ pregnant, it’d have been obvious. How would that even _work?”_

“I don’t think they’re hers,” Marianne explained, her voice nearly lost in the furor. “I think their real mother must have died.”

A grin lit up Alois’ face. “That’s… _meow-_ raculous!” he chortled.

The stairs winding up the inside of the tower creaked and groaned as a bulky mass of scarlet fur squeezed down the narrow staircase. Hapi poked her head out, her pointed ears snapping forward, and crept over the threshold, cautiously approaching the goat carcass Jeralt had left for her. After giving it a cautious sniff, she clamped her jaw around one of its legs and started dragging it up the stairs, leaving a bloody smear in its wake as she returned to her brooding.

“So,” Leonie said, “Marianne, how old did those kittens look? It’s about three weeks before the mother usually starts letting them leave the nest, right?”

“They looked about three weeks old,” Marianne said, “but it’ll be another three or five weeks before they’re ready to be separated…”

“Well,” Jeralt said, wiping his brow and regaining his composure, “I guess that means she can’t leave ‘til then. Can’t just leave those babies to fend for themselves.”

Alois sighed. “Goddess, I need a drink.”

“I think we both need a drink,” Jeralt said. “That is, if you don’t mind hanging out with a disgraced ex-knight.”

“Jeralt! My friend, it’ll _always_ be my pleasure to drink with you!” Alois assured him with a hearty slap on the back. “Oh, but… you’ll have to pay your own tab now, though,” he added, “won’t you?”

Jeralt’s face went pale. Edelgard recalled that from what Byleth had once told her, he had a four-figure unpaid bar tab in just about every major tavern from Fódlan’s Fangs to Fódlan’s Throat. He had likely racked up a similar debt in the local tavern in the town outside the monastery that he’d been meaning to pay off with next month’s stipend from the Knights of Seiros… which he was no longer going to receive.

“Drinks are on me,” Byleth announced.

“You sure you know what you’re asking for, kid?” Alois asked. “This guy drinks like a fish.”

A simple, nostalgic smile crossed her face. “I know. He’s my dad.”

“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you! Let’s go!”

The adults set off to slake their thirst, leaving the students behind outside the guard tower.

“Thank you, Marianne,” Edelgard said.

Marianne smiled faintly. “Um… thank you, Your Highness. I am simply glad I could be of use.”

Leonie laughed. “With a skill like yours, how could you _not_ be of use? Just think of all the things you can do with it!”

A sheepish blush crossed Marianne’s cheeks. With her pale complexion and steel-blue hair framing her face, the way her cheeks lit up called to mind a flame melting a beautiful ice sculpture away from the inside. It wasn’t hard to imagine how Dimitri could fall for a face like that.

Oh, Goddess, _Dimitri_ of all people was caught up in a love triangle.

Marianne inched a bit closer to Edelgard. “Your Highness,” she said, lowering her voice from its normal breathy near-whisper to a sound that nearly got lost in the clouds of her breath, “so… it is true.” Her soft, doelike brown eyes flitted toward the guard tower where Hapi defended her adopted brood. “I heard a rumor that Lady Cornelia turned her daughter into…”

Edelgard nodded. “It’s true. You could say that she’s the victim of a curse. But, as Hanneman says, a curse is only a curse if it can be broken. I’m confident that anybody who becomes a monster can be changed back, no matter how great an effort it takes.”

“I admire your, um… your optimism,” Marianne said, her fingers fumbling nervously with the clasps of her cloak.

“Hey, Marianne,” Leonie said, “isn’t that one of Prince Dimitri’s cloaks?”

Marianne’s ears turned as red as the rest of her face. “I-I h-have to go,” she stammered, turning tail and hurrying back to the academy grounds like a spooked deer bounding away into the woods.

* * *

Edelgard spent the rest of the day trying to keep herself busy and, more importantly, out of sight. Dedue’s tense meeting with her the other day still hung heavily in her mind. What was he plotting? What ulterior motives dwelt beneath his quiet and stony facade? When he said that his Men in Black were as dangerous allies as enemies, what did he mean? A part of her wanted to hope that he meant it the same way she once had—that he meant to turn on and dispose of them as soon as he’d gotten what he wanted from them—but the rest of her, of course, was too cautious to hope. And what about the other agent in the monastery? Did he really have the authority to convince them to spare her… and if he did, then could he exercise it this far away from the monastery?

And most baffling of all—what had he meant about her mother? The way Dimitri had spoken of his captivity, she’d thought Anselma had died in the same dungeon. But was it possible Those Who Slither had kept her alive, or was Dedue just trying to unnerve her?

And on top of that, Thales walked the monastery a free man; Claude was suspicious; and Edelgard found herself and Byleth isolated, separated from the rest of the Blue Lions by Rhea’s machinations so that they would be easy prey for the Immaculate One’s talons.

And on top of all that, she had Pascal and Hedwig to look after—her two youngest siblings were the only other Hresvelgs remaining at the monastery, too young to leave on their own. They had retainers of their own to keep them out of trouble, of course—Pascal had Armin, whom Edelgard believed was Hubert’s second or third cousin; Hedwig had Cassia, who was apparently Hubert’s younger sister, hence the pains he took to avoid her (sometimes Edelgard wondered what had happened to all of these extraneous Vestra children she’d never heard of in her world and concluded that those who hadn’t been discarded by Those Who Slither after the insurrection had probably been disposed of in Hubert’s purge of House Vestra)—but they were practically children themselves, both just barely younger than the average student, and to say the least, Edelgard didn’t trust them not as a matter of loyalty but of competence.

Edelgard took her siblings to lunch, intent on keeping them close by her side. But in the dining hall, she met someone who had other ideas.

Constance caught her just before she could step into line. “Oh, Edelgard, darling, _there_ you are!” she called out with a foxish smile. “I have been looking all over for you!”

“I’m sorry to make myself scarce,” Edelgard replied frostily, “but unfortunately, I’ve been busy. And I have a few chores to get done this afternoon—”

Constance kept talking as though she’d never said anything. “I have such great plans for this weekend! We simply _must,_ in the common parlance, ‘hang out.’ First, might I recommend going on a luxurious jaunt—”

“Constance, _shut up,”_ Edelgard barked, at her wit’s end.

Constance shut up. But, unfortunately, not for long. “Ah,” she said, squinting. “I see how it is. You have been avoiding me… on _purpose!”_

“That is not what I mean at all,” Edelgard protested.

“El wouldn’t do that,” Pascal added. “She’s _nice!”_

Hedwig tried to stammer out something in Edelgard’s defense as well, but Constance drowned her out.

“No, no, I see, I understand perfectly,” Constance said. “You will not admit it, but you look down on me for being the daughter of a fallen house. The failure of my father and mother and uncles and aunts and cousins and brothers and sisters to defend Adrestia’s shore clings to me like an unwelcome stench.”

“Not in the slightest, Constance,” Edelgard retorted. “I simply mean that you can be a little—”

“Say no more, Edelgard. I know it is hard to imagine that I can measure up to a Hresvelg, even though Prince Burkhart had asked for my hand in consort-ship. But…” Constance’s violet iris-colored eyes darted across the room. “Aha! I shall prove to you the strength of House Nuvelle and my commitment to restoring our grand reputation!”

Before Edelgard could protest, Constance stormed off and came to a stop in front of Caspar, Dorothea, and Petra, who were all having lunch together. Edelgard left the line and hurried toward them, and her siblings followed behind her like ducklings.

Petra looked up at Constance. “Hello, Constance. Are you wanting to talk to me?”

“H-H-Hello, P-Petra,” Hedwig stammered, waving.

Petra looked away from Constance with a bright smile on her face. “Hello, Hedwig! Would you be liking to join me for the hunting today?”

“Petra Macneary, Princess of Brigid,” Constance announced, slamming her hand on the table hard enough to send ripples through everyone’s soup. “I, Constance von Nuvelle, do hereby challenge you to a duel!”

Caspar and Dorothea were dumbfounded.

“If you are wanting a friendly competition,” Petra said, “then I would be liking that greatly—”

“No, this is not about friendship, but about _honor!_ My father and many brave men from House Nuvelle met their end at the hands of your father and his soldiers, and I must cleanse the stain upon their souls!”

Caspar, normally one to leap up in excitement at the prospect of a good fight, looked queasy. Edelgard knew, and had no reason to suspect that it wasn’t the case in this world, that in the Brigid-Dagda war Count Bergliez himself had slain Petra’s father, and his guilt still weighed heavily on his mind.

Petra looked down and then back up at Constance. “You are wanting… to be revenge-killing me?” she asked, arching her eyebrows.

“This is ridiculous,” Edelgard said, grabbing Constance by the wrist. “Constance, you don’t need to prove yourself to me by picking fights with people.”

Hedwig grabbed Constance by the other wrist. “P-P-Please d-don’t be revenge-k-k-killing Petra!” she wailed.

“If this is all because you feel slighted by me,” Edelgard said, “then consider my schedule cleared for the rest of the day.”

Constance relented and stepped away. “Very well. You shall not feel the sting of defeat today, Princess Petra.”

Dorothea rolled her eyes. “Nobles,” she scoffed under her breath.

“I beg your pardon?” Constance snapped.

“Nothing,” she said, no doubt remembering the last time she’d insulted a noble with a stick up her ass.

After lunch, Constance all but dragged Edelgard to the stables, where among the pegasi a black steed with a mane like curtains of sable and immaculately-groomed wings waited. “Do you like to fly, Edelgard—Oh, pardon me, but may I call you El? It seems that is your preferred nickname.”

“Perhaps in the future,” Edelgard said. She could hear her own heartbeat. Constance hadn’t even given her time to find Hubert; she was completely alone and if Constance was really so much of a formidable spellcaster, she might as well have been completely defenseless.

“I understand. We need to spend more together before I am worthy!” Constance fitted her black pegasus with an ornate scarlet and gold saddle and bridle. “This is Deimos. I have had him since he was a foal. No pegasus in all the land delivers a smoother ride than he… although I do suggest you still hold tight. I would not want you to fall from such a great height.”

“I-I-I-I want to fly!” Hedwig all but shouted, shaking her fists excitedly. “M-Miss C-C-Const-t-t-t—C-Constance, c-can I—m-may I p-p-please…”

“Oh, of course! Deimos is perfectly capable of carrying three people. Of course, it is up to your older sister…” Constance gave Edelgard a haughty grin, a fox licking its chops in anticipation of the rabbit it had cornered.

Edelgard considered running for it. But if she kept avoiding Constance like this, she’d probably earn a stern talking-to from Ferdinand. He’d already had a few choice words for her over the past few days about how she was making Constance feel ‘unwelcome’ at Garreg Mach. Besides, Hedwig looked as though she was about to explode.

“What about you?” Constance asked Pascal. “You are small for your age. Certainly you would fit as well.”

“Um… N-No, it’d be cramped,” Pascal protested, shaking his head. His curly hair bounced. “I’m not good with heights anyway, Lady Constance. But thank you for the offer. I’ll just watch you… from down here.”

“Very well. Some other time, perhaps! Now, Lady Edelgard, Lady Hedwig, come along! We shall sally forth!”

Constance, Edelgard, and Hedwig mounted Deimos. Edelgard swallowed a growing lump in her throat as she curled her arms around Constance’s waist and Hedwig did the same to her. She was giving Constance the perfect opportunity to dispose of her. A pegasus could soar miles away to some remote and inaccessible part of the mountains in an hour, where nobody would find her corpse. And she’d dragged poor Hedwig into it as well… “Actually,” she said, “like Pascal, I might… I might be just a little squeamish about great heights—”

“You will not be,” Constance said. “Deimos and I will see to that.” She led her mount out of the stables, and then with a mighty flap of his wings, they took to the sky. Pascal remained behind, flanked by his and Hedwig’s retainers so that at least _he_ would be safe.

Heights did not actually bother Edelgard at all. Depths did. But this was a special circumstance.

She tried to keep herself calm. Constance _couldn’t_ kill and replace her yet. She’d given her too few opportunities to observe her. This was just a ploy to learn more about her, observing her mannerisms, her body language, the way she spoke, ferreting out important details about her past…

The monastery grew smaller and smaller down below, a frost-coated jewel nestled among the mountains. The ceiling of the drab cloud coverage felt closer and closer as the monastery drifted farther and farther away and the people milling about its snowy lawns dwindled to pinpricks. The cobalt peaks of the Oghma Mountains spread across the horizon to the northeast, past the fog-filled ravine that split the monastery from the cathedral. To the north was the Sealed Forest, stretching from Garreg Mach’s wall to the northern peaks of the mountain range; to the west was the town, and further west was the forested wilderness that stretched down the slope of the mountains all the way to Remire (or, what had once been Remire).

Hedwig tightened her grip on Edelgard and buried her face in her hair. “W-We’re s-s-s-so h-h-high up…” she stammered, her teeth chattering. “I—I c-c-can’t look!” She pulled away. “O—Okay. I can look f-f-for a little b-b-bit…”

“Is it not beautiful?” Constance asked, easing Deimos into widening spirals and bringing them higher with every slow, powerful flap of his wings. “Ah, to see the monastery from this height brings back such memories…”

The three of them circled the monastery until the clouds began to break and the sun, still high in the sky but dipping lower, peeked through the gaps to shine its light upon the mountains. The cold seeped into Edelgard’s bones; there was no sound but the howling of the north wind high above the monastery and the deep, steady flaps of Deimos’ wings. The entire time, Constance made surprisingly few attempts at small talk, leaving Edelgard perplexed. Were they only here to admire the scenery? Was this some plot to make her lower her guard?

“Well, Edelgard, Hedwig, are we bonding yet?” Constance finally asked, breaking a long silence.

“I can’t feel my nose,” Edelgard said.

“Nor can I,” she said. “Ah, well. Was this not lovely? We have shared a spiritual moment here, my soon-to-be sisters.” She directed Deimos into a slow and gentle descent, guiding him back to the stables. The monastery rose up to meet them until the pegasus’ hooves met solid ground.

Hedwig nodded. “Th-th-th-thank you s-s-s-so m-much, C-Coco!”

Constance raised her eyebrows. “‘Coco?’”

An incoherent stream of apologetic babble escaped Hedwig’s lips.

“You’ll have to excuse her, Constance,” Edelgard said. “Hedy has difficulty speaking sometimes, especially when she’s nearly frozen solid, so she tends to give people nicknames that are easier for her to say.”

“Ah, I understand. But I would prefer you to use my full name when you can! Now, where shall the three of us fly tomorrow? Have you ever plunged straight down into that ravine?”

“No,” Edelgard said, “and I don’t think I’d like to.”

“Oh, please. I would pull up just before we hit the river!” Constance grinned. “I wish to go on so many more adventures with you two. After all, are we not all family?”

“I suppose,” Edelgard said as she rubbed the feeling back into her hands. It would take a while before her nose and her ears became less numb. Hedwig clung to her as though she’d float away if she didn’t. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I do have some chores to do—”

“Of course, of course!” Constance patted her on the head as though she were a puppy. “Darling El, dear, and sweet Hedy, I would never distract you from your duties. Run along! I shall see you at dinner!”

Edelgard did not quite run along, but she did make a hasty retreat from Constance. She was shivering, and it wasn’t just the cold that sent a chill up her spine. There was an icy dread running through her veins that even Hedwig, still clinging to her, couldn’t melt.

“So… how was the ride?” Pascal asked them.

“Cold,” Edelgard said.

“I’m s-s-sorry,” Hedwig mumbled into her shoulder. “I d-didn’t m-m-mean to offend C-C-Coco—C-Cons-s-s—”

Edelgard lifted a hand to her head and stroked the silken braids that held her hair back. “Don’t worry, Hedy. You did nothing wrong, and she understands that.”

“I—I d-d-did! I—I sounded s-s-stupid, and d-disrespec—s-spectf-f-ful… a-a-and if I—if I j-just knew h-h-h-how to _shut up—”_

“You didn’t sound stupid or disrespectful. If anybody takes issue with your manner of speaking, that’s entirely their fault.”

“I j-j-just w-w-wish i-it was easier t-t-to _s-stop_ t-t-talking,” Hedwig moaned. “Wh-Why is it s-s-so hard f-for me to s-s-s-speak, a-and so h-h-hard for me t-t-to be s-s-silent?”

“Did Lady Constance get mad at you for your stutter?” Pascal asked her, taking her by the hand. “I’m sorry, Hedy. That’s not okay.”

Constance hadn’t exactly gotten _mad_ at Hedwig, but Edelgard could tell that much like Bernadetta, enough people had in the past that Hedwig had gotten used to simply assuming it.

Hedwig sniffled and nodded, letting go of Pascal to wipe away the tears leaking from her eyes. “I s-s-should c-c-cut my t-t-tongue out.”

“Don’t say that,” Edelgard told her. “Whatever anyone else thinks, Hedy, I could listen to you speak all day.” What less could she say to her sister? “Besides, Constance was simply caught off-guard. You didn’t offend her at all.”

Hedwig hugged her tightly enough to nearly break her spine. _“El…”_ she sobbed.

 _“Edelgard! Hedwig!”_ Flayn’s voice rang out through the hall as she hurried across the floor to meet them. “What a pleasure to see you here—oh, Hedwig, is something wrong?” A concerned frown crossed her face. “What is the matter?”

“Someone didn’t appreciate her nicknames,” Pascal said.

“How rude of them! Hedwig, your nicknames are delightful!”

Hedwig pulled away from Edelgard just enough to reveal a sliver of her face. “Y-You th-th-think so?” She released Edelgard only to embrace Flayn with all her might. Flayn’s face turned red.

Edelgard caught her breath. “Hedy, I have a few chores to do before it gets dark out. Can I trust you and Pascal to keep Flayn out of trouble?”

“Hey!” Flayn gasped. “I do _not_ get into trouble!”

Hedwig nodded, mustering a weak smile.

Edelgard hurried to attend to her tasks, granting herself an afternoon of monotony that did nothing to stop her mind from turning toward her troubles. By the time she was finished, the sun hung low in the sky and it was time for dinner.

As she headed to the dining hall, another dreadful chill ran through her blood and up her spine. Thales’ presence filled the great hall from its floor to its high vaulted ceiling like a suffocating miasma. She paused and surveyed the room, spying him near the entrance to the courtyard with Seteth. The two of them were striding down the hall side by side, though both seemed eager to part ways. Thales had to walk slowly as Seteth hobbled along with his cane, and it was obvious from his scowl that the slow pace he’d been forced into was not helping his mood.

 _“I would advise, Seteth, that you stop getting in my way,”_ Thales was saying, no doubt still irked by Seteth’s intervention yesterday morning.

 _“I am doing no such thing, Lord Fraldarius,”_ Seteth answered. _“Rather, I would say that_ you _are interfering in_ my _duties.”_

_“Do not accuse me of meddling.”_

_“Then perhaps stop doing so. Here, the Church of Seiros is the highest authority…”_

Seteth’s eyes met Edelgard’s. So did Thales’. Edelgard felt the stinging cold that still lingered from her jaunt with Constance worm its way deeper into her, burning into her bones, stabbing an icy needle into her eye.

“And with that,” Seteth said, “I bid you good day, sir.”

“Hmph.” Thales scowled. “This shall not be the last you hear of me,” he snarled under his breath, and he stormed off. Edelgard narrowly sidestepped him before he could ram his shoulder into hers in a petulant show of force, making him stumble for a step or two. He walked it off, but Edelgard felt slightly more at ease to have caused him some minor embarrassment.

“Hello, Edelgard,” Seteth said, drawing nearer to her. “Please pardon Lord Fraldarius. He is merely upset that I postponed his son’s funeral service until after the rest of the Blue Lions return. I am beginning to see why young Felix is so sullen in his presence—he is simply impossible.

“By the way,” he added, “I have something to ask of you. All week, Flayn has been begging me to allow her to have a ‘sleep-over.’ I am normally against such things, especially given the current situation, but as I recall, I did allow her one with you and your friends in Arianrhod. If you both abide strictly by the curfew, can I trust you to look after her for the night?”

Edelgard was dumbstruck by his offer. “You want Flayn to stay in my room tonight?” she repeated, just to make sure she hadn’t temporarily gone mad and started having auditory hallucinations.

“She has been so lonely,” he said, “and you have been so busy. With things as they are, you have few opportunities to spend time with one another, and so I will allow it. If you swear on your life that you will look after her, of course.”

“I suppose it’s fine with me,” she said.

Seteth smiled. “You have my thanks, Edelgard,” he said, resting a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I cannot tell you how much this means to my dear sister.”

* * *

“I am so, so, so very excited, Edelgard,” Flayn said as she laid out her bedroll on the rug in Edelgard’s room. The sky was growing dark beyond the window. She had already changed into a nightgown and let her emerald-green hair down. “Even if it is only the two of us, this is still only the second time I have ever slept-over with somebody! What shall we do first to pass the time? Do you know card games? Big brother frowns on them, but what he does not know will not hurt him!” The smile on her face was simple and gleeful, almost _too_ innocent given all of the pain she had recently endured.

There was a knock on Edelgard’s bedroom door. _“El, um—i-i-it’s m-me, Hedwig! C-Can I…”_

Edelgard had opened the door already before Hedwig could finish. “Hedy?”

“El!” Hedwig wrapped her up in her arms. “Flayn t-t-told me, um, that—that you two were—C-C-Can I come, too?”

“Hedy! That would be wonderful!” Flayn exclaimed. “The more is indeed the merrier! Um… As long as all three of us can fit comfortably in here.”

Hedwig’s retainer Cassia, who had stood silently at her side until now, opened her mouth. “Er, Lady Hedwig, perhaps—”

“Y-You can come t-t-too, Cas!” Hedwig said, taking her by the arm and pulling her in.

“That, um, wouldn’t—would not be proper, milady,” Cassia said with a humble bow. “Besides, four is a crowd. If you insist, I will spend the night down the hall with my older brother.”

So she _was_ Hubert’s little sister. The resemblance was obvious now—the same green eyes so pale they were nearly yellow, and the same hair as black as a rook’s feathers.

She left and shut the door behind her, leaving Edelgard with her sister and Flayn.

“Oh! Hedy, do you have something to sleep on?” Flayn asked.

Hedwig gasped. “I, uh… Um… I-I forgot! I-I’m s-s-sorry, I didn’t, um—I g-got c-c-carried away…”

Since she looked close to tears, Edelgard put an arm over her shoulders. “Don’t worry, Hedy. You can take the bed; I’ll deal with the floor. I might have a spare nightgown you can borrow, too.”

Flayn giggled. “It is so convenient that you two are both the same size. Hedy, how tall do you think you will be when you grow up? As tall as Hubert, perhaps?”

Mortified, Hedwig blushed. “I-I, um… I’m a-af-fraid s-s-so…” she mumbled, cringing.

“That is amazing!” Flayn seemed to have stars in her eyes. “Perhaps one day you will be as tall as my grandmother! I never met her, but it is said she was at least seven feet tall and the most beautiful woman in all of Fódlan.”

The three of them settled in as the sky outside darkened to a pitch black. Edelgard feared she was not a very skilled host; in all honesty, too, she would rather have just gone straight to sleep, or at least _tried_ to. But fortunately for her, Flayn managed to be the life of the party, keeping her and Hedwig busy with endless questions. Edelgard began to worry, as the night wore on, that this was a mistake. What if she had a night terror while she slept? What if it woke Flayn, or worse, Hedwig?

“Oh, there is one question that has been on my mind all this past week,” Flayn said. This was, assuming Edelgard hadn’t lost count, the twenty-third question she had asked tonight. “Edelgard, your professor looks different! With her hair and eyes, she… well, pardon me,” she said with a nervous laugh, “but she looks like she could be my older sister! It quite suits her, don’t you think?”

“Um…” Edelgard found herself mumbling, “I… I suppose.”

“D-D-Do you think sh-she m-m-m-might be, um… m-might be related to you?” Hedwig asked Flayn, fumbling excitedly with the glasses perched on her nose.

“I cannot help but wonder,” Flayn said. “But Edelgard, please tell me, how did she come to look like that? Did she simply change one day? How did your fellow students react?”

Edelgard recalled the battle against Solon, Dimitri’s apocalyptic fury, and the loss of a close friend as though it were yesterday. “It wasn’t a pleasant story,” she said, irked by Flayn’s attitude. “We fought a terrible battle in the Sealed Forest against a powerful enemy. She saved us, but… lost something important in the process. That hair and those eyes came at a terrible cost.”

The excited smile on Flayn’s face vanished, giving way to a sobered frown. “I… I did not know. I am sorry. I can hear the pain in your voice.” She bowed her head. “Please, forget that I asked.”

Someone knocked on the door. Before Edelgard could get it, Hedwig sprinted past her and picked up a little envelope that had been slipped under the door. “I-It’s f-f-for you,” she stammered, handing the envelope to her.

Edelgard took it. It had her name on it in Hilda’s handwriting, which did in fact make it for her. She opened the envelope and removed a scrap of paper:

_I tried the neck trick on Constance before dinner. It didn’t work. IT ISN’T HER_

Edelgard’s mouth went dry. If she’d felt tired before, she was wide awake now, and would probably remain awake all night.

“I-I-I-Is it a l-l-love letter?” Hedwig asked.

Flayn gasped. Stars twinkled in her eyes, her exuberant mood returned in full force. “Is Hilda… in _love_ with you, Edelgard?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what it is,” Edelgard said, slipping the note back into the envelope and the envelope into her desk. She’d burn it when the other two were asleep… if Flayn ever went to sleep.

 _Flayn._ It had to be her. If Constance wasn’t here to replace her—if Constance had simply been Constance the entire time—then either Seteth or Flayn had to be the one, and Edelgard couldn’t fathom Seteth of all people hiding another one of Kronya’s ilk under his skin _._ He hadn’t been clinging to her like glue, anyway. It was impossible, but it would explain why Flayn had been so eager to spend time with her—and why she’d spent the whole evening trying to learn more about her.

_Flayn was the impostor._

Edelgard fought hard to resist that conclusion. How could she even know the letter was from Hilda at all? She knew Claude could imitate her handwriting perfectly, or at least ‘Future Claude’ could, and it would hardly be the first time he’d misled her. But the thought kept coming to her. If there was even the slimmest chance it could be true, she would need to take it seriously.

“Let’s go to bed,” she said.

“D-D-Do you l-love her b-b-back, El?” Hedwig blurted out.

“Yes,” Edelgard answered without thinking. “Hedy, Flayn, to bed.”

“A-Are you s-s-s-sure you can sleep on the f-floor?” Hedwig asked.

“Yes, I’ll be fine,” Edelgard said. She caught Flayn’s eye and hastily looked away. Actually, though… if she stuck close to Hedwig, perhaps Flayn wouldn’t be able to dispose of her tonight. “Will _you_ be fine alone, though?”

Hedwig looked irked by the implication. “I—I’m n-n-not a ch-child,” she stammered, her face flushing scarlet. “I-I’m t-t-too old to s-s-sleep with you…”

“Don’t worry,” Edelgard assured her. “You’re never too old to share a bed with your older sister. Besides, if it embarrasses you, nothing that happens here has to leave this room.”

“That is correct!” Flayn chimed in. “Nothing has to leave this room.”

After a little more cajoling, Hedwig joined Edelgard on the bed, which Edelgard immediately realized presented a unique dilemma. Aside from Claude, who had somehow managed to procure a much larger bed than anybody else, each student had a bed wide enough for one. To further complicate things, while Edelgard herself slept on her back with her arms at her sides, Hedwig preferred to sprawl, gangling arms and legs akimbo. Her overgrown body was like a spiderweb of too-long limbs.

Edelgard also discovered that night that Hedwig snored. She supposed she didn’t mind. It wasn’t as though she could fall asleep herself anyway. She simply lay there, thoughts ranging from worried to terrified racing around in her head, while Hedwig draped herself on top of her and snored in her ear.

Lost in her thoughts, she waited. It was an ugly thought, but Hedwig would make a fine human shield tonight if Flayn had been plotting to kill and replace her… although the depravity of Those Who Slither couldn’t be underestimated. If Flayn really _was_ hiding a wicked face beneath her mask, there was a good chance that she could easily drive a dagger through both Hedwig’s heart and Edelgard’s without hesitation.

Eventually, somehow, Edelgard _did_ fall asleep, though likely well after midnight.

She had that dream again. The same soothing, comforting dream as last night. She was in the gently rocking carriage, warm, safe, surrounded by friends. This time, she felt a familiar chest and a familiar heartbeat pressed against her ear, and could hear someone she knew faintly mumbling in her sleep nearby.

In the dream, she slept well.

She woke up in the middle of the night, or perhaps very early in the morning, though, to the sound of a frightened young girl crying out for her father.

It was Flayn.

Edelgard suspected it was a trap. But Hedwig, roused from her restful sleep, had no reason to suspect such a thing. _“F-Flayn?”_ she mumbled, blearily pulling herself up out of bed and letting the sheets slough off of her shoulders. _“I-Is that y-y-you?”_

“Go back to bed, Hedy,” Edelgard mumbled, sluggishly reaching for her arm to try and hold her back, but Hedwig was too nimble and scampered quickly to the floor.

_“F-Flayn? Is—Is s-something wrong?”_

_“Hedy? Oh… is it morning already? It’s so dark out…”_

_“Y-You were c-crying.”_

_“Was I? I suppose… I was having a nightmare. How embarrassing! But do not worry. I feel much better now.”_

_“I-It’s so c-cold and h-hard on the floor… c-c-come up with us on the bed!”_

_“Oh, no, I could not—That bed is far too small for all three of us—”_

“Hedwig—” Edelgard sat up, trying to shake off the last traces of her drowsiness. It was still dark, aside from a slight violet hue at the horizon beyond the window that heralded the rising sun. “Hedwig, don’t bring Flayn onto the bed—”

Hedwig brought Flayn onto the bed, sandwiching her between herself and Edelgard. “S-See? Isn’t this b-b-better?”

“I suppose it is much softer and warmer,” Flayn said. Her silhouette shifted a little in the dark and an orb of soft white light coalesced in her palm, lighting up the room. The cold light etched worried lines of shadow onto her soft, young face. “I am sorry to have awoken you. I suppose I have ruined our wonderful little slumber party.”

“N-No! It—It’s f-fine. W-We had fun, r-right, El?” Hedwig asked.

“It was… fun,” Edelgard mumbled, hardly thinking about the words coming out of her mouth. She was too busy studying Flayn’s face. She’d never experienced an agent of Those Who Slither replacing someone whose face she remembered so clearly—she’d been too young when Thales had replaced Uncle Volkhard, and her memories from that period of her life were a blur. Was it really possible that there could be not so much as a single pore on her skin out of place? She looked exactly like the same Flayn who had once crawled into her tent to ward off her nightmares.

“May I… confess something to you two?” Flayn asked. “When… When my big brother and I were running, we… we got separated. It was at Magdred Way. I was… lost in the forest. For… For two days. On my own. The last time I had been se—separated from my fa—f-from my brother for so long was when—when I—When the Death Knight—” She swallowed a visible lump in her throat.

Hedwig hugged her. “I-It w-was just a n-n-nightm-mare,” she said. “I-It’s okay. M-Mister Seteth is—he’s just on the other s-s-side of the m-monas-s-s—G-Garreg Mach.”

“When I found my way back to the road,” Flayn said, “I—I was considering going on ahead without him. Without my big brother. Without Seteth. I almost gave up on him—when he would _never_ give up on me—”

She began to sob.

 _“El, d-d-do something!”_ Hedwig whispered, distressed.

Edelgard had no choice but to do something. She gently rested her hand on Flayn’s back. “There’s nothing shameful in wanting to survive. It all worked out in the end, didn’t it?” she asked. “You and Seteth found each other again. Now you are both here, and you are both safe and sound. That is all that matters.”

Flayn took her arm and pressed herself against her. “Oh… Edelgard…” She choked back her tears. “I am a bad dau—a bad sister, am I not? If he had not found me before I left—I would have left him behind!”

Her maudlin display of emotion was almost enough to make Edelgard angry—angry, at the very least, on behalf of the _real_ Flayn, who was most likely dead or at the very least undergoing the most ghastly torture imaginable, and on behalf of Seteth, and on behalf of Hedwig—but there was nothing she could do but to play the part of a caring friend.

“Y-You’re n-n-n-not a b-b-bad sister,” Hedwig stammered, clinging to her in a tight and possessive embrace. “You’re a—a g-g-good person. You—You’re k-k-kind to everyone, y-you don’t make f-fun of p-people for how they t-t-talk…”

Flayn continued to weep for a while until her tears had run their course. “You are too kind,” she said, “both of you. You are better friends than I deserve.”

“S-So are you,” Hedwig said, yawning. She laid down and sprawled herself across the bed. Within minutes, she was snoring again. Edelgard found herself envying her for how easily she could fall asleep.

Flayn sniffled and wiped away the last of her crocodile tears. “You have an amazing family, Edelgard. Do you remember, at Arianrhod, when we met your brother Burkhart? He was so kind. And I said to you that I would have liked to have a brother like him… but I do not even deserve the brother I _have.”_ She rested her head on Edelgard’s shoulder. “By the way… I am still afraid of falling asleep… and awaking to find myself alone. Do you… do you still have _your_ nightmares, Edelgard?”

Edelgard was nonplussed. Flayn was an _impostor._ How could she remember a conversation the two of them had had alone, in the middle of the night, over three months ago?

“I have not had time to ask you about it, since we have not been alone,” Flayn said, “but you… You are the other world’s Edelgard still, are you not? The one who lost her family and fought a war?”

That, too, was something that an impostor could not have possibly known—not unless Those Who Slither had some magic or technology that allowed them to rip the memories out of their captives’ heads, which would have made them far more dangerous than they had demonstrated. Could it be that Flayn _wasn’t_ the impostor?

But that would just leave Seteth as the only remaining suspect—and how could _that_ be possible?

Edelgard let her hand slip onto Flayn’s neck. “Flayn… I have been studying a way to help people relax using natural pressure points on their bodies. Do you mind if I try it on you? I might not get it right.”

“Not at all, Edelgard.”

She found the right point on the back of her neck and pressed hard against it. The fact that Flayn allowed her to do this at all should have been proof enough that she wasn’t the impostor, but Edelgard had to make sure. She had to be completely certain.

Nothing happened.

“I do not think it worked,” Flayn said, wincing. “Do you need more practice?”

“It’s fine.” Edelgard let out a relieved sigh, the terrible burden of her crushing paranoia lifting itself from her mind. Flayn was simply Flayn… a girl who sometimes cried out for her father in the middle of the night. “And… yes. It’s still me. I haven’t made it home yet.”

“You must feel awful.”

“I’ve been able to visit there, every once in a while… but nothing permanent. It’s better than nothing, though.”

“That is good. You deserve to find your way home as well.” Flayn snuggled closer to her, extinguishing the light she had held in her hand and letting the darkness of the far-too-early morning flood the room. “While you are here, though, thank you for being my friend.”

Flayn returned to sleep, but Edelgard could not. Her mind turned now to Seteth. The idea that _he_ could be the impostor, the agent of Those Who Slither sent to take her identity and remove the thorn in their side once and for all, made far too little sense. But he had been behaving suspiciously, too—always in the right place at the right time, and not quite himself…

Edelgard held Flayn close now, her heart brimming with sympathy. The first time she had seen her uncle shed his face and reveal the corpse-pale monster hiding underneath had been in itself nearly as painful as the torture she had undergone. No betrayal had ever hurt so much as the day the last of her innocence had been snuffed out.

If Seteth had been replaced, then Flayn had lost the closest and most beloved person in her life. She just didn’t know it yet, and Edelgard dreaded the day when she would.

* * *

That morning, Hedwig and Pascal returned to the oversight of their retainers and Flayn to her brother. At the dining hall, Edelgard revealed her findings to Hubert, Byleth, Hilda, and Jeralt over breakfast, the five of them conversing over their meals in furtive whispers.

 _“Seteth?”_ Hubert repeated, aghast. “But… how can that be?”

“He _has_ been a bit weird,” Hilda noted, setting her elbow on the table and propping her cheek up in her hand. “Like… a little… _too_ nice? I mean, he let _Flayn_ spend a night out with friends. But I’d figured that was just from the trauma. It can change people in unpredictable ways.”

“His demeanor _has_ been softer,” Hubert said, “but that alone should disqualify him. We have not met a single one of these fiends capable of behaving with an ounce of decency.”

“Besides,” Byleth said, “Seteth is too tall.”

Everyone looked at her, bemused.

“I mean if he’s an impostor, he’s too big to take Edelgard’s place.”

“That’s a good point,” Jeralt said, “but then again, Kronya didn’t exactly have the same body type as Glenn.”

“This is preposterous,” Hubert said. “Hilda, you must have pressed on the wrong part of Constance’s neck. We have already established that Lady Rhea knows Seteth and Flayn well enough that neither of them could possibly escape her detection.”

Hilda rolled her eyes. “I don’t cut corners when my _life_ is at stake, Hubert.”

“If Seteth was replaced, then Those Who Slither had the perfect opportunity to do so,” Edelgard said. “Flayn told me that she and him were separated from each other for about two days. Enough time to replace him with a double.”

“I still think it is absurd,” Hubert said.

“I’m with Hubert. _Something’s_ up with him, but if he was one of the creeps, he wouldn’t be working so hard to keep Rhea out of our hair,” Jeralt said.

“Maybe he’s getting instructions from…” Byleth’s green eyes flitted back and forth conspiratorially under knitted eyebrows. _“…‘Future Seteth.’”_

Edelgard hadn’t intended to laugh, and had no idea why she found that funny at all in the first place, but she had. “With everything that is going on, and as strange as things are becoming… you might not be wrong.”

“I say we continue to operate under the assumption that Constance is the impostor,” Hubert said to her. “I trust that you have adequately assessed Flayn, and as for Seteth, well, we have established that it is not possible.”

 _“Hey,”_ Hilda said, wrinkling her nose.

Ignoring her, he picked at his food and went on. “Ferdinand told me she didn’t intend to stay more than a week at first, but hasn’t yet talked about leaving. I suspect that the day she ‘leaves’ Garreg Mach will be the day she intends to steal your identity.”

Byleth nodded. “That makes sense to me.”

The conversation came to an abrupt halt as Archbishop Rhea entered the dining hall. Her shimmering white silk gown, midnight-blue vestments, and ornate headdress that crested her waterfall of luminous mint-green hair made her look out-of-place everywhere in the monastery save for her audience hall and the cathedral.

Edelgard watched Rhea draw nearer, as though gliding across the floor. Every head turned in her direction; it was rare for her to be seen in the dining hall, mingling with the lesser folks.

“Byleth, Edelgard, my children,” Rhea said, her voice soft and breathy, a sad smile brushing across her face. The smile faded. “Jeralt.”

“Rhea,” Jeralt said as noncommittally as possible, though Edelgard could see the tiniest hint of a vein throbbing on his temple.

“We have had far too little time to, as the commoners say… catch up,” Rhea said to Edelgard and Byleth. “I do apologize for being so… forceful last weekend. I have longed for ages to meet someone like the two of you. I would love to have tea with the two of you after Cardinal Aelfric’s funeral service. In fact, speaking of the service… I would like to ask if either of you would like to say a few words on his behalf.”

Jeralt’s brow furrowed, and Edelgard recalled that he had mentioned Aelfric’s name to her once before.

“Jeralt,” Rhea said to him. “I do recall that you and Aelfric were rivals for my dear Sitri’s affections. I hope you will let bygones be bygones today when we commend his soul to the Goddess.”

He rolled his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Byleth said, “but I didn’t know Aelfric at all. I don’t think Edelgard did, either.”

“My professor is right, unfortunately,” Edelgard said, trying to sound sad about it. “Surely there must be someone here who knew Aelfric well and can speak to the kind of man he was.”

“It is not a matter of you two _knowing_ him,” Rhea said, her smile returning. “It is a matter of the blessings and endowments you have both been given by the Goddess. To have you preside over the funeral is more than Aelfric could have ever dreamed of. I recall his excitement when he told me what had happened to you, Byleth. He was a man of great faith.”

“I’m sorry, Archbishop,” Edelgard said, “but in spite of our… endowments, we aren’t people of the cloth. Neither of us have ever presided over a funeral before.”

Rhea slowly nodded. “I understand. You will only need to read from a few mourning scriptures. You may leave his eulogy to me.”

Byleth looked to Jeralt.

“Dunno if we can make it,” he said.

“It is a Sunday, and none of you are busy. Of course, though, some of you may have social obligations far more important than honoring the life of one of the church’s most dedicated philanthropists.” Rhea’s voice, though calm and soft, oozed passive-aggressive sarcasm. “Aelfric… was one of the most devout men I have ever known. He truly loved the Goddess, and all that came forth from her bosom, all of creation…”

 _“Lady Rhea!”_ Seteth’s voice rang out through the dining hall as he entered and honed in on the Archbishop. His cane tapped on the floor with every careful step he took. “There you are. I have something to discuss with you before the funeral.”

There he was again, distracting Rhea, as though he had charged himself with the task of keeping her away from Byleth and Edelgard.

Rhea nodded. “Very well, Seteth,” she said. She looked to Byleth and reached out to her, fingering a lock of her mint-green hair as though appraising the texture of fine Almyran silk. Jeralt glared daggers at her. “Please make your decision as soon as possible. The service is in an hour. And Edelgard…”

Edelgard stiffened. “Yes, Lady Rhea?”

“What has happened to your eye, my child?”

She lifted a hand to the patch covering her eye. “Oh… It’s nothing. Something has been irritating it, so the patch is to stop me from rubbing—”

A warm hand clamped around her wrist and pulled her hand away from the eyepatch. “Let me see.”

“Lady Rhea—” Seteth protested.

Byleth stood up. “Hey,” Jeralt said testily, rising to his feet beside her.

Edelgard tried to wrench herself free of Rhea’s grip as soft fingertips glided over her cheekbone and peeled away the patch. They pressed firmly against her eye, warmth bleeding through her eyelids as she squeezed them shut. An almost intoxicating tingling rushed through her body, flooding her mind. Of all things, she suddenly felt _tired,_ but not just that—she felt _willing_ to fall asleep right then and there.

“Rhea, please,” Seteth said.

Rhea released Edelgard. “Do you feel better now, my child?” she asked her.

Edelgard caught her breath. She felt Hubert’s hand fall to her shoulder, steadying her. The world was spread out before her to her left and to her right; she’d kept the eyepatch on long enough to grow used to her reduced field of vision.

“Rhea, I am afraid this cannot wait any longer,” Seteth said sternly. “May we speak privately in my office?”

“Yes, certainly, Seteth,” Rhea said. She left with him, leaving Edelgard alone and reeling.

“Are you okay?” Byleth asked Edelgard as she regained her composure.

Realizing that every single person in the dining hall was staring at her, Edelgard nodded and put her eyepatch back on, as sheepishly and shamefully as one might cover an unfortunate tear in one’s clothing. Hubert looked shocked, red-faced, as though he’d just bore witness to an intimate act.

_“Excuse me, Lady Edelgard…”_

Next, it was Lorenz’s turn to interrupt, with Ferdinand at his side. “Were you and Professor Byleth truly speaking with Archbishop Rhea just then?” he asked.

“And a very good morning to you, too, Lorenz,” Hubert said, regaining his composure.

“That is incredible,” Ferdinand said, awestruck. “What were you talking about?”

“Nothing,” Hilda said.

“Please! You cannot have been speaking to the archbishop about _nothing,”_ Lorenz said. “And the way she reached out to you—”

“They were talking about nunya,” Jeralt said.

Lorenz’s brow furrowed. “I beg your pardon? What is nunya?”

“Nunya business, you little twerp.”

His face turned beet-red. “Why, I never! Capt— _Mister_ Jeralt, sir! Is that an appropriate way to speak to _anybody,_ let alone a noble scion?”

Hilda chuckled. “Oh, come on, Lorenz, it was funny.”

Lorenz grimaced. “It was _uncouth,_ Hilda.”

“You’ll have to forgive my father,” Byleth said. “He’s never been couth in his life.”

“It seems the archbishop was asking something of you,” Ferdinand said. “I’m sorry, Edelgard, I don’t mean to pry—but I cannot help but be incredibly curious about these intimate moments you share with her.”

“It’s just that if Lady Rhea sees the Goddess within someone,” Edelgard replied, “she will go to any length to draw it out.”

* * *

That afternoon, after Aelfric’s funeral service, Rhea unfortunately found herself occupied with church affairs, or so Seteth claimed, which granted Edelgard some more time to spend with Hedwig, Pascal, and Flayn. The five of them spent what felt like hours in town, browsing the storefronts, enjoying the idyllic sight of the town glazed by a thick blanket of midwinter snow.

The Pegasus Moon, the most bitter and mercifully the shortest month of the year, was only a few days away; soon the worst of the winter’s most miserable winds would come, and the worst of the winter’s most miserable snows, and the worst of its most miserable cold. In so many words, Edelgard was glad she had some excuse to put the weight of the world aside and enjoy at least an hour or two of the last few remotely pleasant days of winter while she could.

She, Hedwig, Pascal, and Flayn returned to the monastery laden with bags of sweets and treats and souvenirs, their cheeks red. Edelgard was afforded so few opportunities to live this kind of life, and if it wasn’t for her younger siblings demanding it, she would have let this opportunity pass her by as well simply out of habit.

The happiness she felt seemed in the moment like the eye of a hurricane, a deceptive moment of blissful calm surrounded by a whirling maelstrom. Soon, the eye would pass, and the winds would return and bring with them devastation.

And as she’d expected, as soon as Hedwig, Pascal, and Flayn had left her side, Edelgard felt her troubles reemerge from the depths of her mind, stronger than before.

Passing by Gilbert and Shamir in the great hall did not exactly help. It seemed Shamir had returned from her hunt for Cornelia while Edelgard had been in town, and from the sour frown pulled tightly across her normally inexpressive face, it was plain to see that the hunt had not yielded good results.

 _“I am glad you returned safe and sound,”_ she heard Gilbert say to Shamir as she subtly sidled behind one of the great stone pillars lining the hall and inched toward them. _“And with your faculties intact. I heard from Lady Catherine what Cornelia is capable of and prayed that the Goddess would protect you from meeting such a fate. I fear this news bodes ill, though. House Rusalka will not—”_

Gilbert stopped, as though he’d caught sight of something distracting. Edelgard pressed herself against the pillar, flattening her profile as much as possible.

_“Perhaps this is better discussed in private.”_

_“Shouldn’t we go straight to Captain Jeralt with this?”_ Shamir asked him.

He coughed and cleared his throat awkwardly. _“I am sorry, but you have missed an… eventful week. I shall explain later.”_

Gilbert and Shamir hurried down the hall, the tapping of their boots against the floor echoing sharply and fading away. It wouldn’t be easy for Edelgard to find out what Gilbert had been about to say—with Jeralt expelled from the knights and due to leave the monastery in just a few days, her most reliable connection to the knights’ intelligence and operations had been severed.

Cornelia was up to something, and Edelgard had as of yet no way to learn what it was. The next stage of the machinations of Those Who Slither in the Dark? Did it have anything to do with the second research facility mentioned in Dedue’s intercepted communiques? Whatever it was, unless she could glean the information out of someone soon, it would blindside her just as it had so many of their other wicked plots.

She would have to speak to Hubert about it right away. He was perhaps the only one in the monastery crafty enough, at least in potentia, to uncover that information—save for Claude von Riegan.

Claude von Riegan, who, as it turned out, was the next worrying sight her eyes met.

She found him while cutting through the courtyard on the way back to the dormitories—or, to be more accurate, _he_ found _her_.

“You’ve been having Time Squad meetings without me,” he said to her, almost as if he were pouting.

Edelgard crossed her arms. “Until we can better trust you, Claude, as far as I’m concerned there _is_ no Time Squad.”

Claude laid a hand on his chest, his mouth agape in a shocked and hurt O. “Edelgard… that _hurts.”_

“And do you know how much it hurts to know that you’ve been working with Dedue this whole time?” Edelgard asked.

“You figured it out, huh?”

“I can’t say there are many other options for who your ‘confidential source’ is. At this rate, it’s either Dedue or Thales himself.”

“Touche. But, of course, I might be concealing the identity of _another_ No-Eyes that none of you know about yet.”

“Start being honest, Claude. There is no ‘Future Claude,’ is there? You made that story up to avoid outing Dedue as your secret source.”

Claude smirked. “Well… I can’t really say I don’t have a future, can I?”

“I want to know why it’s so important to Dedue that all of our attempts to tell Dimitri the truth must fail. Why have you been sabotaging us for him? Why are you helping Those Who Slither in the Dark?”

“Hilda tells me _you_ helped them, too.”

“It was a partnership of convenience, and I couldn’t wait to be rid of them.”

“But you _had_ to wait, didn’t you? You had to let them stick around for a lot longer than you’d have liked… if you wanted to achieve your goals.”

“Is that what the two of you are doing?” Edelgard asked, rankled. “The same thing I did?”

“And would that upset you? Have I stumbled upon some little bit of self-loathing you’ve kept hidden, Princess?”

 _“Self-loathing?_ Don’t be absurd. What they’re doing in this world is far more dangerous than what they did in mine. If _I_ was playing with fire, _you’re_ daring yourself to stick your hand into an inferno.”

“Dedue’s told you to back off, hasn’t he?” Claude asked her. “If I were you, I’d listen to him. Your first priority should be getting home, not appointing yourself the savior of two worlds.”

“Excuse me?”

“Look, I didn’t bring you and Hilda together and start up Time Squad so you could play some key role in the liberation of Fódlan. The original mission of Time Squad, of investigating Solon and figuring out what the No-Eyes were doing, was to get you two back to your own world. If I made some progress in my mission along the way with your help, well, that was just an added perk. But things have changed.” His jade green eyes were as cold as ice, his glare unusually stern. The look on his face made him look harder, older, more weary of the world, as though he’d suddenly aged five years. “You’re the kind of person who thinks she’s the only one who can solve everyone else’s problems, aren’t you? No wonder they called you a tyrant back in your world. But if you keep that attitude up here, you’re going to die, and you’ll never see your wife again. Is that what you want, Edelgard?”

Edelgard grabbed him by the collar. She was very good at suppressing the urge to punch people in the face, which she was grateful for because otherwise Claude would be half-buried in a snowdrift with blood gushing from his nose right now. “Don’t you dare speak to me as though I were a child. No matter what Hilda might have told you, you have no idea the hardships I’ve gone through, the sacrifices I’ve made, the lengths I’ve gone, the blood these hands have been stained with. Do you think you can put an end to Those Who Slither in the Dark by _yourself?_ Even _I_ wasn’t so foolish.”

“Of course not.” Claude ripped himself free of her grasp, shrugging out of his cloak and slipping away to leave her clutching an empty black shroud. “It’d just be a shame if someone as interesting as you died again.”

A phantom pain pierced Edelgard’s eye. _“What?”_ she hissed, throwing the cloak aside and chasing after him. But Claude was swifter than her, as he always was. The most of him she could catch was a fistful of his raven’s-wing black hair that slipped through her fingers like flowing water. _“Claude!”_

She gritted her teeth and held back a silent curse.

She was at her wit’s end. She had to find Hubert. Where had he gotten to?

Her search led her through the dormitories until Ferdinand told her he thought he’d seen him returning to the cathedral some time after Aelfric’s funeral. Edelgard never would have expected that herself, still too used to the Hubert she knew best, and hurried across the bridge that crossed the vast ravine separating the cathedral from the rest of Garreg Mach. Fog swirled like a sea of clouds beneath the sturdy stone bridge as the sun, a weak pinprick leaking through the clouds, began to sink lower and lower toward the horizon, lengthening faint shadows.

As Ferdinand had expected, Edelgard found Hubert in the cathedral. The dying daylight bleeding through the windows fell upon him, rendering him a blotch of shadow on the tile floor as he knelt before the altar of Saint Seiros.

“Hubert,” she called out, keeping her voice low. As she neared him, she could see that he was shivering. And not from the cold. “Is something wrong?” she asked, resting a hand on his shoulder.

“Lady Edelgard,” he rasped, his voice faltering. He shook his head. “No, no. It is nothing for you to concern yourself with, Your Highness.”

To say something was _bothering_ him would have been an understatement. His tone was so quiet, so fragile, that he seemed close to tears. Edelgard had to remind herself that this man was not the Hubert she knew, the bloodstained shadow that slithered in her wake to lessen the blood that stained her hands, but rather one who had had an altogether easier life in just about every way, albeit perhaps significantly more frustrating.

“What are you praying about?” she asked. At the very least, she knew that digging to the root of Hubert’s distress would be as difficult in this world as in her own. He had never thought it was appropriate for her to concern herself with his problems, no matter how she pried.

“I am praying for your health and safety, of course,” he said. Edelgard knew it was a half-truth at best.

“You’re distraught.”

“Should I _not_ be?”

“Are you _that_ worried about me?” she asked him.

Hubert was silent for a while. “Lady Edelgard,” he rasped after a long pause, “what is my other self like?”

Edelgard was taken aback. “Well… he has a sinister demeanor and revels in his villainous affectations, but beneath that, those close to him find him to be surprisingly caring… and proud to be utterly devoted to those he cares about. He can be ruthless, underhanded, even cruel sometimes, but only in service of what he believes in.”

“And what does he believe in?”

“Me.”

Hubert let out a sigh and shook his head. “I still remember, when this madness first started and you began behaving strangely… as I recall, you accused me of being an atheist. I take it my counterpart…”

“After what happened to me as a child,” Edelgard said, “he couldn’t see any sense in trusting the Goddess’ grace. I didn’t return to him safe and sound in my world, as your Edelgard did to you. I returned to him broken and alone, and for years after that we had no one else, neither human nor divine, aside from each other.”

“What happened to you?”

“The same thing that happened to Dimitri.”

Hubert remained silent a while longer, absorbing what she’d told him, and then stood up, pulling his dark cloak tightly over his shoulders. He couldn’t meet her eyes, hanging his head low so that his gaze remained fixed on the ornate tiles lining the floor. “Lady Edelgard… I was not praying for your health and safety,” he admitted. “I was hoping for an answer from the Goddess.”

“To what?”

“To… to _you,”_ he said, gritting his teeth and clenching his jaw as though holding back a sob. “I was praying that you would return to your world and return the Lady Edelgard I knew to this one. I… I thought I could serve you as I served her, but _you_ are…” He looked away, still averting his eyes as though ashamed.

“Hubert…”

“I—I have had enough of you. I have had enough of your plots, and your plans, and sneaking and skulking around. I have had enough of constantly worrying what horrible events you will find yourself—and _myself—_ dragged into next. I have had enough of what you have said of beasts within the church and devils without. I miss when Ferdinand and I had to drag you out of bed for our morning lectures or nag you about doing your classwork. I miss when the most pressing concern on my mind was making sure you did not embarrass yourself, not _this!”_ He held out his arms. “You, with all your dangerous ambitions… are _exhausting,_ Lady Edelgard. And I cannot stand it.”

Edelgard was taken aback. If there was one flaw her world’s Hubert possessed, it was that he was always reluctant to speak his mind to her. Though he was perfectly capable of and willing to take things into his own hands and defy her orders if she directed him in a way he disapproved of, he would keep any complaints and disagreements to himself, even if she wanted to hear them. This world’s Hubert, though, had finally reached his limit.

“I cannot even have my faith anymore. After breakfast, when Lady Rhea touched you, I was horrified. All through Cardinal Aelfric’s service, I could not stop feeling sick, knowing that she looks at you the way a hungry dog stares at a piece of meat just out of its grasp.” Hubert’s eyes were watery, brimming with tears. “I have been begging the Goddess to take it all back, to take you back, to erase what you have planted in my mind… to let me feel _safe_ again. I feel as though you are trying to mold me into the Hubert you know… and while I am sure you have the highest opinion of him, I do not think I _want_ to be him.”

The sight of her retainer struggling to keep from weeping was so bizarre to Edelgard that for a moment she had no idea what to do. By the time she had the presence of mind to take out a handkerchief to offer him, he had started trembling anew and the tears he’d struggled so hard to keep back had begun rolling down his cheeks.

“Hubert,” Edelgard said, reaching up to offer him the handkerchief, “nothing is more important to me than returning to my own world. But to do that, I need you. If my ambitions are dangerous, it is only because our enemies have _made_ them so. They must be defeated. And I trust you to help me.”

He dried his eyes. “Lady Edelgard… is _my_ Edelgard making as much of a mess of your life as you are of hers?”

“She’s trying her best not to,” she answered.

“And you could not extend to her the same courtesy?!” he snapped, wrinkling his nose and brow in disgust. He stormed off, and Edelgard found herself rooted to the floor in shock, staring at his back as he left her.

Finding herself dazed and disgusted at both herself and Hubert, Edelgard chose to skip dinner and instead used the last of the daylight to cram in some last-minute studying of the magical tomes in the library. As much as she found it difficult to focus, she pushed herself to take diligent notes and work slowly and carefully through her equations. Mathematics was the underpinning of the seals that governed most black magic and dark magic spells, and one could not conjure so much as a spark without developing a firm understanding of those equations. The trigonometry she’d had to immerse herself in to learn fire magic paled in comparison to the calculus governing dark magic, and she wondered how her world’s Hubert had mastered it. If only he or Lysithea were here, they could probably tutor her easily.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t have the luxury of being alone in the library, and more unfortunately, the other student getting in some last-minute research was Arcturus von Ordelia.

As he finished his studies and put away his books, he glanced over her shoulder. “Try to be more careful with your pen, princess,” he sneered before striding away.

Edelgard looked down and realized for the first time that blotches of black dye had stained her fingertips, leaving black fingerprints with all their whorls and ridges imprinted on the pages of both her notebook and the tome she’d been studying.

She told herself that at least with the day over, it couldn’t get any worse.

As though to disagree with her, though, her stomach whined pitifully.

* * *

A few days later, the Guardian Moon came to an end.

Edelgard was glad she and Byleth had managed to avoid Rhea through the weekend, though they had Seteth to thank for that. However he was managing to constantly keep her busy at just the right moment, suspicious as it was, she had to be grateful. Still, though, with the rest of her classmates yet to return and Hubert still upset with her, she felt especially naked.

A few day’s worth of diligent study in the hours of daylight felt strange with Byleth and Edelgard as the only Blue Lions remaining on the academy grounds. Edelgard found herself thinking of her classmates often—and her uncle. By the end of the month, they all should have been well on their way back from Arundel territory, but what stories would they bring with them? Would her uncle Volkhard be okay? How badly was Dimitri chafing under the command of a Knight of Seiros, and Thunder Catherine no less? Would the unrest in the land have cost the lives of innocents? Had it been a part of Dedue’s plot to begin with, and had he been forced to crush one of his own guerrilla cells to keep up appearances?

But the last day of the Guardian Moon brought a more important worry to the forefront of her mind: Jeralt’s last day at Garreg Mach.

The sky was gray that day, pale like corpse-skin, and the wind felt colder than usual. That morning, when Byleth would normally be teaching her morning lecture to the Blue Lions, she, Edelgard, Leonie, and Jeralt met outside Hapi’s guard tower to say farewell.

Jeralt hadn’t come to the monastery with much more than what could fit in his horse’s saddlebags, and he left with just as much. As much as he hadn’t been enthusiastic about being press-ganged back into service, the prospect of being forced to leave Garreg Mach again seemed to weigh heavily on him; he seemed worn down, forlorn, and everything about him seemed to be wilting.

“Well,” he said, surveying the plains of snow and watching Hapi chaperone a cluster of tiny kittens struggling to navigate the snowdrifts on their unsteady legs. Since he didn’t exactly have many obligations, he spent most of his day watching her. “This is it, I guess.”

“Isn’t there anything else you can do, Captain?” Leonie asked. “I’m sure there’s an inn in town you can stay at for at least a few weeks. I’ll chip in if it’ll help, and I’m sure plenty of the knights would—”

“Money’s tight, kid,” he grunted with a noncommittal shrug. “Don’t worry. I’m meeting with the rest of the Blade Breakers near Remire—near where Remire _used_ to be. From there, it’s back to the good old days of mercenary work. Got a feeling there’s gonna be a lot of it soon.” He looked to Byleth, his face softening. “You, kiddo—I hope you can keep your distance between yourself and Rhea. Good luck with the teaching thing; you’re a natural at it—”

“I’m quitting after my students graduate,” Byleth said to him.

Jeralt looked taken aback, but only for a moment. “Well… it’s probably for the best. Shame. You have a real knack for it.” He put his arms around her and pressed her to his chest. “So, what will you be doing after you quit?”

“I’ll find you,” she said matter-of-factly.

 _“We’ll_ find you,” Leonie corrected. “Sorry, Captain, but I’m not done being your apprentice just yet. And don’t you dare tell me otherwise!”

He let out a self-effacing laugh. “Alright. If you really can’t find anything better to do when you’re done here, go ahead and try to find me. But if you take care of Hapi and get her changed back, you bring her with me.”

“Of course,” Byleth said. “As long as Edelgard doesn’t have any objections.”

“She can go where she pleases,” Edelgard said, keeping an eye on Hapi and her adopted litter. She couldn’t quite say for sure, but Hapi seemed to be enjoying herself. The kittens were a handful of gray Bergliez shorthairs and orange Riegan tabbies, and like all orange cats, the tabbies seemed to be especially stupid as they fumbled around. “But I think she’d be fine going with you.”

“And, if you keep her alive,” Jeralt told Leonie, “then consider yourself no longer my apprentice. Everyone’s gotta grow up sometime, kid, and I’m running out of things to teach you.”

A smile crossed Leonie’s face. “I’ll be the judge of that. And I just told you not to dare tell me otherwise!”

“As for you…” Jeralt took Edelgard aside, far enough away from the others that they couldn’t be heard if they whispered. “Keep Byleth safe, okay?”

“That is a given, Dad,” she said to him. “Do you honestly think I wouldn’t?”

He grinned. “Yeah, you’re right. And look after yourself, too. You’ve still got to get back to your own world. Tell your world’s Byleth all the stuff I couldn’t tell her, okay?”

“Of course.”

“Like that she chose a damn good woman to marry.”

Edelgard nearly choked on her spit. Jeralt slapped her on the back.

“But really—I hope I’m not the only one a little creeped out that Rhea’s still interested in you, considering you didn’t go all… green. I got a feeling that whatever she’s had planned for my girl, she’s got something even weirder planned for _you.”_

Edelgard shuddered, recalling with unease how eager Rhea always was to lay hands on her. “I know how you feel. Between her and Those Who Slither, we’re certainly caught between a rock and a hard place.”

“Well, when you leap out of this frying pan, just make sure you don’t find yourself in the fire.” Jeralt watched Hapi pick up all six kittens by the scruffs of their necks at once and carry them closer to the entrance to the tower. “And when you finally get a chance to see your wife again, tell her I’m sorry I didn’t tell her I loved her enough. Because I probably didn’t. I probably don’t in this world either.”

Edelgard glanced over at Byleth. “You can fix that right now.”

Jeralt glanced at Byleth, then back at Hapi. “I don’t think you understand men, Your Highness.”

“Perhaps not,” Edelgard countered, “but I understand emotional constipation well enough.”

He let out a sharp laugh. “Got me there. Hey, Hapi!” he called out. Hapi turned her head and looked straight at him, but like most cats, did nothing else in response. “I’m leaving! Wanna say goodbye?”

Hapi, like most cats, either ignored him or pretended to ignore him.

“Well, that’s that, then,” he said. “I’d better go before the knights find me and I end up having to personally say goodbye to half the fucking monastery.” He went to Byleth and whispered something in her ear, his face turning red. She hugged him and his face turned redder.

Jeralt left, but before he could get far, Hapi decided that she did, in fact, want to say goodbye, and decided she would do so by catching up to him and flopping down onto the snow in front of him. Her size made her quite an effective roadblock.

As Jeralt obliged Hapi’s unspoken request and took some time to vigorously scratch her ears, Edelgard drew a bit closer to Byleth, wondering if it would be appropriate to take her hand. In her own world, she wouldn’t have given such a thing a second thought, but this world and its people filled her with doubts, moreso now that even Hubert had begun losing patience with her.

Byleth took her hand anyway, gave it a firm squeeze, and then went off after Jeralt to see him away. Edelgard stood by, holding the hand Byleth had taken as though it were a rare and fragile ornament.

On her way back from the lawn that stretched from the monastery’s walls to the academy grounds, she found Thales loitering near the dormitories, just outside a cluster of students. Though she changed her course to steer clear of him, he approached her.

“Good morning, Lady Edelgard,” he said. “I thought you would be busy studying this morning, not cavorting with the monastery cats. I didn’t think they _had_ such big ones here.” His gaze was fixed on Hapi, whose scarlet fur stood out like a bloodstain against the snow.

He put his hand on her shoulder. Edelgard gritted her teeth, but her body had frozen. “She looks _happy,_ doesn’t she, dear El?” he asked with a mocking sneer. “I suppose you and your friends must be working quite hard to find a way to reverse what that horrible witch Cornelia did to her. But I don’t think you’ll have much luck.”

Edelgard felt his hand travel to her neck, his touch colder than the snow and the wind. He wouldn’t do anything—not with so many people nearby—but it was clear he knew how easily he could kill her.

He let go of her and stepped back. “A beast like that, going as it pleases, endangering the students, could get into so much trouble… you should take care somebody doesn’t make a winter cloak out of her. Excuse me. Unfortunately, I have to speak with Seteth about something. Do take care.”

“Is he still bothering you?” Edelgard asked. Whatever Seteth was doing, if it kept both Rhea and Thales away from her, she was grateful.

“Yes… but he won’t be for long.” With a sweep of his fur-lined cloak, Thales turned his back on her and departed.

* * *

As it turned out, it was Constance’s last day as well; Hubert’s theory from Sunday morning that her ‘departure’ would give her the cover to take on her new identity weighed heavily on Edelgard’s mind. Watching Constance fly off on Deimos and vanish into the gray sky, rather than bring any sense of relief, only strengthened the intensity of Edelgard’s dread.

Perhaps she’d lain low enough over the past few days that she wouldn’t be replaced. But why would Those Who Slither in the Dark give up so easily?

“You were far too standoffish with her, Edelgard,” Ferdinand chastised her as Deimos vanished into a black speck against the gray sky and disappeared. “You need to be more sociable. You were once so _good_ at that. By the way,” he added, crossing his arms, “do you know what has gotten over Hubert? He has been in a sour mood for days. I procured for him a bag of his favorite coffee beans and he is still brooding! Have the two of you had some sort of disagreement?”

“I wouldn’t call it a disagreement,” Edelgard told him, shifting her feet uncomfortably. “He is simply under a lot of stress. Perhaps he just needs some time to himself.” Normally, she would be worried to not have him by her side when danger lurked close by, but this world’s Hubert had shown to her quite plainly how ill-equipped he was to handle his counterpart’s job, especially if he was _still_ sulking.

“I see.” Ferdinand nodded. “I admit I am at a loss. Usually, he confides in me, but as of late he has been insisting on carrying many secret burdens by himself, no matter how much I pry.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Edelgard assured him. “Do you know where he is?”

“Out riding, I would think. As _you_ ought to be, if you are serious about passing the valkyrie exam.”

“Noted,” she said.

On her way to see Hubert and talk some sense into him—she understood his plight perfectly well, but he couldn’t simply abandon his duties, especially _now—_ Edelgard crossed the great hall and found another arrival at the monastery awaiting her.

Count Sigmund Ulrik Galatea had come to Garreg Mach, clad in dour black clothing that clung to his gaunt frame and with little more than two bags of clothes accompanying him. The thinning blonde hair that sat in wisps upon his head was withered like dying flowers, and his green eyes were downcast and dark as looming rainclouds.

His expression brightened just a little at the sight of Edelgard at the gate. “Lady Edelgard von Hresvelg, Your Highness,” he said, his voice creaking like a door hinge in desperate need of oiling. “A pleasure to meet you again, though these circumstances are far from pleasurable.” Still, he mustered a little half-smile that tugged on only one corner of his mouth. “Would you happen to know where my daughter is? And His Majesty?”

“Unfortunately,” Edelgard told him, “the rest of the Blue Lions are away. I take it you’re here for Glenn’s funeral service. It’s been postponed until the class returns; I think they should be back tomorrow.”

He nodded sadly. “Understandable. I take it Lord Fraldarius is here as well?”

She was well aware that telling him no wouldn’t technically count as a lie. “Yes,” she said. “And in quite poor spirits, I’m afraid.”

“It is hard to bury two sons,” he said. “To bury the same son twice… I cannot imagine. I had hoped to ask him why he insisted that His Majesty’s coronation be kept a secret, but perhaps I should not bother him with such topics now. It seems these are dark times for all of us. I heard you recently lost your father as well.”

Edelgard nodded. “Unfortunately… yes. He passed away last month. Due to the turmoil that has gripped the capital, we have yet to even hold his funeral.”

Count Galatea gave her a sad, sympathetic smile. “My apologies.” He let out a sigh. “My sons tell me you danced with my daughter at the winter ball,” he said, forcing his smile to grow warmer as part of his awkward attempt to lighten the mood. “I had not thought she would even attend. Though she should by all rights be a proper woman now, forcing her into a dress is still almost impossible. I only wish I could have seen her in it.”

Just thinking about the ball and how she’d behaved in front of Ingrid still made Edelgard feel ashamed. “It was a lovely dress,” she lied to him, since he seemed so fragile and fraught right now that pointing out what he was wrong about might shatter him like a delicate glass vase.

Fortunately, Alois arrived to save Edelgard from making any more small talk with Ingrid’s father. “Count Galatea! Welcome to Garreg Mach,” he said, giving him a firm handshake. “We’ve been expecting you. Why don’t I take your bags for you? We’ve got a room prepared for you—sorry, it’s in the monks’ quarters, so it might not be what you’re accustomed to…”

“It is fine. One does not come to Garreg Mach expecting the finest of bedding.” He followed Alois away.

Byleth returned through the front gate soon after Count Galatea had come through. “Dad’s gone,” she told Edelgard, her tone flat and dour, her eyes dull and downcast.

“I’m sorry,” Edelgard said, resisting the urge to pull her into an embrace. “You’ll make do without him, though. Just trust me.”

Byleth nodded. “I know. I just hope he doesn’t worry.”

“Of course he’ll worry,” Edelgard told her. “But it is up to us to show him that his fears are unfounded.”

A faint smile crossed Byleth’s face.

“You must be bored without the rest of our class. Are you in the mood for some sparring later today, Professor?”

That seemed to excite her a little. “Of course.”

The two of them walked together through the monastery. A maelstrom of worries clung to Edelgard’s mind and her eye throbbed under its patch, twinging with its usual phantom pain, but at least with her professor at her side she felt safe.

“Speaking of worries,” Edelgard said, “Professor, I could use your advice. Hubert’s had enough of me; I fear I’ve pushed him too hard to be more like his counterpart in my world. Between him, Dedue’s warnings, and now Claude… I want to return home more than anything, and yet…”

Hubert’s parting words from their conversation at the cathedral rang in her ears.

“I’ve made quite a mess of the other Edelgard’s life, haven’t I? It seems that every action I’ve been taking drives me deeper into an inescapable morass… one she will be set to inherit, if I’m not killed first.” She pressed her hands tightly together to keep them warm, nervously kneading them. “In my world, I subjected my friends to the same fate, binding them to a goal that even I often thought seemed impossible and would likely end in death for all of us. But they _chose_ that path. I told them I would walk a path of thorns and leave a trail of blood and gave them every chance to step aside or even oppose me if they wished. Professor… do I have the right,” she asked, staring down at unblemished and unscarred hands, “to walk that path in this body?”

Byleth thought for a moment. “Well,” she said to her, “what _else_ can you do?”

“That’s what I’m wondering. Those Who Slither in the Dark have us surrounded. They have knives to our throats and the throats of our friends, myself twice over…” Edelgard reflected on Dedue’s parting words. “Perhaps even my… mother. My teacher, in another life, you gave me the courage to choose a path that forced many unwilling people to suffer and die, so that I could create a world in which no one else would have to suffer as they did. But now I find myself hesitating yet again. My counterpart has spent these past four months tormenting herself on my behalf, forcing herself to live my life and take on my incredible burdens in my stead when she could easily cast them all aside, but I haven’t preserved her life in return.”

“Do you think she’d have wanted you to have done nothing?” Byleth asked. She reached out, brushed aside a lock of Edelgard’s hair, and traced her eyepatch with her fingertips. It didn’t feel the way it had when Rhea had done it. It was a touch that was not only gentle but kind and empathetic, with a welcome warmth. Not intrusion, but outreach. “We have to save Dimitri,” she said, and that was it.

There was no other possible answer. If she couldn’t save Dimitri from his own delusions, then who else could?

The tapping of a cane followed them.

 _“Professor Byleth, Lady Edelgard.”_ Seteth’s voice reached their ears ahead of them. Byleth politely came to a halt and allowed him to catch up with her. “May I speak to you in private?”

“About what?” Byleth asked.

“Something important,” Seteth said. His single green eye was hard and cold, set in his stern face like a gemstone. “I do not wish to speak of it out here. We must talk in my office.” There was something unnerving about the urgency in his voice.

“Is everything alright?” Byleth asked. “Is it about Flayn?”

“It is about Lady Rhea. Please. I am very busy and I confess I have little time to spare.” He turned around and walked off, expecting them to follow. “I have been meaning to speak to you for days, but grossly underestimated how much paperwork had accumulated in my absence, as well as how much supervision Rhea has required from me.”

Byleth and Edelgard followed him, though Edelgard found herself oddly hesitant. Seteth was behaving too oddly. For so many reasons, it was still improbable bordering on ridiculous that _he_ of all people could have been the agent sent by Those Who Slither—if he was, then wouldn’t he have assassinated Archbishop Rhea already?—but Edelgard could not help but allow that paranoid fantasy to stake its claim on her mind.

Byleth drew her aside. _“Don’t worry,”_ she whispered. _“This past week, I’ve been practicing using Sothis’ power while everyone was sleeping. I think I’ve got it. If anything goes wrong, I’ll turn back time. I can do it now; I’m sure of it.”_

“I believe in you, Professor,” Edelgard said.

They followed Seteth across the monastery grounds, through the great hall, up the stairs to the faculty offices and studies. Every tap of Seteth’s cane on the floor, sharp and resonant, sounded like the ticking of a clock.

The three of them reached Seteth’s study. “Please, sit down,” he said, gesturing to the chairs in front of his desk as he shut the door behind them.

Behind the tapping of his cane, Edelgard heard the sharp click of a lock sliding into place. Sparks of flame coalesced in her hand almost as though by instinct. Byleth was tense, every muscle under her skin like a coiled spring. Edelgard stared at the back of Seteth’s neck. If she tackled him to the floor and jabbed him in the right place, she would be able to drop his disguise and reveal himself; if she was mistaken, which she hoped she was, Byleth could turn back time.

An unfamiliar smirk tugged at the corner of Seteth’s mouth for a split second as he turned to face them. He took a deep breath. “Professor Byleth, Lady Edelgard… Pan the Tactician sends his regards.”


	30. Jamais Vu

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard and Byleth have a conversation with Punished "Venom" Seteth that changes everything, the Enlightened One outfit gets thoroughly roasted, and Rhea's mommy issues are revealed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas! Your present is PAIN
> 
> (next chapter is the breather, I promise)

The look on Seteth’s face, the smirk tugging at the corner of his lips and twisting the faded scars on his face, the gleam in his eye, did not suit him in the slightest. It was unnerving; Edelgard felt as though she and Byleth had suddenly stepped into the presence of a stranger. Dread curdled in her stomach and icy fingers seized her heart.

Edelgard was certain of it. She and Byleth had stepped into a locked room with a member of Those Who Slither in the Dark.

“Professor Byleth, Lady Edelgard,” Seteth said, taking a deep breath. “Pan the Tactician sends his regards.”

His words hung in the air.

“You knew Pan the Tactician?” Byleth asked, her brow furrowing in befuddlement.

 _“Professor,”_ Edelgard hissed. She held out her palm, gathering sparks to form an orb of roiling fire. “You,” she said to Seteth, “unlock the door and let us out or I’ll—”

Seteth held up his hands, palms facing outward. “Calm yourself, Edelgard. I mean you no harm. Now, to answer _your_ question, Professor, yes, I did know Pan the Tactician. Though I knew him first as Ashe Ubert, and then as Pan, and later as Leon Duran.”

Edelgard didn’t let up. “Unlock that door or I will step over your charred corpse and take the keys myself. You’re not Seteth. You’re one of _them.”_ Out of the corner of her eye she could see Byleth’s hand curling around the hilt of her dagger.

“Yes,” Seteth said. “It’s true that I’m not Seteth. But I’m not your enemy. Actually, we’ve met before, in—”

Byleth grabbed one of the chairs and swung it at him. The chair’s wooden legs shattered against his body, and in a flurry of wood and splinters he fell to the floor. She tossed the broken chair aside, grabbed him, and hauled him onto the desk, wiping away its cluttered piles of books and papers onto the floor. “Help me hold him down,” she grunted to Edelgard.

Edelgard took him by the arms and pinned him against the desk as Byleth took her dagger and held it to his throat.

“Back of the neck,” Byleth said.

“A good feint,” Seteth said, “but unnecessary. I’m not here to—”

 _“Back of the neck,”_ she repeated, and Edelgard let go of one of his arms to press her thumb as deeply as she could into the base of his neck.

“No need to manhandle me,” the impostor said. “I’m not interested in harming either of you.” He looked up at Edelgard, furrowing his brow. “What are you doing?”

Nonplussed—why, she thought, wasn’t it working?—she stepped back. “Removing your disguise…”

“Only amateurs keep the physical disengage in the vertebra promenis.”

“That’s… that’s where Kronya had it,” Byleth mumbled.

“As I said. Mine, in case you must know, is directly behind my left earlobe. Go ahead. Try it.”

With a skeptical frown Edelgard slipped her hand into his hair, felt around for his ear, and pressed down on the spot behind it.

Seteth vanished. The man who replaced him was just a bit taller but slighter and slimmer; his skin had a corpselike gray pallor to it and his ashen face, hard-edged and androgynous, was framed by a strong jaw and sharp nose; his hair, ice-blonde with an oddly opalescent sheen to it, fell from his scalp in a curtain of long, spidery wisps; his visible eye was pure white, pupil and iris both blending into the sclera with only faint gray demarcation lines to separate them, but was piercing nonetheless. Sharp black geometric tattoos, all lines and angles, ran down his brow, bisecting his eyes and rolling down his cheeks. One of his hands was metal, steel plates shaped in the image of a human hand bound to a mass of tiny bits of machinery more intricate than the most precise clockwork; like Seteth’s hand, it was missing two fingers.

Byleth stared down at him, eyes wide, jaw slack with horror.

“I’m sure you don’t recognize me,” he said, his bluish lips curling in a wry smile. His true voice was deeper than Seteth’s, a resonant and sonorous drawl, and he spoke without Seteth’s clipped and formal tones. His voice was vaguely familiar, though Edelgard couldn’t place it. “After all, from my perspective, it’s been four hundred years or so, I think. I don’t look the same as I did during the temporal resonance cascade.”

The jargon sounded familiar to Edelgard, though she couldn’t understand heads or tails of it.

“Remire,” he added, noting her and Byleth’s blank stares. “I helped your friend Ashe… Please tell me you know what I’m talking about. I know you humans have better memories than this; it was only a few months ago from your perspectives…”

“You were the mage who fell into the vortex with him,” Edelgard realized. Deep down, she was filled with a tangled mess of revulsion and something that almost felt like equal parts relief and worry, but she forced herself to remain calm.

“There we go.” He smiled. “Why don’t we put the knives away and properly introduce ourselves? You two need none, but my name is Vual.”

Byleth furrowed her brow and narrowed her eyes. “Did you kill Seteth?”

“What? Let me explain—”

“You killed Seteth?”

“Wait—”

The blade dug into his throat. _“You killed Seteth!”_

Edelgard grabbed Byleth by the wrist and wrenched the dagger away from Vual. “Professor,” she said, “wait. We should hear him out at least.”

Vual wiped away a thin and shallow line of oozing black blood from his throat. “Thank you, Edelgard.”

“What have you done with Seteth?” she asked him. She still couldn’t believe that the person she had thought was Seteth actually _was_ an impostor. It had been such an easy scenario to dismiss. For starters, how had Rhea failed to detect him?

But the evidence was staring her in the face with a cold, empty white eye.

Vual sat up, bracing his arms against the table. Seteth’s clothes hung on him due to his slighter and thinner physique. He was just a bit taller than Seteth, and if he had been able to disguise himself down to the last detail, then he could probably disguise himself as anybody. Was he the one Thales had sent to replace her?

“Seteth,” he said, clearing his throat, “is probably alive.”

“Probably?” Byleth repeated, arching her eyebrows. Her tone was cold and sharp, and Edelgard could see by the harsh glint of her emerald eyes that she still desperately wanted to put her dagger to his throat.

“I couldn’t bring myself to see him terminated. Just after I’d fine-tuned my disguise and before I set out from our encampment, I made sure to provide him with an opportunity to escape. Whether he took that opportunity is up to him.” Seeing the way she was still glaring at him, he added, “Perhaps I should start at the beginning.”

She wore a tight-lipped scowl, but said nothing in response.

He slid off of the desk and sat down in his chair. “Excuse me,” he said, and with a flash of violet sparks his disguise returned. “I would tell you to take a seat,” he said in Seteth’s voice, “but since you’ve ruined one of my chairs, Professor, one of you will have to stand.” As soon as he’d donned the disguise, his manner of speaking changed completely, not just his voice—less casual, sterner. He sounded exactly like Seteth.

Byleth nudged Edelgard toward the remaining chair, and she sat down. Her legs felt weak, as though she’d just ran a lap around the monastery’s walls.

“When you last saw me, I was one of Solon’s mages,” Vual said. “More specifically, I was a temporal mechanics engineer for Operation Antediluvia. That was before Ashe and I were taken to the year 735. We did not exactly arrive unscathed; as I recall, you’ve seen the results of our… failed experiments in Zanado.” He rubbed his arm gingerly. “I lost my arm and part of my leg. Ashe got a haircut—he always was the lucky one. Though just minutes prior, we’d been enemies, and I admit I didn’t have the highest opinion of you primitive savages, he insisted on helping me.”

“That sounds like Ashe,” Byleth admitted, her tone softening just a bit. Edelgard had to admit herself, if _anybody_ could befriend one of Those Who Slither, it would be him. “But why didn’t he mention you in any of his letters?” she asked him.

“He would not have mentioned me by name,” he replied. “Not by _this_ name, anyway. Perhaps, though, he mentioned the godfather to two of his children?” He cocked his head. “No? Ah, well, nevertheless, as I came to know him… I will admit that you people grew on me.” He took a deep breath. “Now, after centuries of planning, I have come here to offer you my help.”

“I thought you were sent here to replace me,” Edelgard said. Something about this didn’t seem right to her. If Ashe had been willing to warn Dimitri about Solon and Thales, then why hadn’t he mentioned Vual in his letters to her or Byleth?

“I _could_ replace you,” he told her. “It would be easy. I have studied you very carefully, and while it might sound immodest of me, there is not a single infiltrator in all of Agartha keener than I. But they didn’t want to waste the best on the likes of you—no offense. The greatest test of my skill would be to replicate Seteth so perfectly that even Archbishop Rhea herself wouldn’t be able to tell, and so far, I seem to be passing that test. But I digress. My stated purpose here, as far as Thales is concerned, is to spy on Rhea.”

“Flayn,” Byleth said. She laid a hand protectively on Edelgard’s shoulder. “Is Flayn an impostor, too?” she asked, very obviously struggling to keep the hand she’d put on Edelgard’s shoulder from curling into talons. Edelgard felt a leaden lump settle in her gut. Now that she knew that not all of Those Who Slither could be revealed through ‘the neck trick,’ everything she thought she knew had been called into question. Flayn, Constance, Claude… Any of them could still be one of them.

“I had a partner who meant to replace Flayn, and then later Edelgard,” Vual explained. “However, since Flayn managed to evade capture, I had to go out alone. I suppose the other one must have decided on a backup plan and taken a different form by now, but she has not met with me yet. I do not know if she has even arrived here.”

Edelgard felt a relieved sigh leave her body, though she didn’t feel much relieved. Every time one worry was removed from her mind, it seemed two more would take its place.

“I am doing a good job, am I not?” Vual asked. “I have studied Seteth for months, not just while he and Flayn hid at the Rhodos Coast, but also while he still worked here. It was very difficult to pull off, especially the steps I needed to take to avoid running into my past self.” A crooked smile flickered on his face. “I must admit, it is rather fun to antagonize Thales and get away with it, all in the name of committing to my character.”

“You could be doing better,” Byleth said tersely. “You’re too familiar with other people. And you’re too lenient with Flayn.”

Vual chuckled. “I suppose so. But after everything she has suffered, can you blame me for wanting her to have fun and spend time with her friends?”

“You say that like you care about her,” she said to him.

With a wounded frown on his face, he placed a hand tenderly over his heart. “I am supposed to be Seteth,” he said, “and Seteth loves his dear Flayn. To play the part perfectly, should _I_ not love her as well? Or at the very least, care for her as though I did?”

Byleth’s gaze drifted to the floor. “You don’t sound like any of the other infiltrators we’ve met,” she said.

“Units whose jobs require them to take the identities of surface-dwellers typically do a terrible job.” Vual leaned forward. “Do you know why? It is because they have no respect for the people they replace. They see you all as beasts, hairless apes, degenerate and de-evolved humans. To understand their masks would require them to look past years or even centuries of propaganda and conditioning. Their pride simply will not allow them to hide their contempt, even for a second. Solon was the closest to understanding this, but even he felt as though his disguise was akin to covering himself in mud; he could not wait to be rid of it.”

“And as for you?” Edelgard asked.

“As you could imagine, four hundred years ago I could not go to the monastery looking like my true self any more than I could today, but Ashe insisted that he drag me along and bring me to a physician on account of my amputations. I had to disguise myself very quickly and live as a surface-dwelling human for quite a long time. Eventually, I started to enjoy it.” Vual leaned back in his chair and crossed one leg casually over the other, and then, wincing in pain, thought better of it and uncrossed his legs. “Pretend to be something long enough and it leaves a permanent mark on you. I may have been created in a laboratory, flesh grown around an artificial core, but after a few years among your kind, I began to feel… human.”

Edelgard knew a thing or two about pretending, to say the least. For a long time, she had thought that the face she’d shown to her classmates and her professor had been a mask the Flame Emperor wore. When she had started growing fond of her classmates, and especially her professor, she had started to wonder which was the mask and which was the face. She still couldn’t fully disentangle those thoughts, but what she knew for sure was that she hadn’t felt human the day she had first set foot in Garreg Mach, but the day she had left it, she finally _had._

She nodded. “I understand, Vual,” she said to him. “Allow me to apologize on behalf of both myself and my professor for assaulting you.” She still didn’t trust him, but a diplomatic apology at the very least seemed appropriate.

“All water underneath the bridge,” he replied. “I am thankful we are so close to the infirmary. I shall tell Professor Manuela that I simply tripped over the chair and accidentally broke it. It was an old chair, anyway.”

“So, Vual,” Edelgard said, crossing her arms. “How do you intend to help us?”

“I can help you stop Thales’ plan—Operation Antediluvia.” He produced a device from his desk and quickly glanced at it before slipping it back into the drawer. Edelgard thought she caught a glimpse of a clock face, but smaller than any one she’d ever seen. “Speaking of, there’s going to be another Dirac tidal surge any minute now; you should brace yourselves.”

“A what?” Edelgard asked before a wave of skull-splitting pain tore through her brain like an axe lodged in her skull. For a moment, Seteth’s office flickered and vanished. She saw a flash of the Imperial Palace’s garden before finding herself lying in a heap on the floor, her head throbbing. Byleth had fallen as well, her teeth gritted in pain and her hands clasped to her brow.

Vual rose from his desk and approached them. “A _that._ It’s the result of an attempt to transport matter backward in time.” He offered a hand to Edelgard and helped her back to her chair, then turned his attention to Byleth and offered to help her to her feet. She declined.

Byleth rubbed her brow. “Why is time travel so important to him?” she asked.

“There was a great war over two thousand years ago that saw the final clash between the people of Agartha and the Fell Star. We unleashed the greatest and most terrible weapons we could devise upon the world in our pursuit of victory at any cost. Imagine a miasma that causes you to vomit up your own lungs, or an invisible wave of energy that cooks you from the inside out. Imagine a fire so hot that it turns the desert sands to glass. All these weapons and more were lost when the Fell Star swept the world clean and Agartha was driven underground.”

“The javelins of light,” Edelgard muttered, recalling the destruction of Arianrhod in her world.

Vual raised an eyebrow. “The what? Ah. You mean the orbital kinetic bombardment system. Yes, that is a surviving holdover from the war, but it is greatly diminished; in its present form, it is nothing compared to the weapons that were lost in the flood. Operation Antediluvia is concerned with retrieving those weapons from the past just before the Fell Star destroyed them and unleashing them upon the present.”

Edelgard finished his thoughts. “…And you’ve grown too fond of this world to let that happen, haven’t you, Vual?”

“I have grown fond of its people.” A smile crossed his face, though it was short-lived. “All Agarthans are fond of this world. Even replicants such as myself long for the light of the sun, the smell of flowers, and the songs of birds. They don’t care how many of you they would have to kill to have it all for themselves. And the very act of attempting to reach the antediluvian period itself, even if it fails, could on its own do worse to all of us than simply kill you.”

Edelgard crossed her arms. She would like to believe Vual, for the same reason she’d hoped that Kronya could have decided to rebel against Those Who Slither—but she couldn’t let her hope mislead her. “Four hundred years… and you have been _waiting_ all this time to meet us instead of working to stop them?”

“There is only so much a single replicant can do against all of Agartha,” he answered. “It was difficult enough infiltrating their ranks as it was. Inventing a false identity out of whole cloth, fabricating the necessary identification, and making it believable precluded any attempts at sabotage. It was more important that I survived to the present day and devised a way to meet you than undermine their operations.

“Besides,” he added with a hapless shrug, “when Ashe and I were in the past, the future had already been written. If we had strayed too far off-course from the history we both knew—such as, say, destroying Those Who Slither prematurely—we could have caused a time paradox. This world could have been split in two… or destroyed altogether. Living in the past while knowing the future is like a choreographed dance: one step out of line and you ruin it.” He looked to Byleth. “Professor, you have the powers of the Fell Star. You must know, intuitively, that what I speak is the truth.”

With a frown creasing her face and brow, Byleth scratched her chin thoughtfully. Edelgard had never wished harder that Sothis could materialize at her side and lecture the two of them.

She opened her mouth, paused, and then closed it.

There was a knock at the door. _“Seteth, sir, are you occupied at the moment? I have urgent business with you.”_ Edelgard couldn’t place the man’s voice, muffled by the door.

“Allow me a moment, please, Cardinal Rowan,” Vual called out. “I am finishing up with Professor Eisner.” He turned his attention to his desk. “We will have to continue this conversation when I am less busy. I understand that I have given you two little reason to trust me,” he said to Edelgard and Byleth, his voice low, “so, as a sign of good faith, take these.”

He took out a leather-bound notebook and put his quill pen to his inkpot and then to a fresh page, scribbling lines of tight script madly across it. “I cannot wait for the day Lady Rhea allows you to invent fountain pens, at the very least,” he grumbled in a very un-Seteth-like manner. He tore the page out from the notebook and handed it to Byleth, along with a small leather drawstring pouch. “This is a schedule for further Operation Antediluvia test runs for the next week. At least the next tidal surges will not catch you unaware now.”

Byleth took the page and the pouch from him and looked down at it, studying it with a furrowed brow. “You’re busy,” she commented.

 _“They_ are. I wash my hands of this monstrosity.” Vual went to the door, unlocked it, and opened it to let Cardinal Rowan in. “Good afternoon, Cardinal. What do you wish to ask of me?” he asked as he ushered Byleth and Edelgard out of the room.

Edelgard and Byleth left Seteth’s office and headed downstairs in a daze, the contents of their meeting with Vual slowly sinking in with each step they took, like a meal made from dubious ingredients settling in their stomachs. At the foot of the stairs, as her boot met the floor, Byleth shuddered.

“Seteth might be dead,” she murmured, so softly and so quietly it was as though she hadn’t wanted to say it.

“He might be dead,” Edelgard said, “but he might also be alive. ‘Might’ is a challenging word. One never knows what to expect from it, my teacher.” _Might_ was the word that kept her going for five years when her Byleth had gone missing. _Might_ had been what kept her pushing forward in the service of an impossible dream. _Might_ was a word that carried with it infinite potentials not just of disappointment but of _hope._ And she had learned to have _some_ faith, at least, in hope. “Just because hope can mislead you… doesn’t mean you can’t allow it to guide you.”

Byleth took the little pouch Vual had given her and opened it, dropping a small copper amulet out of it into her open palm. She stared at it, aghast.

“Professor, what is—” Edelgard peered at it and felt the breath leave her body. She recognized that amulet, though the one she’d seen had not been so dull, dark, or tarnished. Underneath the pale green patina clinging to the copper medallion was the image of Saint Macuil. This was the amulet Ashe had always worn around his neck to ward off ghosts and evil spirits.

“I gave Ashe this,” Byleth whispered, “because Mercedes’ ghost stories had been bothering him so much…” Her fingers curled around it. “He had it on him when he fell.”

“Then Vual _did_ know him,” Edelgard concluded, still uneasy. But had he known him as a friend and been given that amulet as a sign of trust… or had he been an enemy, and had he looted it from Ashe’s grave in order to deceive them?

The two of them continued onward, through the hall and into the courtyard. The blistering cold wind that had kicked up while they’d been meeting with Vual met them with the force of a hammer.

“Do you trust Vual?” Byleth asked her, her voice just barely louder than the wind as she braced herself and hugged her cloak tighter around her shoulders. Edelgard did the same.

“At the very least, I’d like to _think_ Ashe can vouch for his character,” Edelgard replied to Byleth. “He seems sincere, but then again, he also seems to be as good of an actor as he claims. If he’s here to help us, as he says, then we’d be fools to reject him after all the setbacks we’ve suffered. But there’s no telling what other agenda he might be hiding or where his true allegiances might lie.” After all, he and Ashe may have been friends once, but Ashe had also been dead for nearly four hundred years, and there was no telling what Vual had been up to in those centuries between now and then.

“I don’t think we should treat him as an enemy,” she concluded, “but we should be cautious. See what more he can give us before we make any judgments. If we can trust him, then we could have him tell Dimitri the truth about Rodrigue without implicating ourselves…” She trailed off, as Byleth didn’t seem to be listening to her.

Byleth nodded absentmindedly, her mind elsewhere, her expression strained.

“You’re still worried about Seteth,” Edelgard noted.

She nodded.

Edelgard took her by the hand. “Have faith, Professor. You taught me that once.” She herself, though, couldn’t feel that faith. If Vual was indeed the master infiltrator he claimed to be, then it was inconceivable that he would have willingly allowed Seteth to escape with his life, risking him returning to Garreg Mach and blowing his cover.

The bells rang in the hour. “I have a class to teach,” Byleth said, pulling away from her.

“I have a class to attend,” Edelgard said, and as the two of them went their separate ways, she looked up at the window to Seteth’s office. A part of her wondered what Sothis would think of Vual, and what advice she would have to offer the two of them if she could still speak to them.

* * *

The rest of the Blue Lions returned to Garreg Mach the next day. Byleth and Edelgard met them at the marketplace in front of the gate, both glad to see them again but apprehensive as to what state they would be in.

The grim look on Dimitri’s face, though, vanished as soon as he caught sight of the two of them, and though just a moment ago he and his fellow classmates had been trudging along, weary and worn, he quickly dismounted from his wyvern and ran up to meet them.

“Professor! El!” he cried out. “I have worried about you day and night. I am so glad to see you two again.”

“You missed us that much?” Byleth asked with a slight smile brightening her worried face. “I hope you got along with Catherine while I was gone.”

Dimitri’s brow wrinkled for a moment as he cast a backward glance over his shoulder toward Catherine and the rest of the class. The knights Catherine had brought with her surrounded them. “I… vastly prefer your leadership, my teacher,” he said.

 _My teacher?_ Had he picked that up, Edelgard wondered, from her?

“Professor, you look sad,” he added, carefully curling his hand around hers as though it were a delicate glass ornament. “Ah. Captain Jeralt—er, your father Jeralt was to leave yesterday, was he not?”

Though that was one of many sad things weighing on Byleth’s mind, she nodded.

“I am sorry, Professor. You two have never quite been apart until now, have you? I must admit I was quite envious—no, forgive me; that is not the proper word. I… wish I could have what you have with him. For ripping the two of you apart like that, I swear I shall make Lady Rhea—”

The rest of the class and Catherine caught up to him, though Bernadetta scurried past all of them and made a beeline for the dormitories (as she usually did). The students were all dirty and tired and probably hungry as well, but none of them looked injured; whatever fighting they’d done had probably been a route. Dedue had a very poorly knitted cap upon his head, crocheted from a fat skein of violet yarn so inexpertly that it looked as though a strong breeze would unravel it. So did Bernadetta. Dimitri had been very anxious indeed.

“Professor.” Catherine gave Byleth a curt nod. “You’ve trained your kids well. They put up a good fight.” She clapped her hand heartily on Dimitri’s shoulder and flashed him a teasing smile. “Though I’ve got to tell you, your White Lion of Fhirdiad is more like a stray cat sometimes. He’s got no master but himself.”

Byleth turned a stern glare on Dimitri. “You were insubordinate?”

Pale roses blossomed on his cheeks. “I… once or twice, I suppose, I did as I thought you would have told me, instead of following Catherine’s orders.”

“I’m flattered,” she said to him. “But Catherine’s an experienced knight. When she’s in charge, you need to respect her leadership.”

Dimitri hung his head. “Yes, Professor.”

“Can you really blame him, though?” Sylvain asked. “Princes aren’t exactly used to taking orders.”

“Neither are boars,” Felix grumbled.

“That is true,” Catherine admitted to Sylvain, shooting a dirty look at Felix. “Now, when you’re king,” she said, tousling Dimitri’s hair, “you’ll be the one calling all the shots. But until then, you’ll have to sit tight and do what the adults tell you. Don’t beat yourself up about it; I was a real hellion once, too!”

Edelgard could have sworn she saw a knowing smirk on Dedue’s face, if only for a second. Dimitri looked as though he was trying his absolute best not to scowl.

“How about we catch up over some food instead of standing out here in the cold?” Raphael piped up. “Ingrid and I could eat a horse! Each!”

“You’ve earned a hot meal,” Byleth said. “Good work out there, all of you. I just wish I could’ve seen it for myself. Go return your equipment to the armory, stable the horses, and meet us in the dining hall.”

The class dispersed, except for Catherine and Volkhard.

“Thank you for looking after my students, Captain,” Byleth told Catherine. Catherine stiffened, evidently unused to hearing that title applied to her and struggling to fully accept its weight. “I’m glad they weren’t too difficult.”

Catherine laughed. “Compared to the Black Eagles or the Golden Deer? Aside from a few of the boys, you’ve probably got the most disciplined and mature class this year. Anyway, I’d like to join you for dinner, but I should probably catch up on business.”

Byleth nodded. “I understand. I heard Shamir returned from her mission last weekend.”

“She did? Alright. I’ll see you around, Professor.” Catherine left, hurrying into the hall with a complement of knights following behind her, their armor clanking with every step. Only Volkhard was left with Byleth and Edelgard.

The three of them made their way through the gate and into the main hall. As they walked, Volkhard wrapped his arms around Edelgard. “El, my dear,” he said, holding her close. “I have missed you. How are Pascal and Hedwig faring?”

“Well enough,” she said to him, returning the embrace. “Though I can’t spend much time with them during the week, so they’re a bit bored. How is home? Was it serious?”

“Thankfully, things were not so bad as I had feared. There was a riot in town outside Castle Arundel, but a little saber-rattling was enough to subdue them; no need for any serious show of force. A few bruised skulls and broken windows were the only casualties.”

“There was a riot?” Byleth asked.

“You said there’s unrest in other parts of the Empire,” Edelgard said. “Is this all connected to the succession crisis?” She wondered if Dedue’s guerrilla cells had anything to do with it. Had his men started the riots?

Volkhard nodded. “A sizable portion of the townspeople were asking that I throw my support behind Prince Anselm. There were brawls in the street between supporters of both princes.” He let out a frustrated sigh. “I cannot understand how they became so passionate about the subject. We nobles argue and fight about such things so that the commoners need not concern themselves with them.”

“That was it?” Byleth asked.

“Would that it had been. Unfortunately, the day we arrived, brigands came from the Brionac Plateau seeking to loot the town as well. I suspect they may have come from Gaspard or Rowe territory and crossed the river into the Empire. The Blue Lions and Catherine’s knights were a great help in fending them off. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must see if any news has come for me while I was away.” Volkhard patted Edelgard on the shoulder. “Take care, my dear.”

He peeled away from Edelgard and Byleth, heading off in the direction of the rookery.

Later that day, the Blue Lions met in the dining hall as the setting sun drew close to the horizon. Though the cold didn’t make it feel like winter was anywhere close to ending, the days had been steadily getting longer and longer for over a month now. But the sun still set early now, too early for most students’ liking, as much as the faculty might have enjoyed the peace and quiet of the curfew.

“You’d better hope they find the real Hurricane King soon,” Felix said to Sylvain. “I haven’t seen you on a date in months—oh, wait, the curfew’s only been on for two weeks.” He was in an even sourer mood than usual; Edelgard supposed that while ‘losing’ Glenn may have had something to do with it, he was likely still sore over the way Thales had treated him in front of the rest of the class. He was prideful in his own way.

“Somebody’s cranky. You need a nap or something, Felix?” Sylvain shot back. “It’d be nice if this curfew lasts forever, honestly. No more finding you bleeding out in the training hall at midnight because you were dueling your shadow by candlelight.”

“That was one time,” Felix grumbled.

They had been snapping at each other all through dinner. They were _still_ snapping at each other. Every childish barb, just loud enough to be heard over the din of a dozen other chattering students filling the hall, coming from their mouths made Edelgard’s head ache. Byleth was distant enough that she didn’t seem to notice, or have the energy to intervene. Jeralt’s departure, combined with her worry about Seteth and the question of Vual’s trustworthiness, must have been weighing too heavily on her for her to be her normally attentive self.

“Did I miss something?” Edelgard whispered to Ignatz.

“They, uh…” Ignatz nervously adjusted his glasses. “Had a bit of a fight on the way back from the castle.”

“They’re _still_ having a fight.” Edelgard couldn’t help but notice that Ingrid wasn’t doing her usual job of breaking up their little spats. Normally, she would be glad to see that, since she thought Ingrid spent far too much time putting up with their immature attitudes, but much like her professor, Ingrid wore a distant expression on her face as she picked at the bowl of stew she was staring glumly down at; she might not have even been aware of their fighting at all.

Edelgard leaned closer to her. “Ingrid. Is something on your mind?”

Ingrid snapped to attention as though she’d just been rudely awakened from a nap. “Hm? Oh, Edelgard. My apologies. My mind hasn’t been in the right place recently. I couldn’t help but… feel guilty about Glenn. That I had to be out there instead of at his service…”

“The service was postponed,” Edelgard said. “Lady Rhea didn’t feel it was right to have it while you and Felix were away.”

“Oh.” Ingrid smiled, but didn’t look any happier. “That’s a relief. Maybe after the service, I…” She trailed off. “Well, he’s with the Goddess now. I hope he stays at peace this time.” She put a hand to her mouth, her voice cracking. “No, that’s a horrible thing to say; I…” With a shake of her head, she set down her fork and stood up. “I’ve… had enough.”

That phrase piqued Raphael’s attention. “Huh? Ingrid, you haven’t even finished your first bowl! You gotta be hungry.”

Felix and Sylvain stopped bickering. Edelgard hardly noticed at first until the rest of the dining hall went quiet along with them.

Archbishop Rhea was back in the dining hall.

“Is that… _the Archbishop?”_ Annette asked, her mouth agape, rubbing her eyes in disbelief.

“Lady Rhea?” Ignatz gasped, trembling. “What’s she doing here?”

“Even archbishops gotta eat, right?” Raphael said. “Maybe she heard how good the stew was tonight!”

Dimitri glared sourly at Rhea as she drifted closer to the Blue Lions’ table. If looks could kill, at the very least, he may have wounded her. Before she could come close enough to notice, Dedue put a hand to his jaw and deftly turned his head so that he was no longer looking at her.

Rhea loomed over the students with a beatific smile and hunger in her eyes. “Hello, my children.”

“Um… H-Hello, Your Holiness,” Ignatz squeaked, averting his eyes.

“I know,” she said, “that Glenn Fraldarius was very close to all of you… some more than others.” Her gaze rested heavily on Ingrid, then on Felix. “There will be a funeral service tomorrow morning in the cathedral at nine. Morning classes and drills are canceled, and those of you who need it may take the rest of the day as well.” There was a gleam in her eye, as though the final stages of a devious plot were unfolding before her. “And… Professor Byleth, Lady Edelgard, I think it would mean so much to everyone if you were to preside with me over the service.”

Of course. Of _course_ that was what Rhea wanted.

Dimitri clenched his jaw so tightly that Edelgard was shocked his teeth didn’t shatter. Ingrid looked expectantly to Edelgard, then to Byleth, as Rhea laid a hand on her shoulder.

“Miss Ingrid Galatea… you would appreciate such a gesture, would you not?” Rhea asked her.

“Um… It would…” Ingrid bowed her head. “I suppose it would certainly be an honor.”

“Neither of us have ever presided over a funeral,” Edelgard said, loath to repeat the same conversation from Saturday. Rhea was being especially crafty here, springing this on her and Byleth in front of their class. This time, her entreaty was backed by social pressure. She looked to Ingrid. “I… My professor and I wouldn’t want to disgrace Glenn’s memory if we fail to perform the rites properly.”

“That is no issue,” Rhea assured her. “You will need only to follow my lead and read from the scriptures I provide.” She turned to Byleth. “Professor, you are blessed with the power of the Goddess. Please consider gracing us with your presence.”

Byleth looked into her stew. “I’m not sure,” she said. Then, lifting her head, her eyes met Ingrid’s. “But… for my students, I guess…”

Edelgard felt a hand fall on her shoulder. Unfortunately, as her gaze traveled up its sleeve, she found that it belonged to Ferdinand von Aegir.

“Lady Rhea, excuse me,” Ferdinand said, “but did I just hear you correctly? Are you asking Edelgard and Professor Byleth to join you in tomorrow’s service?”

Rhea nodded in a way that strongly suggested she was pretending to be surprised by his appearance. Edelgard felt sick to her stomach and wondered if she had planned this.

“What an honor! Of course, Edelgard would be glad to participate.”

Edelgard glared at him. _“Ferdinand!”_ she hissed.

“Thank you for the opportunity, Your Holiness,” Ferdinand continued with a deep, polite bow.

“And thank _you,_ my child,” Rhea responded. “Professor Byleth, Lady Edelgard… I will collect you tomorrow morning and prepare you for the rites.”

Before any further objections could be raised, she turned her back on them and left.

“This is so exciting,” Ferdinand said, practically giddy. “Edelgard, all of these opportunities to distinguish yourself continue to fall right into your lap! You just might be the luckiest woman in all of Fódlan.” He patted her on the shoulder. “And that makes _me_ the luckiest man in all of Fódlan.”

“If Lady Edelgard does not wish to perform the service,” Dimitri growled at him, standing up to loom over him, “then she should not be forced to. What manner of man are you to presume you can speak for her?”

Ferdinand was taken aback. “I, er… well…”

“I can make my own decisions, Ferdinand,” Edelgard said to him frostily. “Though it seems Lady Rhea thinks otherwise.”

“I did not mean to offend you,” he said, his ego deflated. “Simply… who in their right mind would forego an opportunity to participate with the Archbishop herself in one of the holiest of rites? You and your professor shall be helping her commend Glenn’s soul to the Goddess!”

“Well, then,” she snarled, shoving his hand aside and storming off, “perhaps I am _not_ in my right mind.”

She stormed out of the dining hall, fuming. Part of her frustration was performative, but most of it wasn’t. She was so sick and tired of being tossed around like a ship in a storm by the whims of the waves and wind, thrown from one unwanted situation to another at the behest of others, penned in on all sides.

_“Edelgard, wait!”_

Ingrid caught up to her. “Edelgard. Are you alright?”

Edelgard took a deep breath. “I am under a great deal of stress right now. If you don’t mind, I think I will retire early.”

Ingrid glanced at the dying rays of sunlight barely spilling over the monastery’s ramparts. “You might as well, I suppose,” she said. “I didn’t think you would blow up like that. I’m sorry. It’s just that… look, I didn’t expect Lady Rhea to bring it up so suddenly, either, but I think I really _would_ appreciate it if you and Professor Byleth did this for me.”

“Oh.” A bitter laugh escaped Edelgard’s lips. _“Now_ you stand up for what you want.”

Ingrid’s lip curled. “Oh, so you want me to ‘stand up for what I want’ as long as it’s what _you_ want, too? Okay, fine, if you don’t want to do it, then don’t. Just do whatever you want. It’s just that after over half a week of putting up with Felix and Sylvain being utter asses and Dimitri being weird, I’d hoped I could still count on _you_ to be the mature one.” She let out a frustrated sigh. “Okay, you were right. You’re _not_ in your right mind. Whatever’s going on with you, I hope some sleep helps.” With a huff, she made for the dormitories.

Edelgard hadn’t expected Ingrid’s words to _hurt_ so much, but in her frustration she herself hadn’t noticed how hurtful her own attitude had been to her. Despite everything, Ingrid still had strong feelings for Glenn and had wanted her friend and her teacher to play a role in the funeral.

Perhaps she was just overreacting to the whole situation. There wasn’t anything Rhea could do to her and Byleth at the ceremony in full view of everybody else, was there? At worst, she might try to ‘have them over for teatime’ afterward, and Vual in his disguise would probably head that off just as he had before.

She wasn’t able to catch up with Ingrid before Dimitri and Dedue reached her. “El,” Dimitri said, taking her by the arms. He opened his mouth, but whatever words he’d been planning on saying died on the tip of his tongue. “I… I am afraid. Please do not let that witch harm you, or… or do anything unnatural to you. If she tries to take you—”

“I merely overreacted,” she admitted to him. “Don’t worry. It’s just a funeral service. I’ve just been under a lot of pressure these past few days…”

“I see. You must have been so worried about your home.” The worried and frightful look wrenching his face gave way to a faint smile. “I met a few of your cousins at Castle Arundel. They were quite happy to hear that you were doing well.”

“Oh,” Edelgard said flatly. She couldn’t quite remember any of her cousins on her mother’s side. Thales had probably kept them away from her, or possibly even disposed of them.

“I am sorry about the Empire. About… everything.” He let out a sigh, his breath billowing in white clouds from his mouth, and let his hand crawl into her hair like a tiny animal seeking warmth. “I cannot help but feel as though this is all my fault.”

Edelgard took him by the wrist, feeling his pulse racing under her fingertips. “It’s okay,” she said, feeling Dedue’s eyes on her. “Let’s go inside before someone takes issue with us being out after curfew.”

The last light slipped under the monastery’s walls and the day came to an end.

* * *

The night was tranquil, though Edelgard’s sleep was anything but.

As she laid awake in bed, her thoughts swirling within her mind, the slow and steady footsteps of the unfortunate knight tasked with watching over the hall and making sure the students remained in their room matched the tempo of her heartbeat. The last time she had felt like this, so lost and so alone and so overwhelmed, surrounded on so many sides by potential enemies with so few allies she could put her trust in, had been the night before the Flame Emperor’s attack on the Holy Tomb.

This time, she didn’t even have Hubert.

She laid awake and wondered if Byleth would be practicing with Sothis’ powers tonight. Perhaps then she could get some rest.

A blood-curdling shout pierced the air, sharp even though the walls had muffled it. It was a man’s voice. No, more specifically, _Dimitri’s_ voice. Edelgard threw herself out of bed as, down the hall, a door slammed open so violently that it might have flown off its hinges.

 _“Hey!”_ the knight on patrol called out. _“Your Highness, what are y—”_ His outcry was replaced by a sharp gurgle as something hit him in the throat.

Edelgard threw open her door. “Dimitri—”

Dimitri hurried past her like a man possessed, trampling down the hall like an entire herd of stampeding beasts. The knight who’d previously been keeping watch sat on the floor in a crumpled heap, gingerly rubbing his throat. He was lucky he hadn’t been killed, if Dimitri was as out of his wits as his behavior implied.

Still in her pajamas, Edelgard threw on her cloak, slipped on a pair of shoes, and hurried after Dimitri, following him down the stairs and outside onto the lawn. The cold night air pierced her thin clothing like a flurry of freshly sharpened knives.

She conjured a flame to provide some light and warmth and continued on in pursuit of Dimitri. The snow stung and burned her feet and nipped at her ankles as the hard, dry snow on the lawn crackled and crunched under her shoes.

She found Dimitri standing aimlessly on the lawn, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and a tunic that clung to his skin, soaked through. He looked around aimlessly, like a child who had gotten lost in a crowded market and was trying to find his mother.

“Dimitri,” she called out, closing in on him. She wondered if he’d had a waking nightmare. Or perhaps he’d been sleepwalking?

 _“Your Highness,”_ Dedue called out from across the lawn. He moved quickly in spite of his size and stature, and the snow hardly crunched under his feet.

Dimitri looked back and forth between them. “El. Dedue.” His breath condensed in the night air, the clouds pouring from his mouth as ghostly white as his hair and as pallid as his glistening, sweat-soaked skin.

“Dimitri, what’s wrong?” Edelgard asked him. She took his hand. His skin was feverishly warm and clammy. “You’ll catch pneumonia if you stay out here,” she told him.

“Are you hurt, Your Majesty?” Dedue asked him, looking him over with a quick glance.

Dimitri’s chest heaved. He was panting for breath, each heavy exhalation pouring from his mouth like cold dragonfire. “I… I saw him. I swear I saw him out here…”

“Who did you see?” Dedue asked him.

“Was it your father?” Edelgard asked. “Dimitri, the only ghosts are in your head. You had a nightmare, nothing more.”

“It wasn’t him.” He shook his head. “No, no, it was… it was real. He was here. Yuri was here! I know he was!”

“Yuri?” Edelgard’s brow furrowed. She’d only heard that name a few times, mostly when Dimitri was asleep and having a nightmare. From what she recalled, he had been one of the children imprisoned by Those Who Slither in the Dark after the Tragedy of Duscur, the equivalent to Dimitri of the family Edelgard had lost.

“Yuri is dead, Your Majesty,” Dedue said, resting a hand on his shoulder. “Lady Edelgard is correct. You saw one of your phantoms again.”

“No.” Dimitri shook his head and brushed Dedue’s hand away, his sweat-soaked hair flopping in the wake of his head as the moisture in it began to crystallize. “No, no. He was here.” He stomped his foot on the snow almost petulantly. “I saw him from my window, right under my room, here. Here in this very spot! He was as real as either of you. You must believe me!”

Edelgard wondered, could he have actually seen something? “What did he look like, Dima?”

Dedue gave her a sharp, disapproving look.

“Like… me,” Dimitri said. “His hair was white and shone like polished silver.”

“It was a trick of the light,” Dedue insisted. “You mistook the snow for his hair. That is all. Please, let me escort you back to your room. It is cold, and you must be well-rested for the funeral.”

“He was here,” Dimitri repeated, dazed. “I swear he was no ghost, no spirit, no phantom… I saw his flesh and blood. He survived… and we must find him.”

“Nobody else survived the experiments,” Dedue said.

“He must have,” Dimitri said. “He did not look like my father or Glenn. He was not pale or emaciated, and I saw no blood. He was alive, healthy…”

Perhaps, Edelgard thought, he had caught sight of Vual. But why would Vual be out and about without his disguise, even in the middle of the night? It must have been a hallucination. “Dima.” She raised a hand to his pallid, clammy cheek. “Dima, listen. Dedue is right; Yuri is dead. You saw a phantom, nothing more. It was probably a trick of the moonlight.”

“But I saw him with my own eyes, El!”

“The eyes are easily fooled. A little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. Perhaps there was an underdone potato in your stew, or a bit of undigested beef that hasn’t settled properly.”

Dimitri was silent for a while. “I could have sworn… And what if he could have lived? Him… or Emile… or any of the other dozen children down there?” His voice cracked.

“You saw Yuri alive because you feel guilty that he died and you lived. But you don’t have to feel ashamed to have survived that hell. It was not by any act of selfishness that you lived, nor was it by any fault of their own that they died.”

Dimitri shook his head. “You don’t understand, El. You can’t. You weren’t there. You cannot know the depths to which I sunk.”

“I _can_ understand,” Edelgard told him, raising her hand higher to run her fingers through the snowdrifts of his hair. Feathery frost was already beginning to gather on his silvery locks, and she could feel the same cold worming its way into her fingers, stabbing at her knuckles. “I can understand… more than you know.”

“I can tell you and tell you and tell you… but I tell you, those horrors were beyond your imagination. El, you have grown up with everything. Someone who was fortunate enough like you to have everything… can never understand those of us who had everything taken away.”

“That’s not true, Dima. _Nothing_ is beyond my imagination.”

Shuddering, he threw his arms around her and held her close. He was like a solid block of ice; the patina of sweat gluing his underclothes to his skin was close to freezing. She started to shiver.

“Please don’t let Rhea hurt you,” he whimpered. “Please don’t let her take you away… or the Professor.”

_“Hey! You three!”_

The knight from upstairs came tramping down the steps and onto the lawn, gingerly rubbing his throat. _“Get back inside,”_ he shouted out, his voice hoarse, _“before you get in trouble!”_

Dedue took Dimitri by the arm and began to drag both him and Edelgard back to the dormitories.

“Um… s-sorry,” Dimitri mumbled as he passed by the knight he’d accidentally wounded.

“Water under the bridge, Your Highness,” he squeaked, coughing.

Edelgard squeezed Dimitri’s hand. “Please, Dima, don’t worry about me,” she said. “It’s just a funerary service tomorrow. Nothing can go wrong.”

“I cannot believe you are doing this,” he muttered.

* * *

Edelgard couldn’t believe she was doing this.

On the morning of ‘Glenn’s’ funeral, she and Byleth stood in the sacristy at the back of the cathedral and stared at the reflection of themselves and each other in a floor-length mirror amid the drawers and shelves of ceremonial objects and garments.

The Church of Seiros built beautiful works of architecture, but they did not in the least bit design fashionable clothes by any stretch of the imagination. Edelgard had only seen Byleth wear the robes she now wore once before, and _only_ once, and had never thought she would see that particular shade of embarrassed crimson that lit up her cheeks again.

Rhea had dressed Byleth in a white silk robe and a golden sash embroidered with intricate and ornate patterns. Lustrous chains of gold medallions, sewn into the sash, spilled over her shoulder like a dragon’s scales. The golden sash met a golden cowl that spread over her shoulders and a high collar that reached up to the tips of her ear on one side and hung to the left on the other. A scintillating velvet cape, royal purple, billowed down her back.

It was the gaudiest, tackiest, most hideous outfit Edelgard had ever seen.

And _she_ was wearing the exact same thing.

Once Rhea had finished fussing with all the ornaments and diadems and so on and had left the room, Edelgard and Byleth looked at themselves, then at each other. Edelgard could see in her reflection that her face was as red as a tomato all the way to the tips of her ears. For a moment, they were both struck dumb.

“We look like idiots,” Byleth finally said.

They both burst out laughing.

“This is what Rhea wanted for us all along?” she gasped, catching her breath as Edelgard tried desperately not to choke to death. “To dress us up in silly outfits? No wonder she wanted my father out of the monastery.”

Edelgard fell to her knees, dizzy and lightheaded from how hard she was laughing. Tears spilled from her eyes. She coughed and tried desperately to calm herself down as her shoulders shook and chest heaved. She hadn’t laughed so hard in months. Her ribs ached. Her lungs burned.

At last, she managed to take an entire breath without expelling it in a fit of laughter. Byleth helped her to her feet. Edelgard looked up at her smiling face and was bowled over by her beauty. No matter how silly her outfit looked, she had the face of an angel, and the splash of pink color across her cheeks and the crinkles in the corners of her eyes from laughing too hard only made her more beautiful.

Edelgard reached up and laid her hands on Byleth’s cheeks, her fingertips brushing aside the silky hair that framed her face. The way her heart skipped a beat, the dryness of her mouth, the tightness of her chest, the dizzying lightness of her head; gazing upon Byleth was akin to a religious experience. Her lips parting, half out of awe, half out of yearning.

Byleth slowly reached up, curled her hands around Edelgard’s wrists, and pulled her hands off of her face.

Instantly remembering where she was and _who_ she was, Edelgard slipped her hands free and stepped back. She folded her arms over her chest and tucked her hands under her armpits, as though they might try to act of their own accord if she didn’t try harder to stop them. Now her clothes were the _least_ embarrassing thing about her current situation. “S-Sorry, Professor,” she said, forcing herself to say _professor._

“So, did I have to wear this in your world, too?” Byleth asked her, tapping on one of the medallions and listening to it jangle among its peers.

“Yes,” Edelgard said, sniffling and wiping a tear from her eye. “Only once, though. After the war started, you threw it onto a bonfire and burned it.”

“I’d like to do that again right now,” Byleth said.

Edelgard snorted and burst out laughing again.

If only Sothis could be here with them to laugh at these ridiculous clothes with them.

The door to the sacristy opened and Seteth’s face appeared in the gap. Or rather, Vual’s disguise. “I was expecting to find a pair of humans here, not a pack of hyenas,” he said as he stepped into the room and shut the door behind him. “I am sorry I could not stop Lady Rhea from dragging you into this— _what in blazes are you two wearing?”_

“Ceremonial robes for those closest to the Goddess,” Byleth muttered, bowing her head in shame.

“At least it is only a funeral service,” Vual said. “Whatever Rhea might wish to do with you afterward, though… at the very least, I think I can take a break from Seteth’s duties long enough to drag the two of you off to safety.”

“Why are you so keen on keeping Rhea away from us?” Edelgard asked him. That was one thing that, while she was thankful, she didn’t understand, and that gap in her knowledge kept her ill at ease.

“For starters, it is a part of the role I am playing,” he answered. “When I was here in the guise of a monk spying on Seteth, before he and Flayn left the monastery, I learned that he was quite frustrated by the secrets she was keeping about your professor and her… unsettling interest in her. I see that thanks to your little stunt, Edelgard, _you_ have become an object of interest to her as well. As long as I am Seteth, I ought to behave like him, and that means reining in Lady Rhea’s… impulses.”

Byleth thought for a moment. “But if your job is information-gathering about Rhea… aren’t you curious about what she wants?”

“Of course I am. But if what she wants is harmful or destructive…” Vual took a deep breath and ran the remaining fingers of his left hand over his collar. “I could not tell Ashe everything about the future, lest his… heroic attitude compel him to put a new tear in the tapestry of time. But as a compromise, I could offer him a few details about the far future, since he would never live to see it. When he learned of the Agarthans and their plans, he made me swear to look after his classmates and his teacher. That includes protecting you both from the likes of Thales… and from Rhea.”

“But you’re supposed to find out things about Rhea,” Byleth said. She had the look on her face she always had when she was coming up with a plan. “Vual, if we find out what Rhea wants from us and tell you, can we count on you to help us expose Thales to Dimitri?”

“That would be more than a fair trade,” Vual said. “Thales returns to Fhirdiad this afternoon, after the funeral. He can do many things, but he cannot control the kingdom as much as he needs to from Garreg Mach. Once he has left the monastery, it will be harder for him to keep Dimitri under his thumb, and he knows it.” A smile crossed his face. “That is why he is glad I am here.”

His brow furrowed. “But,” he added, “how will you find out what Rhea wants?”

Byleth smiled. “With the power of the Goddess.”

Vual blinked. “May I have a less… cryptic answer?” he asked.

She thought for a moment.

“No,” she said.

With a heavy sigh, Vual continued. “Very well. Simply let me know if there is anything—”

The door creaked open, forcing him to stop in mid-sentence. He whirled around as Flayn poked her head through the gap between the door and the wall. “Edelgard, Professor, how are you faring? I—Oh, big brother! H-Hello!” she stammered, a guilty, nervous half-smile creeping across her face. “I, um… I did not expect you to be here with them… I am sorry if I am interrupting—”

“No, no, by all means, Flayn, come in,” Vual said, pulling her inside. The hand that gripped her by the arm was soft and gentle, and his tone had become much softer as well. Still, Edelgard felt her stomach churn with revulsion. She was all too accustomed to Those Who Slither, or the Agarthans, or whatever they called themselves, pretending to be family members, and even though Vual seemed to be an ally the sight of him carrying on with his deception made her sick.

And to _Flayn,_ of all people. After what she had endured in the dungeons Edelgard had been damaged goods, full of sick and ugly thoughts on the day that Thales had shown her his true face, and she had felt for years afterward that she had deserved that pain. But Flayn was good, pure in her naivete, and did not deserve to be the victim of such deception.

Flayn’s nervous caught-in-the-act smile turned into a genuine grin when she saw Edelgard and Byleth. “Ah! You two look so wonderful in those vestments.” She clasped her hands together, beaming. “I know that this is a funeral, and that is terrible, but I cannot help but be excited for you! Do you not agree, Seteth?”

Vual glanced at Edelgard and Byleth uncomfortably. It was evident that he did indeed not agree. “I fear I do not have you girls’ eye for fashion,” he answered diplomatically. “If you think the vestments are beautiful, I shall take your word for it.”

As his gaze settled back upon Flayn, his mouth pulled itself into a warm smile that, if Edelgard hadn’t known any better, would have come across as entirely earnest. “There is still some time before the service. Have you had breakfast yet?”

Flayn nodded emphatically. _Too_ emphatically. “Of course, brother!”

“A _healthy_ breakfast?”

“Most certainly, yes!” she said, her smile growing strained. She was a _horrible_ liar.

What if, Edelgard wondered, Vual had been lying about the second infiltrator? Perhaps Flayn was still an impostor, still working with him, and her lack of aptitude for lying was meant to lower her guard…

“A healthy breakfast and not, hmm… for example, a pastry and a mug of hot chocolate shared between yourself and a certain Hedwig von Hresvelg?”

Flayn gasped. “How did—I-I mean, big brother, most certainly not! I ate a normal healthy breakfast for a girl of my age, I assure you!”

“Flayn,” Vual said sternly.

She bowed her head. “I did not have breakfast. I did share hot chocolate with Hedwig. She insisted, and that little girl is just so sweet that I could not resist. But how could you tell?”

Vual tapped on his eyepatch. “Even minus one eye, I can still see twice as much as most normal people. Remember that, Flayn.” He reached out and lifted Flayn up by her armpits. When her feet left the floor, Edelgard was filled with an overwhelming urge to stop him, but controlled herself as he took Flayn and pulled her into his embrace.

“Ah! B-Big brother! This is not necessary,” she squeaked. A nervous giggle escaped her lips. “Your beard is so bristly now; it tickles…”

“Before the service begins, you and I shall have a proper breakfast,” he told her sternly.

“Oh, okay… but please do put me down! I do not wish for the other students to see you carrying me like a child!” she said, though the way she wrapped her arms around his torso in return belied her complaints.

“You were so kind as to carry _me,_ my sister. I must return the favor,” he insisted. He glanced at Edelgard and Byleth. “Good luck with the service. I am certain you shall perform admirably.”

“Good luck!” Flayn chimed in, waving goodbye.

He and Flayn left the room.

“Poor Flayn,” Byleth mumbled.

Edelgard had to agree. Vual was certainly treating her well, unlike Thales, but if the truth was ever revealed to her, it would be just as devastating.

If Seteth was indeed still alive and out there, then the truth would be revealed soon, too—and likely at the worst possible moment.

* * *

_“Oh Goddess, hear my prayer. Please receive this beloved person. When the cold rain washes the body, when the bird and wolf announce the dawn, receive them into your blue blood. Receive them into a twinkling star.”_

Most of the scriptures Edelgard and Byleth had to read for the service were mercifully short, and all in the same vein. The service, however, dragged on. Each short reading was bookended by what felt like hours of proceedings. Standing at the pulpit in all her regalia and more, Rhea read parables and psalms from the Revelation of Seiros; the choir sang hymns from the loft; the attending students, faculty, and guests were led in prayer.

At least it was, at its worst, boring. Though Edelgard had to admit, knowing the funeral was a sham made the misty eyes she spotted amid the attendees sting like shallow cuts on sensitive skin.

When the service came to an end, Edelgard and Byleth found themselves surrounded by the Blue Lions and more before they could slip back into the sacristy and change, much to the amusement of the students.

“El, Professor,” Dimitri said, frowning as he stared at them. “I am… glad that the service went well.” He couldn’t take his eyes off Byleth’s clothes, equal parts disgusted and horrified.

Ingrid was aghast at the sight of the two of them. She put a hand to her mouth and audibly suppressed an undignified snort of laughter, in spite of the teary red rimming her eyes and the glistening stains on her cheeks. “I’m… Edelgard, I’m so sorry,” she croaked. “Thank you so much for doing this for me, but if I had known Lady Rhea would make you wear _that,_ I wouldn’t have snapped at you last night.”

“If I’d known,” Edelgard replied, “I’d have snapped back even harder. Although I’m glad I brought some levity to this day, if not on purpose.” At least seeing a smile on Ingrid’s face made her feel better.

“Well, I think it looks, um…” Ignatz removed his glasses and rubbed them on the hem of his jacket before putting them back on, as though a few specks of dirt removed from the lenses would alter the look of the outfits enough to give him a second opinion. “It’s… not _that_ bad.”

“Yeah,” Raphael said. “I think it looks nice!”

“It’s… interesting,” Annette said.

“Well, you two beauties look beautiful in anything,” Sylvain said. “Still, though, _whoof.”_

“Why’s it so… _asymmetrical?”_ Bernadetta asked.

“I don’t understand,” Dorothea said, furrowing her brow in confusion and disbelief. “The bishops and priests get such pretty robes. Where in the Goddess’ name did _those_ come from? Edie, poor dear, I almost feel _sorry_ for you.”

“Oh, do be quiet, Dorothea,” Ferdinand said to her. “It is a fine and magnificent outfit! Every single article of clothing and its placement has a specific symbolic meaning.”

“Okay, Ferdie,” she shot back, “so is there a deep, meaningful symbolic reason why everything’s on the left side?”

“There _is,_ actually,” Lorenz said. “Allow me to explain exactly why—”

Claude cut him off. “Because no one in their _right_ mind would wear it,” he piped up, prompting at the very least an amused chuckle from almost everybody else except for Ferdinand and Lorenz.

Hilda stared at Edelgard and Byleth, jaw agape, completely and utterly silent.

“Uh… Hilda? Are you alright?” Claude asked, nudging her in the side.

She focused her gaze solely on Edelgard. “I think,” she said, her voice quavering, “I’ve just seen something so funny, I might never laugh again.”

“Then I suppose something good came out of this outfit,” Edelgard told her, aware that her cutting remark probably didn’t sound so cutting when she was dressed in such embarrassing attire. Still, though, she raised a round of laughter from the students.

The bells rang in the hour—twelve o’clock noon. The ceremony had taken just under three hours, not including the hour it had taken for Rhea to dress Edelgard and Byleth up like a pair of dolls.

Byleth took Edelgard by the arm and pulled her aside. _“There’s going to be another tidal surge at a few minutes past noon,”_ she whispered in her ear.

Edelgard nodded. It was good that, thanks to Vual, she and Byleth had some means of predicting those events now. They acted like barriers to Sothis’ power, apparently; try as she might, Byleth couldn’t turn time back past one of those points. They were like scars in the skin of time, chasms which even the Goddess’ power could not leap over. Knowing when to expect them meant that at least Byleth could plan to use her power with some degree of confidence.

It was also good to know the times of the tidal surges, too, because Edelgard now knew that they affected Thales, too. Perhaps that was why she could see him hurrying down the nave toward the cathedral’s enormous oaken doors, rudely brushing off every single visitor who took note of his status and tried to strike up a conversation with him.

 _“When’s the one after that?”_ she whispered to Byleth.

_“A little over an hour.”_

So they had an hour after the surge to find out what Rhea meant to do to them. As long as Byleth turned back time before the next surge hit them, they could uncover whatever information they wanted from even the most dangerous sources. Edelgard could have salivated at the possibilities this presented them.

Volkhard fought his way through the crowd, Hedwig and Pascal at his sides. “El! Dear, you were splendid up there. You bring such gravitas to the scriptures. And your outfit,” he added with a twinkle in his lilac eyes, “serves you well.”

“Perhaps it does,” Edelgard said, “but I prefer something a little less ostentatious.”

“It really makes Miss Eisner look like Lady Rhea, doesn’t it?” Pascal asked.

“It looks like s-s-s-s-sh-sh— _bad,”_ Hedwig said.

“I know,” Byleth said. “Lady Rhea’s outfit is prettier.”

Volkhard chuckled. “If you are as close to the Goddess as it seems, perhaps you will be the next archbishop someday, Professor Eisner.”

As though she had been summoned, Rhea broke away from the priests she had been talking to and came to Byleth and Edelgard’s sides. “Perhaps she will be, Lord Arundel. The will of the Goddess is always in motion. Even one such as myself cannot always discern it.” She smiled. “I hope all is well among your subjects.”

“Yes, thankfully.” Volkhard dropped to one knee and bowed to her. “Archbishop Rhea, you have my deepest gratitude for granting me the support of the Blue Lions and the Knights of Seiros.”

“If only everybody in the Empire was as pious as you,” Rhea told him. “I do hope you would not mind if I borrowed your niece for a private lunch.”

“I would be honored, Lady Rhea, as I am certain she would be.”

The one thing Edelgard might have hated the most about not having the power and authority she had in her world was how often people saw fit to put words in her mouth. “Perhaps we can change out of these outfits first?” she suggested. “I would hate to spill tea on these fine silks, Lady Rhea.”

“Do not worry about that, my child,” Rhea said, patting her on the cheek. “Come along now, both of you.”

Byleth frowned. Edelgard knew what worried her. The tidal surge was minutes away, but if Rhea took them away before then, they wouldn’t be able to reverse time far enough to bring themselves completely out of her clutches.

“Excuse me, Lady Rhea,” Vual said, bringing himself to her side. “I do believe Lady Edelgard has a point. A stain from even the finest tea is still a stain, and need I remind you how important these vestments are? Please allow them to change.”

Rhea sighed. “Oh, I suppose, Seteth. I do hope you bring the two of them back to me when they are done, though.”

Vual brought Edelgard and Byleth back to the sacristy, where their normal clothes awaited them. He slipped his miniature clock out from his sleeve and consulted it. “Less than a minute before the next surge,” he warned them.

Edelgard at least managed to get the ridiculous cape and cowl off of herself before the surge hit her. The skull-splitting headache, the world flickering in and out; it was painful, but she was almost getting _used_ to it. Being able to expect it, surprisingly, helped quite a lot.

When she and Byleth had recovered, they finished changing and met with Rhea. It was time now to probe the depths of her secrets… and find out what she had been doing in the Holy Tomb during those weeks she had been absent from the monastery.

* * *

Edelgard pretended to be surprised when Rhea brought her and Byleth to the entrance to the Holy Tomb. The secret space underneath the monastery was reachable only by a platform that descended a hidden shaft. While Edelgard had read about the moving platforms used in mines, which operated by a system of pulleys, the stone platform that Rhea led the two of them onto had no visible mechanisms by which it could lower or raise itself. It simply did so, unnervingly quietly, as soon as the three of them had stepped into the center of the platform; there was a jolt, a feeling as though Edelgard’s stomach was falling less rapidly than the rest of hers, and an unnerving sense of stillness. The walls of the shaft soon gave way from human-hewn stone to an unnaturally smooth jade, untouched by any human tools, that seemed to glow with its own eerie light.

The platform descended to the floor of a vast cavern nearly the size of the entire monastery itself. There were no lanterns, torches, or chandeliers to light the way; instead, the floor itself, smooth as marble and possessing a dusky jade sheen, glowed with its own light, as did the distant walls and the ceiling high above. Massive organic shapes made from the same smooth, cold stone—or perhaps some eldritch sort of metal—lined the walls, gaps in their carapaces filled with machinery as intricate as clockwork, and nestled near them like the foothills of a mountain range were rows of dust-covered golems.

And in the center of the cavern, in a recessed area of the vast stone floor, stood what could only be described as a shrine lined with pillars and towering stone reliquaries. The aisle that ran from the platform to the other side of the shrine between the rows of reliquaries terminated at a stone staircase leading to a massive jade throne.

Byleth gasped. Edelgard had to admit, though she’d seen it once before… she’d only seen it _once_ before. Despite knowing the monastery inside and out, she had never been able to figure out how to access this place again. The first time, it had only been because Rhea had brought her here with the rest of the class, and her soldiers had only been able to follow her because Rhea had not sent the platform back up.

“Are you surprised, Edelgard, Professor?” Rhea asked. “This is the Holy Tomb. Only a handful of people are blessed to see such a sight in every generation. You two are the first of yours.”

“To think there was such a vast space beneath the monastery all this time,” Edelgard commented. “It’s hard to imagine that any of these enormous contraptions are of this world. Are they, Lady Rhea?”

“Please… simply ‘Rhea’ will do.” Rhea led her and Byleth off the platform. “Professor, what do you think?”

Byleth looked around. “It’s big,” she said.

“This is where the goddess Sothis, creator of the world and everything in it, was laid to rest… along with her children,” Rhea said. Her footsteps, joined by Edelgard’s and Byleth’s, echoed in the cavernous tomb.

“What are those big things in the distance?” Byleth asked.

“Their purpose has long since been forgotten, I’m afraid,” Rhea said. “At any rate, they belonged to Sothis and her kin, and therefore are holy to us.”

“If the Goddess was laid to rest here,” Byleth asked, “does that mean she died?”

“She is sleeping,” Rhea answered.

“Is she in one of these reliquaries?”

“No. These are…” Rhea paused and stopped walking so suddenly that Byleth nearly tackled her to the floor. “These are her family. Her most beloved are gathered here in this shrine.”

Edelgard’s eyes traveled to the throne. “And that… is that where Sothis once sat?”

“Yes,” Rhea said. “Your— _our_ creator. Do either of you… recognize it?”

“I do,” Byleth said. Rhea smiled.

Edelgard did as well. “Yes, Rhea.”

Rhea’s smile grew wider, showing a hint of teeth. “Of course… Edelgard, you must have seen it in your visions. The throne upon Sothis sat when she remade the world…”

“After the flood?” Byleth asked.

Rhea’s eyes widened. Edelgard could have sworn that for a second she saw slitted, reptilian pupils. Her smile vanished. “What did you hear about a flood?” she asked sharply.

“I… thought I read it in a book somewhere,” Byleth answered, shrugging.

“Surely none of the books in _our_ library,” Rhea huffed. “I…” She sighed. “I am sorry, my child. I meant nothing of it… think nothing of it. Simply… Byleth, I am so terribly sorry for the startling lack of religious literacy your father engendered within you.” She looked toward the throne. “Now… I have waited so long for this day. So, so long. I would like for you to both sit upon this throne and allow the wisdom of the Goddess to come to you in its full form. But first…”

Edelgard half expected Metodey to leap out of the shadows with his trademark weaselly sneer and proclaim that the Holy Tomb now belonged to the Adrestian army.

“I sense the Goddess dwelling within both of you,” Rhea said. “I feel her… her warmth, her kindness, in my soul, when I am near you. Yet one of you, and only one of you, has taken on her appearance.”

Byleth inched closer to Edelgard and linked arms with her. Edelgard had never been so glad to hold her hand. “Is that… a problem?”

“No, of course not.” Rhea smiled again. “Of course not.”

She took Byleth and Edelgard not to the throne but instead to one of the reliquaries. She pressed her hand gently to a panel on the stone monument’s facade and the panel slid away (when Edelgard’s army had seized the reliquary’s contents, they had used a far less elegant method) to reveal within its depths a trove of sparkling Crest Stones, all gleaming a bloody red with their own light, heaped amid bones that did not look even remotely human.

Rhea selected one of the dozens of Crest Stones, one that at first glance seemed oddly lumpy and misshapen before Edelgard realized that bits of it had been chiseled off little by little over the course of years… or possibly centuries. Rhea held it gently, carefully, reverently, attenuating her smile. She whispered a name that Edelgard couldn’t discern.

“Come along with me,” she said, and she led Edelgard and Byleth onward to a small stone platform in the center of the shrine. Rhea brought them to a stone table and pulled out from under it a chisel, a dagger, and a goblet, all ornate and gilded with gleaming gold.

Byleth squeezed Edelgard’s hand. Edelgard squeezed back. The sight of the dagger made her heart skip a beat.

As if sensing their discomfort, Rhea offered them both a warm and comforting smile. “Oh, do not worry, you two. These objects are strictly ceremonial.”

Edelgard wondered how long she’d been down here. She desperately wanted Byleth to turn back time and carry them both away from this place, away from Rhea, but they hadn’t learned enough yet.

Rhea placed the diminished Crest Stone on the table, took the ornamental chisel, and held it to the stone. “Oh, my brother,” she whispered, her voice wavering, “forgive me for what I must do. Forgive me, my brother, for I do this in Mother’s name. Sothis… forgive me, for I do as I must.”

She brought the chisel down on the stone, sending another fissure into its broken surface with a thunderous crack that echoed through the vast cavern. Byleth winced and laid a hand over her heart, as if the stone within had let out a painful cry out of sympathy for its brother.

“My brother, forgive me. My mother, forgive me. I do this for all of you.” Rhea brought the chisel down again, again, again, until she had sheared off a blood-red sliver of the stone. She took it and held it between her forefinger and her thumb, gazing at it with misty eyes and appraising it as a jeweler would a diamond.

She set it down, then took the dagger and held her other wrist over the goblet. The dagger’s gold-etched blade rested on the pale white inside of her wrist, bisecting blue veins.

“Um… R-Rhea,” Byleth said, “what are you—”

“And forgive me, Mother, for the blood I offer willingly,” Rhea intoned, slitting her wrist with one fluid flick of the dagger’s blade.

“You said these were ceremonial!”

“They are,” Rhea said, calm as calm could be as a stream of blood, black against the dusky green light, trickled into the goblet. She set the dagger down and pressed her finger to the gash running across her wrist; a golden glow pulsed beneath her fingertip and the wound sealed itself shut. “Please, my children, accept my sincerest apology for this. I did not mean to frighten you. This is a ritual that is performed only for the cardinals of the Church of Seiros; you are actually quite privileged to see it. It took me weeks to devise the modifications to them this situation would require.”

She took the sliver of stone and the goblet of blood and turned to face Edelgard. “Do you feel it, my child? Here… do you feel the presence of your family?” she asked with a hungry smile.

Byleth grabbed Edelgard roughly by the arm and pulled her back. “What do you want to do with her, Rhea?”

“Oh, Byleth, darling, do not speak to me like that,” Rhea said. “You sound like your father. I mean her no harm.

“In fact, what I have to offer you, Edelgard, my dear child, descendant of my dear Wilhelm, is something truly incredible. The Goddess Sothis dwells within you, just as it dwells within your professor. I can feel it within you. When I lay my hand upon your skin, I feel her song humming beneath it. The light of your eyes and your smile dances as she once did. You and Byleth, together, embody her in all her power and wisdom. And yet… I see her mark on only _one_ of you.”

She held out the goblet and the sliver of stone. “Partake of your son’s body, oh Mother, and of your daughter’s blood… and you and your professor together shall embody the Goddess wholly, a dyad of divine power. This world shall be yours to rule, and under your benevolence it will become what it never could have been under this flawed servant’s stewardship.” Tears leaked from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. The green light that filled the Holy Tomb lent an unnatural, sickly hue to her pale skin.

“She’s not eating or drinking that,” Byleth blurted out.

Rhea frowned. “Professor… that is not your choice to make. Edelgard, I offer you power beyond your wildest imagination. You will be blessed with the Goddess-nature, as your professor was, and both of you will receive upon the spirit dais a new revelation from the Goddess. You, the ninth daughter of Emperor Ionius IX, bereft of inheritance, shall gain authority beyond your brothers’ wildest dreams. All shall bow before you and bask in your radiance.”

Edelgard was paralyzed. The thought of herself being transformed as Byleth had been, of losing the color of her hair and eyes in this world just as she had in her own, of condemning a body that did not even belong to her to meet a fate it didn’t deserve, struck her with a terror she had not felt since the day the knives had first bitten into her skin.

At last, she managed to shake her head. “No,” she croaked. “No.”

Rhea slowly lifted her head, staring down her nose at Edelgard. Her lips curled in a frown. “Edelgard… that is not your choice to make, either.”

Mist swirled around the three of them, coalescing into a horde of ghostly soldiers. Mist formed wispy armor, gossamer flesh clinging to ivory bones. Two of them grabbed Byleth and tore her away from Edelgard; two more grabbed Edelgard and did the same.

 _“Edelgard!”_ Byleth shouted, struggling to break free of her captors. She squeezed her eyes shut. _“No! Stop, Rhea! Stop!”_

 _“Byleth!”_ Edelgard screamed out, shuddering and wracked with spasms as terror froze the blood in her veins. The scream scraped the inside of her throat raw.

Another ghostly hand, cold, clammy, took her by the hair and wrenched her head back as Rhea approached her. She clamped her mouth shut, only for another phantom soldier’s hand to pinch her nose and clamp her nostrils shut, forcing her to breathe. As her mouth gaped open, a fourth hand hooked its fingers over her teeth and wrenched it farther open, and Rhea laid the sliver of the Crest Stone on her tongue and tipped the goblet over.

The scream that tore itself from Edelgard’s mouth was filled with a primal fear, a fear that went deeper than any shred of dignity or self-control she possessed. She was eleven again, in the dungeon again, beneath the surface of the earth again, surrounded by men as pale as corpses and at the whims of their twisted rituals, alone, and helpless.

The blood hit her tongue, overwhelming her with its scalding heat and overwhelming coppery taste and smell, and washed the stone down her throat, smothering her outcries. She choked and sputtered as Rhea tipped the goblet farther, spilling the last bits of her blood—

The world froze.

Blinding white fire took everything away: the phantoms, Professor Byleth, Archbishop Rhea, the Holy Tomb, the blood, the pain, the screams all vanished in time’s inferno.

Dorothea was braiding the other Edelgard’s hair in the mirror when Edelgard found herself back in her own world, dazed, hollow, shaken. She felt all but catatonic as she watched her friend’s lovely and nimble fingers cross one strand of her silvery hair over another to form long and intricate plaits.

“I think they’ll love your new look, Edie,” Dorothea said with a flirtatious smile and a flutter of her eyelashes. “Are you sure you’re ready for this speech?”

“I think I really am.” The other Edelgard nodded. “Now that I’ve gotten used to it, my nerves aren’t so bad… actually, I think I have a knack for it now.”

“You _do_ have a flair for the dramatic.”

“You should have heard the temper tantrum I threw when Father told me I had to marry Ferdinand. Gerlinde said it was more moving than any aria she had ever heard.”

“Ferdie’s a sweet guy, but I’d have reacted the same way if I’d been forced to marry him.” Dorothea giggled. “Our Edie was quite the drama queen, too—oh, I’ve told you about the Flame Emperor, right? She missed her calling on the stage, that’s for sure. Honestly, I don’t know how we _didn’t_ end up being friends in your world.” She thought for a moment. “On the other hand, it’s not that surprising.”

Edelgard only half-listened to them chat. It all faded away to incoherent murmuring. Part of her was still there in the Holy Tomb, being transformed against her will, having her body violently torn away from her and with it her freedom and her very selfhood. The world around her felt like the flat, painted-wood scenery of a stage production, as though a careless gesture would knock it all down; the people merely actors reciting their lines.

She felt the other Edelgard rest a hand upon her breast as though she’d just felt her heartbeat come to a stop, breathe heavily as though she’d ran as far as she could run as quickly as she could, struggle for breath as the world closed in on her. She felt her lingering panic and pain seep into her, bleeding from one mind to another and through that, into the body.

 _“Edie? Edie, what’s the matter?”_ Dorothea asked. She sounded as though she were speaking to her from underwater. _“Is it your nerves? How about we do a few more of those breathing exercises…”_

Edelgard rose from her seat, wrapped her arms around Dorothea as tightly as she could, and buried her face in her chest to muffle the loud and piteous wail that wrenched itself from her throat.

* * *

She couldn’t remember what else she did in her world, who else she saw; she was hardly even aware when the other world ripped her mind back out of her body until she found herself lying in the infirmary alone.

Shivering, with trembling hands, she took a lock of her hair and lifted it, holding it over her eye.

It was brown.

A cracked, hoarse sigh of relief burst out of her and she sank into the cot beneath her as though it were the softest bed in the whole Imperial Palace. It was as though everything Rhea had done to her had been nothing but a dream. It might as well have been: the Holy Tomb, with its eerie green light and eldritch atmosphere, a liminal dark reflection of Garreg Mach, was itself a realm of nightmares brought into the world. And she felt now just as she did after her most horrible nightmares. Reality had to slowly work its way into her, driving away the fright lingering from those horrible visions of her slumbering subconscious like sunlight driving away fog.

The door to the infirmary creaked as it slowly swung open, and an indistinct figure slipped in. His footsteps padded gently across the floor as he crept forth. “Oh… Lady Edelgard. Is really only you in here?”

That voice. Count Galatea? Edelgard lifted her head, still groggy.

Before she knew it, Ingrid’s father was looming over her, a fragile smile cracking his thin face. “Oh, please, Your Highness, do not get up on my account. I’ve only come to see you off. I am to return to Galatea County, now that the funeral service is over. I simply wanted to thank you personally for what you did this morning.”

Edelgard mustered a smile. “You’re welcome.”

“I’m glad to see that you and Ingrid are such great friends,” he said, reaching into his cloak. “Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a pain for me… since I can’t stand that prissy little bitch.”

Edelgard saw the glint of a dagger’s steel blade as it slid out from under his cloak. A wicked smile crossed Count Galatea’s face. Before she could even scream, let alone fight back, the dagger’s blade was kissing her throat, pressing against it hard enough to draw a bead of blood from her skin.

“Don’t worry, Edelgard. No one will miss you. _No one will even know you’re gone—”_

His eyes widened, nearly popping from their sockets; his jaw hung slack; his hand sprung open and the dagger clattered to the floor with a deafening crash. A very soft and surprised grunt escaped his mouth. He slowly turned his head, his eyes rolling to the side as he glanced at the shadow over his shoulder.

 _“Vual—”_ he gasped, nearly inaudible. _“Why—”_

His body underwent a stark and sudden transformation, and where Count Galatea had once stood now was a short woman with deathly pale skin crisscrossed with sharp and angular tattoos and a curtain of sea-blue hair.

Seteth’s voice answered.

_“It is nothing personal, Vepar. Unfortunately for you, I made a promise to an old friend.”_

_“But Thales will—”_

_“—never know.”_

A knife silently slid out of the Agarthan replicant’s back and she fell to the ground, dead. Vual knelt beside her and ripped a black stone from her chest; it and the rest of Vepar’s body crumbled to a pile of black ash and wisps of smoke.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For your reading enjoyment: outside of his Seteth-suit, Vual looks and sounds like an Agarthan version of David Bowie. Specifically, David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King.
> 
> (It was either him or Mads Mikkelsen and boooooy was that a hard decision to make!!!!)


	31. My Dinner With Varley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard travels to Varley Manor to meet Prince Anselm, Bernadetta the Absolutely Terrified But Going For It Anyway confronts her father, and Sylvain ruins yet another relationship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is, the last chapter of 2020! Can you believe this fic's been going on for almost 7 whole months already? Thanks so much for reading and I hope you all have a much better 2021 than this dumpster fire of a year!

Hours after the funeral, Edelgard still couldn’t think straight. Even indoors at one of the study tables in the library, bundled up in the luscious wolf’s-fur cloak Dimitri had given her, she felt cold. Her hand trembled as her quill pen rested its nib idly against the next blank page in her notebook, and her eyes had roved over the same paragraph of her textbook at least a dozen times without a single word of it registering in her mind.

A voice faintly registered in her ears, distant and unintelligible. The cold mist that had clung to the jade floor of the Holy Tomb still seemed to swirl around her, invisible but tangible all the same, muffling sound, blinding sight, chilling her to the bone.

_“Um, Edelgard? Your Highness? Are you alright?”_

_“You’re not gonna get her attention_ that _way. Here, try this—”_

A wad of paper struck her on the forehead, jolting her back to reality. She looked up and saw Ignatz and Sylvain both sitting at the far end of the table. She hadn’t even noticed them enter the library, let alone sit down at the same table as her.

Sylvain pointed to Ignatz. “It was him.”

“I-It wasn’t!” Ignatz protested. “But, um… sorry,” he said, nervously scratching at his scalp, “but you’ve, uh… you’ve been sitting there since I got here and you haven’t taken a single note. Or… turned the page or anything, so, uh… I’m sorry if I’m overstepping my bounds, but—”

Sylvain rolled his eyes. “Iggy, you are in dire need of some remedial lessons on talking to girls. What he’s trying to say, Your Highness, is that you’ve been catatonic for like half an hour and it’s starting to worry us. Rhea said we don’t need to worry about any more classes for the day, so just put that book away and… I dunno, do something relaxing. Even _Ingrid’s_ taking it easy today.”

“Something relaxing.” Edelgard looked down at the blank page and all of the notes she hadn’t taken stared up at her. He was right. Being here was counterproductive at best. “Did you have anything in mind?”

With a rakish, devil-may-care grin on his face, Sylvain propped up his cheek in his hand and leaned forward on his elbow. “Well, as long as Ferdinand doesn’t find out, I know a place in town…”

“Sylvain!” Ignatz gasped. “That’s—That’s inappropriate.”

“Lesson one, Iggy. Girls love sensitive guys. Go on, ask her if you can get her anything.”

“That isn’t necessary,” Edelgard said, pulling herself up to her feet and closing both the textbook she’d been trying to read and her notebook, putting the stopper back in her inkwell, and putting away her quill pen. “But… I do thank you for the sentiments. Take care.”

She left the library, still dazed. As though having to be manhandled by Rhea and stuffed into a hideous outfit and then forced to preside over a three-hour religious ceremony hadn’t been bad enough, her memory didn’t care that the grisly ritual Rhea had tried to make her a part of had been erased from history. She could still feel the sympathetic ache from a thousand scars she didn’t have in this world… and her eye felt like it was going to explode. And on top of that, an Agarthan replicant, or whatever Vual called his kind, had taken the form of Ingrid’s father and tried to kill her.

The other infiltrator, Vual had explained to her, had likely taken Count Galatea’s form when he’d been en route to the monastery, if not earlier. After the funeral, while she’d been unconscious, he’d left the monastery, then sent his carriage out ahead of him, slipped back into the monastery, and gone to kill her. In a week or less, a letter would arrive to inform Ingrid that her father’s carriage had been run off the road or beset by some other accident on its way back through the Oghma Mountains.

It was no different from the pain she’d caused herself and others in the pursuit of her goals in her world, Edelgard had told herself. In her world, Flayn’s kidnapping, Lonato’s doomed rebellion, the tragedy at Remire, Jeralt’s death, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people across all of Fódlan, had all weighed heavily on her, but ultimately, none of that had deterred her. All the sleepless nights they’d caused her, all the pain like a knife driven into her heart… all of it had been in service to a better world, and so even when the pain had been enough that she’d silently begged for death, she’d kept going.

But could she keep destroying so much in this world, including her new friends’ families and an innocent version of herself, for the sake of Dimitri? Was it really necessary for _her_ to be the linchpin of saving his soul and stopping Operation Antediluvia? Shouldn’t her first and only priority be finding a way home? Why should the fate of this world mean anything to her at all when the one she had reforged by her own hands was obviously more important to her?

And yet what could she _really_ do now, besides press onward? Just as it had been in her world, caught between the Church of Seiros and Those Who Slither in the Dark, did she have any choice but to forge ahead?

Lost in her ruminations, she was reduced to an aimless wanderer throughout the monastery… until she felt herself slam into something tall and sturdy.

 _“Oh!”_ As she stumbled backward and lost her footing, she saw a flash of her uncle Volkhard’s face and felt his hand clamp down on her forearm to keep her from falling. “El,” he said, “is something the matter? You seem quite out of sorts.”

“I am,” Edelgard said. “Never mind me… I was just on my way to my room to get some rest.”

“I do not think you should be up and about,” he told her, “considering you fainted earlier today. It is for the best that you go to your room. Why don’t I escort you?”

Edelgard felt a pang of suspicion. What if he’d been replaced—again—and was plotting to kill her? She couldn’t count on Vual to save her every time. “I… I can manage for myself,” she said.

“I understand. However, you were heading in the opposite direction to the dormitories.”

“Ah.”

“Besides, I would like to have a word with you.” He laid a gentle hand on Edelgard’s shoulder, though it didn’t feel as gentle as it should’ve felt. The hand slipped to her back and pushed her along toward the dormitories.

“I am glad,” he said, “that you have acclimated to the Officer’s Academy and that your marks have improved. But I’m concerned for you. According to your classmates, these fainting spells of yours have been growing more frequent; you’ve even passed out on the battlefield a few times. And… well… two funerals makes it clear enough that the Blue Lions house is exceptionally dangerous this year.”

“What are you saying?” she asked. “Perhaps I do push myself too hard, but my classmates value my contributions in the classroom and on the battlefield. As for the deaths—”

“I think it might be for the best if I withdrew you from the academy.”

Edelgard was taken aback by Volkhard’s suggestion. “I… Uncle, I think that ship has sailed. There are only a few weeks of classes left. If we were halfway through the term, or only a few months, by all means, I’d agree with you, but…”

Deep down, though, she wondered if it was really such a bad idea. She’d inserted herself into too many events and endangered herself twice over more times than she could count, and this would keep herself and the other Edelgard’s body safe… from Thales and Rhea both. But if she consigned herself to retreating to Castle Arundel and living the idle life of a spoiled princess, she’d be abandoning Dimitri, Byleth, and even Hapi… and she’d be even further away from finding a permanent way home. Besides, Rhea _certainly_ would put up a fight to keep her here. Edelgard knew that for sure now, now that she knew what twisted endgame the archbishop had planned for her.

Volkhard frowned. “I know it is very late in the term. But please, El… since Anselma passed, you have been all I have left to remember her by.” He clasped her hands together and wrapped his own around them. “I love you as I would a daughter of my own. I would be devastated if the next casualty of your class happened to be you. And you know that your siblings… especially Hedwig… would be heartbroken.” His lilac eyes grew misty. Edelgard found it hard to look into them and let her gaze focus itself on his boots.

He put a hand under her chin and lifted her head so that she couldn’t look away. “I know that people in Faerghus consider a valiant death the highest form of achievement. Perhaps some of that attitude has rubbed off on you, El, but…” He raised his hand and his finger brushed against the surface of her eyepatch. “Just know that I am proud enough of you as you are right now.”

“Uncle…” The word struggled to crawl up Edelgard’s throat. It was so hard to see genuine tears in his eyes and to know that she was the cause of them. She took a deep breath, fighting against the lump in her throat. “Uncle Volkhard, consider this. If I arrange to take and pass my final certification exam early, perhaps I can graduate ahead of my class?” At the very least, she hoped that offer would placate him, even if Rhea would never allow it.

He smiled. “Oh… I suppose that is the most I can get from you. You always were so stubborn.”

They walked on together toward the dormitories.

“Oh,” he said, reaching into his cloak, “one more thing. I was just in the rookery awaiting news from Enbarr and these arrived.” He pulled out two envelopes, both bearing wax seals identifying the sender as Anselm von Hresvelg. “One is for you; the other is for Miss Varley. As you two are classmates, I suppose you can deliver the latter letter to her?”

“Of course.” Edelgard took them both, wondering what Anselm would have to say. Perhaps he’d heard that she and Ferdinand had written to Duke Aegir on behalf of Burkhart. Doubtless he wasn’t happy.

Volkhard wrapped his arms around her and held her close. “Please take care of yourself,” he said, “my dear niece.”

“I’ll do my best,” she assured him.

He left her with another voice adding to the chorus of doubts within her head. She went the rest of the way herself, stopping by Bernadetta’s room on the first story to deliver the letter. She knocked on the door. “Hello, Bernadetta? I have something for you.”

Bernadetta answered with her usual muffled squeak. _“Um… Wh-What is it? I’m not, uh, feeling great right now, so… is it small enough that you could slide it under the door?”_

“You mean like a letter?”

_“Yeah! If it’s a letter, just s-slide it under the door… and I’ll definitely, surely read it!”_

“You knew you had a letter from Prince Anselm, didn’t you, Bernadetta?”

_“Mmmmmmmmaybe? How did you know?”_

“My uncle Volkhard found it in the rookery. He must have assumed you hadn’t gotten it.”

Bernadetta was silent for a few seconds. _“Darn,”_ she finally said.

“I’ve received a letter from him, too,” Edelgard told her. “Actually, I’m a bit nervous about its contents… so perhaps it would help if we read our letters together?”

_“Y-You? Nervous? Why?”_

“Because Ferdinand and I wrote letters to Duke Aegir on Prince Burkhart’s behalf,” she said, “and I fear Anselm may have some choice words about that.”

The door creaked open and Bernadetta poked her head out. “Maybe… if we’re both nervous together, we’ll each be less nervous than we’d be individually,” she suggested.

“Exactly.”

“Okay, um… s-sorry about the mess,” she said, opening the door just wide enough to let Edelgard squeeze her way inside.

Edelgard and Bernadetta exchanged letters.

“Um… What if there are imperial family secrets in this letter,” Bernadetta asked, staring down at the one meant for Edelgard, “and if I find them out, it’s treason?”

“Then no one but us needs to know about this,” Edelgard assured her. She took a letter opener, broke the seal on Bernadetta’s envelope, and opened it.

“Okay… Here goes…” Bernadetta took a deep breath and cracked Edelgard’s envelope open.

Edelgard read Anselm’s letter to Bernadetta:

> _Dear Bernadetta, my wife-to-be,_
> 
> _I cannot help but find myself immeasurably excited by the prospect of our swiftly approaching union. I have heard so much about you that has left me intrigued and eager to finally meet you and welcome you into the grand lineage of Hresvelg. In fact, I am so eager that I cannot bear to wait. I insist that you visit me at Varley Manor, where I am working with your father Count Vincent von Varley on a mutually beneficial political partnership. Consider it the opening salvo of our courtship, though the conclusion is foregone. I know this is sudden, but I am certain that a bright student such as yourself will have no issue missing just a few days of class._
> 
> _Your fiance,_
> 
> _Anselm von Hresvelg_

She relayed the letter’s contents to Bernadetta, who listened to her in slack-jawed amazement.

“He’s… he’s kidding, right?” she asked Edelgard.

“I don’t think Anselm is the type to kid,” Edelgard replied. Anselm was obviously trying to butter Bernadetta up, unaware of just how difficult that was. “What about my letter?”

“Oh, um…” Bernadetta looked back down at Edelgard’s letter. “So… D-Don’t get mad at me, okay? You wouldn’t shoot the messenger, would you?”

“Of course not. If I have anyone to be mad at, it won’t be you.”

She sighed, took a deep breath, rubbed her fingertips anxiously against the paper, and said, “Um… Prince Anselm is disappointed that you told Duke Aegir to support Burkhart. I’d bet he totally hates you and is just being polite about it, but, uh… a-anyway, he wants you to… come visit him. Now. At Varley Manor. So he can talk to you face-to-face.”

“I see,” Edelgard said. “I’d been hoping to have a chance to speak to him in person anyway, so this works out well for me.”

Bernadetta took a deep breath, then another one, then another. “What if it’s a trap? What if Father made this whole thing up and when I show up he’ll just grab me and lock me in the cellar for being a bad daughter?”

“I don’t think your father can fake my brother’s handwriting, or the Hresvelg seal. And if he does mean to lock you up, well, I find my axe to be very good at breaking down doors, walls, and people.”

Bernadetta managed to let out a fraught, high-pitched nervous little laugh.

“Anselm isn’t the type to take no for an answer,” Edelgard continued, “but since he wants me to visit as well, I can assure you that neither he nor your father will hurt you.”

Bernadetta crossed her arms over her chest and hugged herself tightly, crumpling Edelgard’s letter under her curled fingers. “D-Do I have to?”

Edelgard looked at timid little Bernie, noting her hunched-over posture, the semi-permanent furrow of her brow, the way she shivered, and imagined the Bernadetta she knew—still an anxious loner, still nervous around other people, still prone to the occasional panic attack and bout of hysteria, but with a refined and cultivated inner strength that let her stand tall and proud even in the darkest times. She knew exactly what Bernadetta needed, due to her experience with her own Bernadetta.

The most important thing about Bernadetta was that she _wanted_ to be brave, and that all she needed to _become_ brave was _help._ At least she wasn’t like Hubert; Edelgard wouldn’t have to mold her into a morally ambiguous rat.

“Brave Bernie does,” Edelgard told Bernadetta. “And she doesn’t have to do it alone.”

“Brave Bernie,” Bernadetta intoned. She nodded. “Yeah… Bernadetta the Fearless. No, um, make that Bernadetta the Absolutely Terrified, But Going For It Anyway!”

“That’s the spirit.”

“…Can Professor Byleth come along, too?” she asked.

“No harm in asking,” Edelgard said.

She left Bernadetta behind and headed for the stairs, but as soon as she reached the top of the staircase, she paused, hearing the sound of both Dimitri’s voice and Thales’ drifting through the second floor hallway.

_“I do not see why you must withdraw Felix. The term is nearly over. Graduation is a little over a month away.”_

_“It is kind of you to advocate on his behalf, but this is a matter between father and son. Felix has accused me of treason. I spent a week held captive by the Knights of Seiros because of his rampant paranoia. He must face discipline.”_

_“But still…”_

_“But still_ what, _Dimitri? You do not think I will do anything untoward to him, do you? My own son?”_

_“I know that Felix has hurt you, Rodrigue. But I think it came from a place of love and concern. He saw that you were close to people like Lady Cornelia—”_

_“A mistake I shall never make again.”_

_“—and he… You must understand, he—he acts harshly toward people he cares for—”_

_“I_ know _my own son, Dimitri.”_

_“And dragging him away from the academy… do you not think it will only make him more resentful of you?”_

_“…I hope I have not done something new to offend you.”_

_“What? No! Rodrigue, I mean no disrespect; I am truly grateful for everything you have done! I have my disagreements with Felix, but I still consider him a friend, and I am simply trying to see things from_ his _viewpoint—”_

“You _are the king of Faerghus, not him._ Your _viewpoint is the only one that matters. In time, even he will have no choice but to bow to you._ I _shall see to that.”_

There was a pregnant pause.

 _“I think Annette fancies him,”_ Dimitri said.

 _“And? So what?”_ Thales replied, very obviously trying hard not to snarl. He let out a resigned sigh, though, and Edelgard heard his tone modulate. _“Perhaps you are right,”_ he said to Dimitri, his voice softer and kinder, conciliatory even. _“I do apologize for snapping at you, Dimitri. The stress of my situation was simply weighing too heavily on my shoulders for a moment, as it was too that morning when I… disciplined Felix. Perhaps I_ should _show some clemency, just this once. You are going to make a very wise king, my boy.”_

 _“Um… thank you, Rodrigue,”_ Dimitri replied, taken aback by Thales’ sudden change in demeanor. Edelgard supposed that Thales’ method of blowing hot and cold in the same breath was the key to ensuring Dimitri’s subservience; the same hand that harmed was also the hand that healed. Thales knew exactly when to concede to Dimitri’s whims and make him feel as though he were in control. _“I have Professor Byleth and El to thank for that.”_

_“Hmph. Is that all?”_

_“And… And_ you, _of course, Rodrigue. I thought that went without saying. So, Felix may stay?”_

_“He may. But do keep an eye on him. See to it he ceases speaking such seditious rubbish against his own house.”_

Edelgard slowly crept backward down the stairs as Thales’ footsteps echoed down the hall so that when he came down the staircase, he wouldn’t think she’d been close enough to overhear. He descended into view above her, a sardonic grin lighting up his face at the sight of her.

“Oh,” he said. “Hello, Your Highness. Are you feeling well? I heard you fainted after the funeral and had to be taken to the infirmary. You must be feeling better now. Like a new woman, in fact.”

Edelgard realized before she could spit some defiant remark his way that he obviously thought she had been replaced. “Like a new woman indeed, Lord Fraldarius,” she said, returning his smile with a sly one of her own. “Will you be leaving the monastery today?”

“Yes, yes, I am on my way right now. Has Count Galatea departed yet?”

“He has.”

“I wish him a safe trip. The mountains can be treacherous this time of year.”

* * *

Varley territory was small, its territory comprising the foothills of the Oghma Mountains northwest of Gronder Field, but within its borders was a mineral-rich part of the mountain range, which made House Varley a very wealthy and powerful house. Just as Gronder Field in Bergliez territory fed half of Fódlan, so too did the mines and smelting furnaces of House Varley arm it.

Bernadetta’s home (if only in a strictly formal sense) of Varley Manor was due south of Garreg Mach, nestled in the mountains. It was actually quite easily accessible from the monastery, even though the winding roads that ran up and down the mountain slopes suggested otherwise; a caravan leaving at sunrise could arrive before sundown if the weather was favorable, in only an hour or two if one traveled via pegasus or wyvern instead of by horse-drawn carriage.

The manor sprawled as much as it could across the rough and uneven terrain, overlooking one of many mining towns throughout Varley’s domain. Ornate wrought-iron fences and gates enclosed its grounds, and the same iron ornaments sharpened the snow-laden eaves of its pointed rooftops into spears aimed at the heavens. Farther up the mountain’s slope was a grim garrison casting its martial shadow over manor and town both; though it was long-disused, Edelgard recalled using it as the site of a provisional camp preceding her assault on Garreg Mach.

The carriage that brought Bernadetta and Edelgard to Varley Manor also carried two other guests. While Byleth hadn’t been able to attend (ostensibly due to too much work, but actually to keep an eye on Vual and Dimitri), Sylvain had insisted on coming along for Bernadetta’s ‘protection,’ and Ingrid had insisted on coming along so that Sylvain wouldn’t make an ass of himself.

The heavy wrought-iron gate that separated House Varley from the commoners swung open to allow them access; the carriage came to a stop in the front yard and the four travelers disembarked. The air was not only cold but hellishly dry; as soon as she stepped outside, Edelgard could feel her skin starting to crack.

The attendant who welcomed them to the manor offered a polite bow to Edelgard and to Bernadetta, but squinted suspiciously at Sylvain and Ingrid.

“Don’t mind them,” Edelgard told him. “They are Lady Bernadetta’s classmates; they have traveled with us at her behest.”

The attendant nodded. “Yes, m’lady. I shall have Count Varley and Prince Anselm informed of your arrival at once,” he said, and he turned his back on them and headed for the door.

Sylvain took a deep breath, stretching as he stepped out of the carriage and put his feet on solid ground for the first time since breakfast. “It’s so brisk here!” he exclaimed. “Reminds me of back home. Who’d have thought you guys would have a little piece of Faerghus this far south? So, Bernie, I bet Ingrid’s dying to know what your dad’s gonna serve us for dinner. Any ideas?”

Bernadetta merely stared at the manor’s foreboding facade, nervously kneading her hands. She was unusually well-groomed for this occasion, her tangled mop of violet hair freshly conditioned and combed straight, a subtle application of makeup adding a touch of color to her face, and a modest yet formal gown replacing her typical wardrobe. Reading the faraway look in her gray eyes, Edelgard started having second thoughts about bringing her here. She put her hand to Bernadetta’s shoulder. “It’s alright, Bernadetta,” she assured her. “You’re not alone.”

“I wonder if any of my plants are still in my room,” Bernadetta mumbled.

Eventually, the attendant came back and led the four of them into the manor, seating them in the parlor. Varley territory was famous for its ironwork, blacksmithing, and whitesmithing, and the decorations of the manor inside and out showed that off with pride. Every staircase had wrought iron banisters; the mahogany grandfather clock in the foyer was inlaid with delicate gold filigree; pewter vases shaped into unique and exotic vessels stood on display, some containing bouquets of flowers, some containing nothing at all but simply flaunting their designs; suits of steel armor decorated with intricate patterns of gold leaf and red paint as shiny as polished brass stood guard in the hallways like silent sentinels, gripping swords and axes in their hands.

Edelgard and the others had only just taken their seats in the parlor when one of their hosts came to greet them. Anselm stepped into the room, a sumptuous burgundy cape draped over his shoulders and swirling in his wake. The richness and finery of his clothes spoke clearly to the station he wished to attain. The last time Edelgard had seen him, he’d worn his shoulder-length jet-black hair in a carefully and deliberately tousled mane; now, though, to demonstrate his seriousness, it was combed and tied straight back, with just a few wisps falling over his high forehead. His face looked severe at first glance, with narrow and beady eyes and a wide mouth drawn in a thin-lipped scowl, but the scowl immediately turned into a grin.

Anselm flung out his arms. “El!” he boomed in his deep, rich voice. “I was worried you wouldn’t come.”

Edelgard waited for a moment before realizing he wanted her to come to him. She stood up from her chair. “Anse—Ansy. It’s… good to see you again. I do apologize for—”

“Save the serious matters for after supper,” he said, wrapping her up in his arms and pressing her to his chest. He hugged the way Hedwig did—like it was an arm-wrestling competition in which he could use both arms. “El, your eye—Who did this to you?”

“It’s just a minor irritation, nothing more,” Edelgard insisted.

“Ah, that’s a relief. If I’d found you mutilated, I would move heaven and earth seeking justice. Now, you must be starving. You and…”

His gaze turned to Bernadetta. “And _this_ lovely specimen… I can see the family resemblance. You must be Lady Bernadetta von Varley.” He strode across the parlor to where Bernadetta was sitting and, before she could throw herself behind the sofa to hide from him, he fell to one knee and took her gently by the hand. “Bernadetta, you are as enchanting as I had hoped,” he said, planting a kiss upon her hand. “Seeing you in the flesh, I grow more certain than ever before that I _will_ be made emperor, by rook or by crook, if only so I can make you the empress you so richly deserve to be.”

Sylvain rolled his eyes.

Bernadetta snatched her hand away from Anselm. “Uh—Um, I-I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to—I just don’t like—Ugh, Bernie, _shut up,_ it doesn’t _matter_ what you like—”

“Who says it doesn’t matter what you like?” Anselm said, full of mock indignation. Bernadetta cowered before him. “Very well. If you dislike being kissed on the hand, then tell me, are your cheeks forbidden as well?”

Bernadetta looked up at him and blinked blearily, as petrified as a rabbit who’d been cornered by a fox. “Huh?”

Anselm’s head turned as he noticed Sylvain (who immediately tried to look as though he hadn’t been in mid-eyeroll) and Ingrid. “More guests. And familiar ones at that. I saw you both at Gronder Field some months ago, didn’t I?” He studied them carefully.

Ingrid stood up and offered him a polite bow. “Your Highness, I am In—”

He lifted his hand in the air to silence her. “No, no, let me figure it out. It’s on the tip of my tongue.” He thought for a moment. “Oh, right. Ingrid Brandl Galatea and Sylvain Jose Gautier. I will admit, I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“We’re Bernie’s friends, Your Highness,” Sylvain said. “We came here for, uh… moral support.”

“Excellent,” Anselm said, briskly rubbing his hands. “A pleasure to make both of your acquaintances.” He took a seat next to Bernadetta. She inched away from him. He inched closer. “Don’t be such a mouse,” he told her. “After you graduate, we are going to spend the rest of our lives together.”

“Your Highness, would you mind asking me what you studied when you attended Garreg Mach?” Ingrid asked, seizing on an opportunity to distract him.

“Faith,” he said. “I finished the term with a holy knight certification. My rank was just as high in reason, and Hanneman tried to push me into a dark warlock for my final exam, but I wanted my record to reflect that I took my most difficult subject and made it my greatest strength. And what are the four of you planning to graduate as?”

“A pegasus knight,” Ingrid answered. “I’ve always liked to fly.”

“A dark knight,” Sylvain said. “I guess that makes us opposites, Your Highness. Wait, you said you studied a bit of dark magic, too?” He looked to Edelgard. “Edelgard, aren’t you studying dark magic right now?”

“Yes; it’s for my valkyrie certification,” she said.

Anselm’s eyes lit up. “Wonderful; perhaps I can provide you with some tutoring while you’re here,” he said to her. “And you, my dear Bernadetta?”

“Um… bow knight,” Bernadetta piped up. “If I make it to the exam.”

“I see. Perhaps the five of us can go out riding tomorrow, should the weather permit.”

The five of them were served tea, and while they waited for Count Varley to greet them, they made idle small talk. None of them were willing quite yet to address the wyvern in the room and ask him why he was so intent on causing so much political chaos in the Empire, even though it was clear that it was on everybody’s minds.

“So, Sylvain,” Anselm said. “You had an older brother, right? I could have sworn I’d heard of him… Miklan, was it?”

Sylvain nodded, his forced pleasant smile slipping. “Yeah.”

“I heard about what happened to him. It’s quite a shame.” Anselm took a sip of his tea. “Raising an army and occupying a fortress shows real talent. I’m sorry the world had to lose him.”

“I’m not,” Sylvain blurted out, prompting a jab in his side from Ingrid.

“Oh? You didn’t get along well with him, then?” He chuckled.

“No, I didn’t. He was a real piece of work.”

A sly smile tugged at Anselm’s lips. “Well, I was complimenting his talent and skill, not his moral character.”

“And it was an army of half-starved bandits and an abandoned fortification, so… not really that impressive.”

Ignoring Sylvain, Anselm’s gaze fell on Bernadetta. “Dear Bernadetta, you’ve hardly said a word. How is your tea?”

“Um… fine?” she said.

“Not too hot?”

“No, the temperature’s just right.”

“I see. You haven’t taken a single sip, though.” He took another sip. “If you’re worried about poison, I can assure you that if we were in any danger, your friends would already be dead.”

Bernadetta set down her teacup. “I… think I need to freshen up,” she said. She looked at Edelgard with eyes that shouted out, _help me!_ “Can I… p-please leave? I mean, just for a moment, not forever! I’m not gonna sneak out the window or anything!”

“What an oddly specific denial. Of course, of course, go,” Anselm said to her.

“I need to freshen up, too,” Edelgard said, setting her tea aside. “Please excuse me.” She followed Bernadetta into the hall and down a corner until the two of them were well out of earshot of anyone else.

Bernadetta shuddered and took a deep breath. “He’s so frightening…” she gasped.

“He definitely does come on strong,” Edelgard noted. “He does seem fond of you, but since he’s only just met you, it stands to reason that he doesn’t know how to behave around you yet.”

Bernadetta’s brow furrowed. “He… doesn’t know how to… huh?”

“Well, take myself, for instance. Weren’t you frightened of me when we first met?”

She nodded. “Terrified. Utterly terrified.”

“As I recall, it took me about six months to learn how to treat you. And now you don’t have any problem speaking to me.”

“But I don’t have six months until I marry him! And besides,” Bernadetta said, glancing down the hall as though afraid Anselm might have followed her, “he’s a lot more terrifying than you.”

Edelgard was taken aback for a moment. _She_ was used to being the terrifying one. “He’s just… overeager,” she said to Bernadetta. “But there’s nothing for you to be afraid of. He’s just as human as you or I.”

“I’m sure Father’s been telling him all kinds of horrible things about Bernie,” Bernadetta said. “He’s definitely just acting nice so he can humiliate Bernie in front of everyone!” She took a deep, halting breath, her chest heaving. “Oh, Goddess, just thinking about dinner is making me nauseous… I’ll spend the whole time fidgeting and Father’s gonna yell at me and Anselm’s going to be _disgusted—_ Bernie, you idiot, you should’ve just thrown yourself in a snowbank and let yourself freeze to death…”

“Bernadetta,” Edelgard said, taking her by the shoulders and gently pulling her inward, “listen to me and breathe. I know it’s hard to be here. I know how brave you’re being right now. You’re not just here to meet Anselm, you’re here to prove to yourself that you can overcome your fear of your father. Just as you overcame your fear of me, of Dimitri, of the rest of our classmates.”

“But…” Bernadetta sniffled. “My father is so much more terrifying than Dimitri or Dedue. They’re _nice,_ deep down. But with my father… there _is_ no deep down.”

“All the more reason to stand tall and proud against him.” Edelgard wiped the tears welling up in Bernadetta’s eyes. “Don’t worry. Sylvain, Ingrid, and I are here to defend and advocate for you.”

There was a muffled shout from the parlor.

Edelgard sighed. “In fact, it sounds like Sylvain is advocating for you right now.”

Bernadetta wrapped her arms around her and squeezed her half to death. “Okay, Edelgard. I—I’ll do it. I’ll be Brave Bernie again! I know I said that fifteen times on the carriage ride over, but—but I mean it this time! Bernadetta the Brave!”

“Bernadetta the Absolutely Terrified, But Going For It Anyway,” Edelgard added, patting Bernadetta on the cheek.

* * *

Count Varley himself did not make an appearance until it was time for dinner, meeting his guests in the dining room. He was tall, pale, thin, and imposing, with a hard-cut, stony face obscured by silver bristles dotted with just a few specks of violet here and there. A pair of glasses sat perched on his nose, occasionally catching the light and transforming for brief instants into flickering opaque disks that obscured the steely gray of his eyes. A perpetual disappointed scowl seemed permanently affixed to his face. To say he was an affable host would have spat in the face of the very concept of hospitality, though he at least deigned to offer Anselm and Edelgard both curt, formal bows.

The dinner table had six seats; Count Varley sat at the head of the table, with Bernadetta on the left side sandwiched between him and Anselm (an unenviable situation if ever there was one), Edelgard and Ingrid on the right side with an empty seat between them and the count, and Sylvain at the foot of the table.

Count Varley’s eyes slid off of Bernadetta, like water off a duck’s back; he barely acknowledged her until she had taken her seat at the table and raised a spoon to the bowl of lamb stew awaiting her. “Elbows off the table,” he hissed sharply at her. With a startled yelp, Bernadetta dropped her spoon to the floor. It clattered to the floor, and with the sound of metal on stone ringing in everyone’s ears, she sat motionless, paralyzed, her jaw hanging slack and her eyes wide.

“Your elbow is still on the table,” he pointed out to her, forcing her to shamefully avert her eyes. He looked to Anselm. “Your Highness, I must apologize on Bernadetta’s behalf. As I warned you, she is a stupid girl.”

Edelgard swore she could hear Ingrid and Sylvain grinding their teeth. “That’s hardly an appropriate way of speaking about your own daughter, sir… with all due respect,” she said.

“When you have a daughter of your own, Your Highness, you’ll understand,” Count Varley retorted.

“No need to apologize,” Anselm said. “I shall take her as she is. I still believe she will make a good wife yet, no matter how much effort I must put into her.”

Bernadetta’s face crumpled like a wad of old parchment paper. Her worst fears had been confirmed. She gulped and stared down at her stew. “I’m… not hungry,” she mumbled. “M-May I…”

“Speak up,” Count Varley snapped. “I swear to the Goddess, you must think we’re all a bunch of mice, the way you squeak.”

“Yes, speak up, Bernadetta,” Anselm said, nodding in agreement.

“Excuse me, Count Varley,” Ingrid spoke up. “I don’t suppose you’re kept abreast about your daughter’s academic performance?”

“I receive a progress report from the academy each month,” he said. He didn’t sound impressed.

“There are things progress reports cannot tell you,” she replied. “Bernadetta is one of the best archers in Garreg Mach. Her aim is impeccable and her reaction times are superb. And she’s so quick that sometimes I think she could outrun a horse. On our assignments, I’m proud to fight alongside her. If you think that’s stupid, then I’d like to put a bow and arrow in your hands and see how well you fare.”

Count Varley almost looked bored.

“With all due respect, sir,” she added. Her green eyes could have been daggers for all their intensity.

He slipped a forkful of stew into his mouth and thoughtfully chewed it, then swallowed. “That’s one thing she can do right then, I suppose. A bow is a coward’s weapon, though. Like those barbaric Almyrans. Aren’t you any good with an axe, Bernie?”

“Count Varley, there is no such thing as a cowardly weapon,” Edelgard answered, growing angrier by the second. “What you call cowardly,” she added with a forced smirk, _“I_ prefer to call good tactics. Bernadetta can fell one enemy halfway across the battlefield and already have her bow drawn and aimed at the next by the time he hits the ground. Do you call _that_ cowardly?”

“Edelgard,” Anselm said, “is that any way to speak to our host? You are a _guest_ of Count Varley. I think you owe him an apology.”

“If you were offended by that, Count Varley, then I am sorry… you were offended.” She could have reached across the table and strangled Anselm, though she was almost certain he was only toadying up to Count Varley to stay on his good side.

An uncomfortable silence descended upon the dining hall, broken only by the sound of eating and drinking and of silverware scraping against ceramic.

“So, you there, boy,” Count Varley said to Sylvain, “you’re the Gautier heir, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Sylvain said tersely.

“Your father has told me quite a lot about you.”

“I bet he has,” he muttered. “You two get along pretty well, probably.”

“I don’t consort much with nobles from Faerghus, but I know your father well enough from business. He’s bought plenty of Varley steel. And what brings _you_ here?”

“I’m Bernie’s friend.”

“Why?”

Sylvain blinked, befuddled. “Did… you just ask me _why_ I’m her friend?”

“Yes. I’m quite curious, since from what I hear you’ve broken almost as many women’s hearts as there are women in Fódlan.”

“Even Sylvain is capable of demonstrating some human decency from time to time,” Ingrid interjected. Unsaid, but clear in her defiant glare, was an added _unlike you._

“I’m glad to hear that,” Anselm said. “Of course, I want my future wife to be… unspoiled.”

Edelgard couldn’t see Count Varley’s boots underneath the table, but she was sure they were so clean they all but sparkled.

“On a different note, out of curiosity,” Anselm added, “Count Varley, who is set to inherit the management of House Varley when you retire? Bernadetta, of course, will be too busy at my side.”

Count Varley let out a sharp, derisive bark of laughter. “Of course House Varley will not fall under _her_ management. Heaven forbid! I had an older son by my first wife. He will be the next Count Varley.”

“And where is he now?”

“He serves in the Imperial Navy. He saw action in the Brigid-Dagda War. Sank three of those primitive savages’ ships.”

“You must be proud of him. I hope nothing unfortunate befalls him in the line of duty.”

Bernadetta stood up. “Um… I—I would like to be excused. I’m nauseous.”

“Sit down,” Count Varley snapped, rising to his feet. “We are entertaining _guests,_ Bernadetta. If you have no appetite, then sit still until the rest of us have finished. We are preparing for the most important thing you will ever do with your wretched life and if you ruin this, then—”

Sylvain rose to his feet, unable to take any more of this. Edelgard hadn’t realized how utterly lovesick he must have been to be so pigheadedly chivalrous all of a sudden whenever Bernadetta’s honor came under attack. “Hey—”

“Excuse me, Count Varley,” Anselm said, interrupting him. “It would be a shame if Lady Bernadetta were to be sick all over this fine table. Why don’t I escort her to the powder room and allow her to calm her nerves and her stomach, if that’s what she needs?”

Count Varley rolled his eyes. “So long as you don’t allow her to lock herself in her bedroom. I cannot tell you the number of servants who have fallen for that trick.”

“Lock herself in her bedroom? Whatever for?”

“Oh, you know,” Count Varley said with a dismissive flick of his wrist. “Her stupid hobbies.”

“Stupid hobbies? Bernadetta taught Prince Dimitri how to crochet,” Sylvain blurted out. “And she won a ghost story contest against _Mercedes,_ of all people. And you should’ve seen the portrait she did of Lorenz. She made the poor guy almost look handsome.”

Anselm looked to Count Varley, as though waiting for his cue.

“I’m sorry to hear that such juvenile trash impresses you,” Count Varley said to Sylvain. “Are you as dazzled by playing-card tricks? Would you be so delighted if I produced a shiny gold coin from behind your ear?”

“If you think card tricks are nothing to sneeze at, you haven’t seen mine.”

Anselm chuckled. “She tells _stories,_ sir?” he asked, incredulous.

“The most asinine pablum you can imagine. Not fit to be read as bedtime fables for toddlers. I thought I’d cured her of that lunacy long ago, when I had her read one of her stories aloud to the rest of the servants. Oh, how they laughed…”

Anselm laughed as though on cue. “Oh, don’t you worry, sir; I will see to it she’s cured of that habit.” He stood up and pushed in his seat. “Come along, my dear Bernadetta.”

“I need to refresh myself as well,” Edelgard said, circling around to the other side of the table. It was easy enough to tell from a glance that Bernadetta couldn’t handle being alone with Anselm. As she passed Ingrid, she whispered, _“Please don’t let Sylvain kill Count Varley.”_

 _“Can’t make any promises,”_ Ingrid whispered back through gritted teeth. The fact that most of her stew had yet to be inhaled was a testament to how upset she was.

Edelgard took Bernadetta with her into the hallway, with Anselm following behind. Bernadetta clung to her arm and with a remarkable show of self-restraint managed to hold back a whimper until the door behind them had swung shut.

“What an odious, disgusting, ill-tempered, uncultured, joyless swine of a man,” Anselm spat. “I am at my wit’s end with this sentient collection of pig’s feces.” He glanced around the hall with a sour frown. Like Edelgard, he’d surely taken note of how gloomy and oppressive the décor was: as proud as House Varley was of its metal trade, the wrought iron that found its way into seemingly every part of the manor made the place feel more like a prison than a home. It certainly fit the count’s character; it was miserable in its beauty.

Bernadetta burst into tears, muffling her sobs in Edelgard’s chest.

Edelgard gently ran her fingers through her hair with one hand while the other hand traced gentle circles between her shoulderblades. “You,” she said to Anselm, “are sucking up to Count Varley, aren’t you? I suspected as much.”

“I’m afraid it’s the only way to stay in that curmudgeonly miser’s good graces, considering we got off to a bit of a rocky start,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders. “Unfortunately, I need Count Varley to not only tolerate but _like_ me at least until I’ve gotten what I want from him. Then he can rot for all I care. Preferably, in a dungeon.” He reached out and put a hand to Bernadetta’s shoulder. “Bernadetta, my dear. It is alright. I did not mean a word of those horrible things I said. It is simply… politics.”

Bernadetta wailed and shrank deeper into Edelgard’s arms.

“You know, I’m something of an artistic soul myself,” he added. “When I was at Garreg Mach last year, I organized a production of a ballet for the winter ball. I played the rat king.” His face cracked into a smile. “Do you remember going to see that, El? Ah, the two of us were kings and queens of drama. We used to stage little plays for Hedy and Pascal, too, no matter how much our older siblings would tease us for it. Go ahead and tell her about it. Tell her about that one time you made fake blood out of strawberry jelly for a production of _The Merchant of Derdriu_ and nearly sent Hubert into an apoplectic fit.”

Bernadetta still kept her face hidden, though her sobbing and whimpering had subsided.

Anselm patted her on the shoulder again. “Bernadetta? My dear, listen to me. I am on your side in all things. You can trust me.” He looked to Edelgard. “El, perhaps _you_ should explain it to her.”

“Bernadetta has difficulty trusting people,” she answered, “and with a father like that, I’m certain you can see why. Being so two-faced won’t endear you to her.”

“Of course,” he said, “but what choice do I have? This is the reality of statecraft. I cannot be judged by my words or deeds—only my goals, should I achieve them.”

Edelgard found that sentiment uncomfortably familiar. What, she wondered, were Anselm’s goals, precisely?

Bernadetta slowly, carefully eased herself out of Edelgard’s grip and gave Anselm a hesitant glance. “Are you… _sure_ you didn’t bring me here so you could humiliate me in front of my friends?”

“Why would I do that?” he asked, wrinkling his nose. “I didn’t expect you to bring your friends. And I wasn’t aware that you and Edelgard were already acquainted!”

“So you thought it was just going to be me, alone, having to deal with my father all by myself?” she asked, allowing herself a rare moment of anger.

The affable grin on Anselm’s face shrunk a bit. “Well,” he said, taken aback, “you would hardly have been _alone.”_

Edelgard almost pitied him, although, of course, she felt much sorrier for Bernadetta. Anselm had no idea who he was dealing with, and it was far more to his fiancee’s detriment more than his own.

“Think of it this way,” he added. “Bernadetta, my dear, what you see of me in front of your idiot father is simply a facade. What you see now, in the parlor, and whenever we are beyond his reach— _that_ is my true face.”

“So you’re… lying to him,” Bernadetta said, squinting suspiciously at him with her lips pursed.

“I’m _fooling_ him, dear,” Anselm corrected. “And I have never met an easier man to fool: the perfect combination of stupid and arrogant. I am _so_ relieved that you and him have nothing in common.”

“Um… yeah,” she admitted, softening up a bit, “I guess the apple falls pretty far from the tree, huh?”

“It fell so far that you may as well have come from another orchard. You don’t belong here, Bernadetta. I’m certain of that now.” He reached out to her, but seeing her shrink away from his fingertips as though repulsed, he thought better of it and drew back his hand. “I can’t wait to take you away from all this. You are going to be so much happier as a Hresvelg.”

A tentative smile lit up Bernadetta’s face, a small spark lit in her heart against the paranoid darkness that so often fogged up her thoughts. “Um… okay. But maybe you could tone it down a bit? I-I mean you don’t have to be a total sycophant, do you?”

“I suppose not,” Anselm conceded. “Well, I suppose we should return to the dinner table before your father starts to worry you’ve escaped his wicked clutches.”

Bernadetta nervously acquiesced to being led back to the dining room. When Edelgard opened the door for her and Anselm, the three of them were immediately greeted by the back half of an indignant tirade by, of all people, Ingrid.

 _“—and he was the kindest and bravest man I’d ever known, so if you_ dare _spew that attitude about commoners again—”_ Ingrid stopped in mid-tirade as Bernadetta timidly shuffled back into the room. “Oh,” she said. Her face was red; a moment ago from anger, now from embarrassment. “Sorry, Bernadetta.”

“Bernadetta, why did you bring with you such ill-mannered guests?” Count Varley asked Bernadetta. “I suppose it’s to be expected from Faerghus. I cannot say I approve of you fraternizing with them.”

“In all fairness, Ingrid’s had a bit too much to drink,” Sylvain said, gesturing to her nearly-full wineglass. “Real lightweight,” he added with a wink.

“Be that as it may,” Count Varley said, standing at the head of the table, “I can only extend my hospitality toward you cretinous excuses for nobility so far.”

Sylvain mumbled something under his breath. Edelgard barely caught the word ‘dick.’

“I expect you two to leave the manor at first light tomorrow. The servants will see you to the guest bedrooms and see to it you are promptly evicted tomorrow. I am certain there is room at the inn if you need somewhere to stay until Lady Edelgard and my daughter are ready to leave.”

“Got it,” Sylvain said.

“I am headed to my study, Your Highness,” Count Varley said to Anselm. “I have more to discuss with you.”

“Of course, Count Varley,” Anselm said, once again plastering a sycophantic smile on his face. The two of them left the dining room together.

As the servants came to collect the remains of dinner (Count Varley and Anselm had been the only ones to finish their bowls, as everyone else had been too disgusted to eat their fill), Ingrid nervously looked to her peers. “I… I didn’t mean to lose my temper there,” she told Bernadetta. “Please forgive me. The things he said about commoners… I just couldn’t let that go unchallenged. For Ashe’s sake.”

“Who knew it was _you_ we needed to worry about, huh?” Sylvain asked, taking one of the mostly-full wineglasses from one of the servants before they could whisk it off the table and downing it in one gulp. “Anyway, thanks for getting us kicked out, Ingrid. We’ve been here less than two hours and I already can’t stand the idea of spending one more day with that guy.”

* * *

During the disastrous dinner, the Varley estate’s servants had taken the guests’ bags and brought them to their respective bedrooms. Bernadetta’s room was in the north wing of the manor; Edelgard’s, Ingrid’s, and Sylvain’s guest bedrooms were in the south (there was plenty more available bedrooms in the north wing, of course, but Edelgard assumed that Count Varley had told his servants to spread the guests out, particularly the unexpected ones, as a sign of his disdain for them). Since the night was still young, they decided that the rest of the evening was best spent together, and so they met in the north wing with Bernadetta instead of remaining on the other side of the manor.

“I hope you don’t mind our company,” Ingrid said as Bernadetta fiddled nervously with the doorknob. “I know your bedroom is a sanctuary of sorts for you. We can leave if—”

“No, it’s fine,” Bernadetta said to her. “I mean… I don’t think I’ve left anything _too_ embarrassing in my room. Except for the plants… and a few old manuscripts… and the paintings… oh, no, the _paintings…”_

“We can meet up in one of the guest bedrooms instead,” Edelgard suggested.

“It’s okay! It’s okay, you’ve done so much for me already; I know a couple silly old paintings aren’t going to scare you off or anything! Just don’t touch anything or look at anything or…”

The door swung open. Bernadetta gasped, horrified.

The room was as bare as a prison cell. There were no half-finished sketches or canvases daubed with long-faded paints strewn around the floor, the dresser drawers were empty, and a sad trio of empty ceramic pots on the windowsill were the only signs that there had once been vegetation in this room. Even the wallpaper had been stripped away to leave naked wood paneling behind. The bed still had its sheets, thankfully, but those and the travel bags piled at the foot of the bed were the only splash of color in the drab, dull room.

Bernadetta looked as though she’d been struck across the face. “He… got rid of _everything,”_ she gasped. She chewed her lip, distressed and heartbroken. “Even the succulents…”

Ingrid laid a hand on her shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Bernadetta.”

Bernadetta stepped over the threshold and into the empty room with slow, plodding steps, as though she were under an enchantment. The floorboards creaked under her feet. With a forlorn sigh, she flopped onto the bed and listened to the bedsprings squeak under her weight. “I guess there’s no harm in you coming in,” she said to the others.

“If I had another few glasses of wine in me I’d drag that dastard out of his study and throw him out the window,” Sylvain muttered.

“And I’d let you,” Ingrid added. “Bernadetta, your father… even after everything you told us about him, I hadn’t thought it was possible for him to be so awful.” She joined Bernadetta on the side of the bed. “My father can be difficult sometimes, frustrating, and a bit pigheaded, but at least he’s kind. It didn’t occur to me that yours could be so devoid of redeeming qualities. Perhaps sometime you can visit Galatea and see what a decent father is like. He’d be happy to meet you.”

While Bernadetta mustered a bitter laugh, the news of Count Galatea’s death formed a pit in Edelgard’s stomach. At this very moment, Count Galatea’s carriage was likely laying in a crumple heap on the northern slopes of the Oghma Mountains; Those Who Slither in the Dark, if they’d kept his body, had likely placed it amid the wreckage so that no one would hold out any hope that he could have survived. Ingrid didn’t know. She wouldn’t until some poor soul found him underneath the shattered wheels and the broken bodies of the horses half-buried in the snow.

“If it’s any consolation, Bernie, my dad’s a piece of shit, too,” Sylvain said. “Just look at how my big brother turned out. And Edelgard’s family is its own mess.” He sat down on the bed beside her. “I think I’ve figured out how your dad’s mind works, though. First and foremost, he hasn’t got one. He just takes in whatever you give him and puts out spite, kinda like how a horse takes in oats and puts out dung.”

Bernadetta burst out laughing.

“So here’s what you’ve got to do. Next time he insults you, you turn it right back on him.”

“Thanks,” Bernadetta said. “I’m glad you’re all here. There’s no way Bernie could do all this without any of your help. Even though I’ve been scared out of my mind this whole time, it felt… nice to hear you saying all those things about me. I’m used to just avoiding dinner altogether so I don’t have to be in the same room as my father, but because you were there I could at least have a little bit of that stew while it was still warm.”

“No wonder you’re so thin,” Ingrid remarked. As though to agree with her, her stomach growled so loudly that everybody in the room could clearly hear it.

“It’s not like I’d skip eating entirely,” Bernadetta said. “Actually, what I’d do was…” She took a deep breath and lowered her voice, as though worried the walls themselves might hear her. “Some time after dinner, when the coast is clear, I’d sneak into the kitchen and steal leftovers. It’s the same thing I do at the academy when I, uh, you know… don’t want to be around people.”

Sylvain snickered. “Are you suggesting we all go down to the kitchen like a bunch of thieves and gorge ourselves on cold stew? I’m not sure our snooty friends here here would approve—”

“Sure. Anything,” Ingrid said. “My stomach is just about wrapped around my spine right now. I’ll eat whatever we can find.”

“It’s not the most dignified way to eat,” Edelgard agreed, “but food is food.” She’d had worse during the war than cold stew. “Bernadetta, since you know the lie of the land, you’ll be leading us. Our mission is to seize control of the kitchen.”

In spite of it all, Bernadetta let out a genuinely mirthful giggle. “Alright, let’s go,” she said with a smile. “With the three of you on my side, there’s no way we’ll fail!”

Heartened by the promise of food, the four of them crept through Varley Manor toward the kitchen, which Bernadetta insisted was probably empty by now, though they quickly found themselves faced with an unexpected obstacle.

“Lost on the way to your bedrooms?” Anselm asked with a wry quirk of his lips. “I’m sure the servants could be of help; no need to creep around like a pack of thieves.”

“Oh, um… h-hi, Prince Anselm,” Bernadetta said. “Or is it just Anselm? Sorry. A-Anyway, no, I’m just, uh… taking my friends on a tour of the manor. Nothing weird about that, right? Not at all! So there’s definitely no need to be suspicious!”

“Oh? Why don’t I come with you?”

“Why?” Sylvain asked. “Did the old man run out of boots for you to polish?”

Anselm laughed. “I suppose I should apologize for being such a lickspittle. Count Varley is despicable, but unfortunately, for the moment, I need him more than he needs me. Hence the boot polish—an unfortunate reality of politics. For now, though, I’m free and eager to spend an evening with my soon-to-be wife.”

“Okay, fine, we’re sneaking into the kitchen because we’re hungry!” Bernadetta blurted out. “Please don’t tell my father!”

“I see,” Anselm said. He shrugged. “Well, that’s no skin off my back. Good luck and godspeed.” He turned his back on them.

“Wait,” Sylvain said.

He did another about-face. “Yes?”

“I know a thing or two about jerks. And you’re about as big of one as they come. You think you’re the center of the world, huh? It must be hard being so entitled and self-important.”

Ingrid set a hand on Sylvain’s shoulder and pulled her face into a stern frown. “This isn’t the right time for this,” she told him.

“Self-important? I was _born_ important; no need to impose it on myself, simply the rest of the world,” Anselm retorted. “Oh… I see what’s going on here. The way you’ve been leaping to Bernadetta’s defense time and time again without fail… Has the notorious louse of Gautier house found a heart? Or are you just stringing her along, just like every other woman who ends up swept into your life?”

“Um… Can we just eat?” Bernadetta asked.

“Anselm, whatever you have to say to Sylvain,” Edelgard said, stepping between him and Sylvain, “now is hardly the time.”

“I know your type,” Anselm hissed at Sylvain, brushing her aside. “And I’ve had some old friends in Garreg Mach collecting information on you ever since El joined your class. What is it you’ve been telling Bernadetta? That all the other girls are different, but she’s special?”

“She _is_ special.”

“Yes. _She’s_ the special one; the others were just toys to you. Bernadetta, do you believe him?”

“Uh,” Bernadetta said, squinting suspiciously at Sylvain.

“What was it you said to the last girl you strung along before she slapped you? If my friend recalled,” Anselm asked Sylvain, “it was something along the lines of, ‘You don’t think I’d really cheat on you, would you? How could I hurt such a sensitive and artistic soul like that?’”

“Anselm, this is far more than enough,” Edelgard insisted, grabbing him by the arm.

There was a cruel flash in Anselm’s dark eyes. “El, if Sylvain wishes to have words with me, then words we shall have,” he barked, wrenching his arm free. “His _own,_ if he’d like. I’d rather you didn’t lay hands on me.”

“You’ll have to pardon Sylvain, Your Highness,” Ingrid said, grabbing Sylvain by the collar and yanking him back. “He’s sorry. He just had a bit too much wine.”

“I did not.”

“Yes, you _clearly_ did.”

“Answer me, Sylvain,” Anselm said, his brows knitting over his dark eyes. “Wasn’t it something like that? I suppose the creative girls’ hearts _are_ the most fun to break.”

“Alright, yeah,” Sylvain spat back, “I’m a good-for-nothing louse who breaks girls’ hearts for fun and gets away with it because I’m a spoiled golden child. You figured it out. And yeah, I hate women. But not her. She’s a good friend and more than that—”

“Oh, you’re so complicated! Such depth, such pathos. I weep for you.” Anselm placed a hand over his heart in mock sympathy.

“—and she deserves better than an entitled, two-faced, pompous—”

“It seems you’ve mistaken my face for a mirror.”

“I think I’m just gonna go to my room,” Bernadetta said, her voice cracking as she gingerly stepped backward, one slow and hesitant step after another. Before the words had fully left her mouth she turned tail and bolted down the hall.

“Hey, Bernie, wait!” Sylvain cried out, hurrying after her.

“Get away from her, you skunk!” Anselm bellowed, hurrying after him.

Edelgard and Ingrid were left standing by themselves in the hallway.

 _“Men,”_ Ingrid muttered derisively, crossing her arms and letting out an exasperated sigh. “Well, Edelgard, I suppose it’s up to both of us to find the kitchen.”

“The… what?” Edelgard asked, not sure she’d heard Ingrid correctly. “You’re not serious.”

“I’m not. I’m starved,” Ingrid said, setting off down the hall.

While she and Edelgard explored the manor’s gloomy interior, Ingrid let out an exasperated sigh. “And to think I thought I could keep Sylvain from making an ass out of himself. I’ve never been able to stop him, just clean up all the messes he leaves behind. If he’s expecting me to go up to Anselm and apologize to him for his sake, like I had to do with Lord Gwendal when he went after his daughter, then he’ll be disappointed. I can’t be his mom forever.”

“No, of course not. Perhaps if he has to clean up his own messes, he’ll finally learn something,” Edelgard agreed. “I don’t think that’s why you really came here, though. Even if Sylvain had stayed back, you would’ve found some other excuse.”

“Am I really so predictable?” Ingrid asked, faintly smiling.

“One could set a clock by you, Ingrid.”

She laughed. “I suppose.”

“For Bernadetta’s sake, thank you. Being here must be the hardest thing in the world for her.”

“I wish the whole class could’ve come along,” Ingrid said. “Although it’s probably for the best that Ignatz and Raphael stayed behind, considering the Count’s attitude… imagine if Dimitri and Dedue were here.”

“Count Varley doesn’t seem to like people from Faerghus in general,” Edelgard pointed out. “To say the least, it’s not an attitude I approve of, looking down on one’s neighbors like that.”

“Perhaps not… but one scowl from Dedue would have likely made him soil himself.” Ingrid sighed. “It’s not right for Bernadetta to have such awful men in her life. You don’t think my father would frighten her, would he?”

“You… were serious about inviting her home?”

“Of course. You know he’s a very hospitable man, and I think he’d find her sweet. If we went there together for just a few days, then maybe she could see what a decent father is like.”

Edelgard’s stomach churned not just with hunger but with nauseating sympathy. Unless she faked another revelation from the Goddess and acted like she’d received a prophecy, she couldn’t admit that she knew the fate that had befallen Ingrid’s father. “You might have to do quite a bit of convincing,” she said, pushing that all aside, “but I think Bernadetta would like that.”

“Actually, I’m feeling a little homesick now,” Ingrid said. “The funeral the other day was… hard. And despite that, my father left so soon when it was over that we didn’t really get a chance to catch up. I won’t be looking forward to enduring his parade of suitors again, but I don’t know if I can wait to see him again until after graduation.”

At a loss for what to do and finding that her words were failing her, Edelgard reached out and took her by the hand. Ingrid had the hands of a warrior, but not a battle-hardened mercenary. She had well-cultivated calluses in all the right places, but unlike Byleth or Jeralt she was quite lacking in scars; in many ways they were still a noblewoman’s hands, soft and warm, even if they had spilled their fair share of blood already.

There was a flicker of shock on Ingrid’s face and for a moment she reflexively tried to wrench her hand free before relaxing. Self-conscious, Edelgard let go. “Sorry,” she said. “I know you’re not—”

“It’s fine,” Ingrid said, color rising to her cheeks. “I’m sorry; I must have made you uncomfortable. All this talk of fathers—I forgot about yours. With all this infighting, they haven’t even given him a funeral yet. No wonder you’ve been so stressed.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Edelgard said.

“Well, _somebody_ has to if you won’t,” Ingrid said, and much to Edelgard’s surprise she took her by the hand, and then after a few awkward seconds, she let go.

* * *

That night, Edelgard was in her guest bedroom preparing for a restless sleep when she heard a muffled thump from the hallway, followed by another muffled thump, and another, and another, as steady as the tick of a clock. The noise didn’t seem to be coming closer or fading away.

She opened the door and found Sylvain in the hallway, his back to her and his arms braced against the opposite wall, half-hidden in the shadows between the sconces. Every few seconds, he would bang his forehead against the wall, producing a distinct and solid-sounding thump.

“Something on your mind, Sylvain?” she asked. “I doubt concussing yourself will drive it from your head.”

He peeled himself from the wall, turned to face her, and gingerly rubbed her forehead. A few stray strands of his brilliant red hair hung over his brow in sad little arcs. “Oh, Edelgard. I forgot your room was at this end of the hall,” he lied.

“Actually, it seems the concussion has done its work already,” she said. “Now, I don’t plan on getting much sleep, but I can hardly have your little self-flagellation ritual right outside my door making it even harder. So, what seems to be the problem? For all your faults, you’re hardly one to wallow in self-pity. Not publicly, anyway.”

“Remember the morning Bernie joined our class?” Sylvain asked. “You and I had a little talk about my behavior.”

“I do.”

“You know, a long time ago, when I first started getting interested in girls and girls started getting interested in me, I realized something.”

“They were interested less in you than in your Crest and your status. A hard thing to realize at such a young age, I imagine.”

“I meant what I said back there. It’s complicated, but I’ve always hated the women who jostle each other to be first in line for a ticket to House Gautier, wealth, and a life of leisure. So I decided to make a game of how many hearts I could break. It was fun to turn the tables on them, use them for their beauty and attention and pretty smiles the same way they wanted to use me for my bloodline. The only girls I’ve really respected are ones like you and Ingrid, and the Professor of course, who don’t care about any of that.”

“And Bernadetta,” Edelgard finished. “The one girl you’ve actually, against all odds, somehow become smitten with.”

“And not only is she engaged to your ambitious, stuck-up, entitled prick of a brother, I also had to stick my foot in my mouth in front of her. It was bad enough back in Remire when I told her I loved her and she thought I was playing a sick joke on her. Didn’t think I’d top it by telling her I hated women to her face; now I’m fucked six ways from Sunday.” A smirk as bitter as wormwood twisted Sylvain’s lip.“You were right about me, Edelgard. I was better off quitting while I was ahead. But the truth is, I’d stopped being ahead a long time ago. Poetic justice, huh? By the time I _actually_ fall in love, it’s too late.”

“Perhaps for Bernadetta,” Edelgard said.

“Yeah.” He sighed, rolled his shoulders, and leaned back against the wall. The sight of him so clearly nursing a genuine heartache, to say the least, wasn’t one Edelgard had ever thought she would witness, and yet here it was. Of course, he _could_ still be lying; scoundrels were well known for being able to play the contrite sinner. But the bruise forming on his forehead didn’t match his usual woe-is-me fishing for sympathy.

“But not for you,” she said. “You’ve dug a very deep hole for yourself, and climbing out of it is going to be long and arduous. But it’s worth doing. You’ll find someone at the top.”

“You think so?” he scoffed.

“I did.”

He raised his eyebrows, but didn’t question her. “You know, Miklan… I mean, you didn’t know him. You joined the class after we… put him down. He was a twisted, bitter piece of shit who tried to kill me twice before I was twelve, but he was just lashing out at the world in his own way… just like me. Deep down, I think I’ve known all along that I wasn’t any better than him. I came up heads and he came up tails, but we were just the different sides of the same coin.”

“Both products of a twisted society,” Edelgard said to him, “that destroys people over its obsessions with Crests and the power they provide… that ruins those who have them and those who want them alike.” She sighed. “I take it you’d get rid of your Crest in a heartbeat.”

He nodded. “But blood is hard to renounce.”

“I’d get rid of mine, too. It’s never been any more than a burden. It’s never meant much for succession, but Duke Aegir is no doubt salivating over the prospect of grandchildren bearing the Crest of Seiros. For blessings from the Goddess, they seem to cause no end of trouble.”

“Yeah.”

“Perhaps they were originally punishments, not blessings,” she mused, “and the Church changed a few words here and there to prop up the nobility. After all, nobody would recognize the authority of House Hresvelg or House Gautier if they believed their ancestors had been _cursed.”_

“Did the Goddess tell you that during one of your revelations?” Sylvain asked, chuckling.

“Perhaps she did. But don’t tell Lady Rhea. Heresy is heresy, even if it comes from Sothis herself.”

“Ha. You know, as stern as you are, it’s better to get a dressing-down from you than from Ingrid. Her favorite phrase in the world is ‘I told you so.’”

“Only when she’s speaking to you or Felix, it seems.”

“You, on the other hand… you can be cold, but there’s this weird sort of sympathetic look you get in your eyes.”

“Is that so?”

“Well, just the one eye right now.”

She looked him in the eyes and studied the candlelight from the wall sconces bouncing off his amber eyes. So many of the Blue Lions could have fought on her side, _should have_ fought on her side, but instead they were condemned to cold and dark graves. Ingrid was one. Sylvain was another. Felix probably could have counted as well. One of the costs of her revolution, she’d known all along, had been the lives of the very same people she’d been fighting for, both among her own ranks and the enemy’s. Not everyone could have been saved. Not everyone who should have been on her side could have been turned to it. But it still bothered her, and it bothered her even more to see those very same people who had died, some slaughtered by her own hand, defending a side in the conflict they didn’t even believe in to their last breaths.

“And I figured you could empathize after how Ingrid shot you down. I guess some things just don’t work out, huh?” He yawned and held a hand to his mouth to stifle it. “At least you two are still friends. I dunno if that’s possible for me and Bernadetta now. She’ll never trust me again.”

“Perhaps. I’d give her some space from now on if I were you.”

He nodded. “So… Ingrid and I are out on our asses at sunup. Guess I should try to get some sleep. How long do you think you and Bernie are gonna stay?”

“No more than a day, I hope.”

“Yeah, fuck this place.” He shrugged and headed down the hall to his bedroom. “Well, good luck with your brother. Maybe you can give _him_ a heart-to-heart, too. Goddess knows the prick needs it. Or a swift kick in the shin.”

Edelgard laughed. “If he proves intractable, I’ll give him a kick just for you, Sylvain. Will that do?”

“That’ll do,” he said with a smile.

* * *

Count Varley was as intolerable of a host for breakfast as he was for dinner. It seemed he went to bed and woke up with a permanent scowl affixed to his face. During breakfast, he ignored his guests and read yesterday’s mail until Bernadetta arrived at the table and meekly took a seat next to Edelgard, as far away from Anselm and her father as she could get.

Bernadetta wore the same dress she’d worn yesterday, and it was a fine enough dress in Edelgard’s opinion, but her father took one look at her and his mood turned blacker. “What are you wearing?” he sneered, his lip curling.

“Um… m-my good dress,” Bernadetta said, “from yesterday.”

“Wear something fresh and clean for our esteemed guest,” he said, nodding to Anselm.

“I’m flattered,” Edelgard said, “but I think she’s fine as she is.” Seeing Count Varley’s expression curdle further in response made the little remark worth it. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she added slyly, “do you not hold princesses in esteem?”

Count Varley ignored her and continued to rip into his daughter. “Old clothes. No makeup. You didn’t even comb your hair,” he said, prompting Bernadetta to lift a hand to a lock of her violet hair that had reverted to its almost-natural state of tousled disarray overnight as though she hadn’t noticed. “Can you not look even the least bit decent for your future husband?”

“I’m sorry you feel that way about yourself,” Bernadetta mumbled.

“Excuse me?”

“I know I take after you. I’m sorry you don’t think you look presentable, Father.”

It wasn’t the most well-constructed put-down, and her delivery was anemic to say the least, but it was a good first step. Edelgard slipped one hand under the table and gave Bernadetta an approving pat on the knee, bringing a tinge of flustered pink to her cheeks.

“What did you say?” Count Varley asked, a gathering storm on his face.

“Oh, um… d-did you just hear the door squeak? Someone should oil its hinges,” Bernadetta backtracked, the color draining from her face. “It almost sounded like a person.”

“Hmm.” Count Varley busied himself with his breakfast. Edelgard dug into hers, loath to miss another meal. “So… archery and idle hobbies. Your professor must be a poor teacher indeed to allow you to fritter away your time like that.”

“Our professor,” Edelgard said, feeling her blood boil in her veins, “is the best teacher in the academy.”

“Then the academy has certainly seen better days. Prince Anselm, I do hope you can teach my girl some _useful_ skills.”

“Knitting’s useful,” Bernadetta blurted out.

Count Varley shot her a withering look.

“Um,” she added, nervously giggling as she forced herself to meet his gaze, “d-do you… You wouldn’t happen to know what Prince Dimitri does when he loses his temper? Or, well, um, what he used to do is… he’d break things. _Lots_ of things. He’d just go out and smash swords and spears like twigs! But now, whenever he has a fit, um, because I taught him how to crochet, he just makes really bad yarn hats instead! And that’s really useful! I mean, the hats aren’t, but swords are expensive to replace…”

Count Varley was silent for a moment. The nervous rictus grin stretched across Bernadetta’s face began to falter.

“If you were marrying Prince Dimitri,” he finally conceded, “that would be useful.” He looked to Anselm. “I take it you aren’t as much of a beast as the infamous White Lion.”

“Oh, no, sir, certainly not,” Anselm said. “Heaven help us all when that boy ascends to the throne of Faerghus. Although, of course, it’s the people of Faerghus who will suffer the most under his incompetence.”

“Perhaps they get what they deserve,” Count Varley said.

“Perhaps they do.”

Edelgard couldn’t help but notice that Anselm had been far more reverent of Dimitri when the two of them had conversed at Gronder Field. She wondered who he had been lying to, Dimitri or Count Varley. Of course, only he knew for sure. Some of Edelgard’s sisters had mentioned that he respected the austerity of Faerghus’ culture, though, while Count Varley seemed to see everyone north of the Oghma Mountains as inbred hicks (as opposed to the cultured and sophisticated examples of inbreeding that comprised the southern noble houses).

The rest of breakfast was uneventful, as quickly as it was over. Edelgard excused herself as soon as she had had just barely enough to keep herself from growing faint and Bernadetta used her departure as an excuse to excuse herself as well.

As soon as they’d left the dining room, Bernadetta let out a deep, relieved sigh. “I—I did it,” she gasped, amazed. She laughed. “I did it! Now Father knows he can’t push Bernie around anymore!” she crowed, pumping her fists.

The sudden change in Bernadetta’s mood was infectious. Edelgard grinned and took her by the shoulder. “You did well, Bernie.”

“I feel good,” Bernadetta said. “I mean, I’m terrified, I feel like I need to vomit, but…” She took a few more deep breaths. “I… I did what I came here for. I feel so light, like I could just float away! I told him off. I told him off! I can do anything now!”

“Anything?”

“Okay, maybe not _anything,”_ she added. “So, um, I’ve done what I came here to do, so we can both leave once you and Anselm talk to each other, right? I don’t mean to rush you, but… maybe if you do it quickly we can both go to the inn this afternoon and leave for the monastery tomorrow morning?”

“I’ll do my best,” Edelgard assured her.

“Actually, maybe it’s best if you take things slow,” Bernadetta backtracked. “I mean… a whole day’s carriage ride with Sylvain, uh… um… Actually, there’s one other thing I can do while I’m here. You know the cemetery out back? I mean, of course you don’t, you’ve never been here before. Anyway, I… should visit it.”

“Say no more,” Edelgard said. She knew precisely what Bernadetta was talking about. Her late uncle Albert was one of the only other people to bear the Varley name that she had ever felt safe or comfortable around, and because she so rarely returned to the Varley estate, she rarely was able to spend time at his grave. “I understand.”

Bernadetta took another deep breath. “And thanks so much for being here with me for this,” she said to Edelgard, still drunk on the heady feeling of the little triumph she’d had over her father. “I know I said that last night to you and Ingrid and… but _you,_ Edelgard, you’re just… I’d never had a real friend until I came to Garreg Mach, but it’s like you and I have been friends our whole lives.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah! It’s just that you always seem to know exactly what to say to me, no matter how I’m feeling, and…” Her face was getting redder by the second. “And when I’m having a panic attack, you just know how to… you know… You just know exactly what I need.” She took a deep breath and clutched at the front of her dress, bunching up the fabric in her fists. “Um… D-Don’t tell your brother this, but… I think if I’d been arranged to marry _you_ instead, I’d have really liked it.”

Edelgard suddenly felt as though she’d been dropped into one of Varley county’s legendary smelting furnaces. “Really?” she asked, feeling her tongue cleave to the roof of her mouth and her words stick in her throat.

A flash of fear spread across Bernadetta’s face like a fork of lighting cutting through a stormy sky. “Oh, no,” she moaned, backing away from her. “Bernie, you idiot, now she thinks you like her _like that!_ Why’d you have to do that to her, Bernie? Now you’ve ruined everything!”

“No, no, I’m flattered,” Edelgard assured her.

Bernadetta’s smile returned, a little weaker. “So, uh… be honest with me, Edelgard… I think I have you all figured out. The reason you know so much about me, and other people, too. It’s so obvious in hindsight. I can’t believe I didn’t put the pieces together until now; it’s all been staring me in the face for almost half a year.”

Edelgard braced herself.

“Edelgard… _you can read people’s minds,”_ Bernadetta gravely pronounced.

Edelgard was dumbstruck. For a while, she could only stare and blink. “…No, Bernadetta,” she finally said. “I can’t read anybody’s mind.”

Bernadetta let out a deep, long, relieved sigh. “Oh, thank the Goddess. Because I was just thinking…” Her face turned tomato-red. “I-I mean, never mind what I was thinking! You don’t have to know! You don’t have to _ever_ know! Let’s go to the cemetery!”

Before Edelgard could get a word in edgewise, Bernadetta ran off to visit her late uncle.

* * *

While Bernadetta weaved through the snow-capped headstones dotting the field behind the manor, Edelgard stood back to offer her the privacy she and her uncle deserved, watching the violet blotch of her hair bob over the granite and marble monuments like a ship on the waves until it came to a stop at one grave in particular.

“That poor girl,” Anselm said, observing her as he stood at Edelgard’s side. “She should be doted on and beloved, shouldn’t she? Unfortunately, her father precluded me from making a good first impression. But I digress; we have important matters of our own to discuss, don’t we, El?”

“We do.” Edelgard crossed her arms. “I want to know why you’re doing this.”

“Father decided that he wished for me to rule. The rest of our family is defying his dying wish! You cannot truly believe that somebody forged his will, do you?”

“I don’t,” Edelgard said, “but it isn’t legally binding. I’m sorry, but Father altered his will too late and wasn’t able to pass his request through the appropriate channels, and you’re going to have to accept that. I think you’d be a fine ruler, but all you’re accomplishing is weakening the Empire. Leicester is pulled in all directions by squabbling nobles and merchants; Faerghus is all but a failed state without its king; Adrestia is the only true bastion of stability left in Fódlan, but your spat with Burkhart is putting that at risk.”

Her true argument was left unsaid. A weakened Adrestia was vulnerable to Those Who Slither in the Dark; when Agartha sought to conquer Fódlan, what force would be strong enough to stand against them?

“You think the status quo should be preserved? That an unfit leader should take the crown because the law demands it?” Anselm asked.

Edelgard couldn’t believe she was defending _the status quo,_ but she wasn’t exactly in a position to openly be herself. “I empathize with you, Anselm, but I think you and Burkhart should stop this madness and come to some compromise to preserve our empire’s unity. A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Anselm’s brow furrowed. “El, what has Burk _ever_ done to deserve your loyalty? He’s only ever looked down on us from the apex of his birthright, wielding the silver spoon in his mouth like a scepter and acting like he earned it.”

“It’s not a matter of which brother I’m loyal to; I love you both dearly,” Edelgard retorted. “This is about seeing the forest for the trees. Neither of you have given me a good reason to side with you. All you have done is slander each other in missives to your siblings. Anselm, if you have a vision for the future of Fódlan, then share it with me. I’d happily side with you if I shared that vision, but otherwise, I find myself supporting Burkhart solely by default.”

“You _know_ why I’m doing this,” Anselm said.

Edelgard was speechless. Of course, Anselm hadn’t told her in his letters because he thought she already knew exactly what he wanted. Of course, the two of them had been closer to each other than most of their other siblings, and he’d probably shared plenty of his ambitions with her before she’d enrolled at Garreg Mach.

“I’m disappointed in you, El,” he added. “I love you. I’ll _always_ love you. But…” He placed a hand to his heart, his fingers curling inward like claws as though he could reach inside and rip it out; a flash of anguish crossed his face. “Knowing that I can’t depend on you is a worse wound than anything I’ve suffered in battle.”

Edelgard struggled to recall the words she’d been meaning to say next. A thousand possible responses and justifications that normally sat in the corner of her mind waiting for an opportunity to be used died before they reached her tongue; her heart pounded in her throat.

“El, we’re both lucky to be blessed by the Goddess,” he said, placing a hand on her shoulder. His touch, gentle and yet somehow accusing, burned like acid through her cloak. “You, if what I’ve heard from my friends among the faculty is true, twice over. Ever since our great-great-grandfather drove the Church of Seiros from the Empire, we’ve allowed people to forget about those blessings. Many noble houses here treat Crests as an afterthought now. Given the freedom to offer inheritances as they see fit, too many of the great houses engage in petty favoritism while ignoring the Goddess’ wishes.” He looked to Bernadetta again. “Poor Bernadetta. The blood of Saint Indech is strong in her veins. Her father should have groomed her to be Countess Varley, not treated her blessing as nothing more than a bartering token. Adrestia is diminished, and it is because we spat in the Goddess’ face.”

“Anselm…” Edelgard struggled to find the words that used to come so easily to her, the words that comprised the manifesto she held in her heart. “I commend you for your ideals, but I don’t think the world is so simple anymore. At Garreg Mach, among my friends in the Blue Lions especially, I’ve seen people’s lives ruined by Crests. Sylvain and his brother became what they became because of Crests and for want of Crests, respectively. Ingrid’s Crest has decided for her that her future is to be a brood mare for House Galatea, not the knight she has yearned for years to be. Even here in Adrestia, terrible acts cut short the lives of innocent people like Professor Hanneman’s youngest sister because we ascribe such potency to these ‘blessings.’”

“But those are because we ascribe the _wrong_ potency to them,” Anselm retorted. “Those of us with Crests aren’t meant to be used and abused. We’re not meant to be stud horses, brood mares, and goods to barter between families. Our blessings allow us to derive incredible power from holy weapons and set us apart as the natural leaders of humanity.”

“But Crests are growing farther and fewer in between,” Edelgard pointed out, working herself into the comfortable and familiar rhythm of her most deeply held beliefs. “Each generation, they become rarer and rarer. What if a house has no Crest-bearing heirs in a single generation? Are there no natural leaders among them? They would not accept that answer. Instead, they would go to extreme and heinous lengths to produce a Crest-bearing heir. And if Crests begin skipping more and more generations, your system will collapse.”

“Crests are declining because our faith has declined. The Goddess can and has rescinded her blessing upon Fódlan, our empire especially. It is a simple matter of cause and effect which I alone seem to care to remedy.”

“That’s naive, Anselm. However you place meaning upon Crests, whether material meaning or divine meaning, people will be consumed by greed for them all the same, and that greed will result in senseless waste of life.”

Anselm took a step back from her. “Is that what your revelation from the Goddess told you?” he asked with a furrowed brow and curled lip that barely hid his revulsion. “How do you make Crests meaningless? They have power. They _are_ power. That power will always have meaning. Would you propose some sort of culling of the population just to remove Crests from society?”

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said, her spine tingling and eye stinging as the repulsed look on his face cut deep into her soul. She felt herself falter. “It’s just that these blessings from the Goddess we call Crests… I’m not sure we humans are mature enough to use them. Perhaps the ultimate test of one’s worthiness of a Crest is to not to use its power at all for any gain.” It was complete and utter horseshit, as Jeralt might have said, but she had to say something. “I admire your faith, but I cannot agree with the conclusions you draw.”

There was a slight, pensive bow to Anselm’s head as his gaze drifted from Edelgard’s face to the ground. “While I cannot agree with your conclusions, either…” His lips twitched in an involuntary smile. “You’ve certainly grown up, El.”

“I take it I can’t dissuade you,” Edelgard said. It was clear that his ideology was rooted in a deep and zealous faith—the same sort of zealous faith she’d found herself butting heads with constantly during the five years of war she had waged across her world’s Fódlan. A single conversation could do almost nothing to change a mind like his.

“No,” Anselm said, “you cannot. I’m sorry it must come to this. I suppose we have nothing more to discuss, then.”

“I suppose we don’t,” Edelgard agreed.

Anselm turned his back to her and trudged back to the manor, leaving deep bootprints in the snow.

With her work here done—at least she had a better idea of _why_ she couldn’t position herself on Anselm’s side in this conflict—Edelgard ventured deeper into the cemetery and approached Bernadetta, who she found conversing animatedly and without a trace of anxiety to the headstone that marked her uncle’s grave.

 _“And I know Bernie’s probably boring you to death—or, well, I guess not—but it’s just been so long and I have so much to say! Oh, I should tell you about my new friends! You know how Father always told me commoners were dangerous. But there are a lot of them at Garreg Mach, and they really weren’t so scary when I got to know them! There’s Dorothea—she’s gorgeous—Raphael and Ignatz—Ignatz likes painting, too—and Dedue, he’s huge and scary but he’s the nicest huge and scary guy I’ve ever met; and Ashe, too, and I could probably talk for hours about him. He was a great cook and he liked stories, and—oh, you’ll_ never _believe this, but he went back in time and became Pan the Tactician! Although… I guess if you’re both with the Goddess now, you’ve probably met him already and don’t need to listen to Bernie going on and on—”_

As Edelgard drew closer, Bernadetta stopped. “Ah!” she cried out. “H-How long have you been standing there? How much did you hear? I-If you heard too much of that, I’ll have to commit regicide!”

“Heard too much of what?” Edelgard asked.

Bernadetta giggled. “Exactly!”

Edelgard looked over the tombstone. _Albert von Varley, 1121-1174,_ it read. “You got along well with your uncle?”

“I really did. Uncle Albert and Aunt Priscilla were the nicest adults I’ve ever known, but I didn’t see them very often. Every time they visited, I’d wished I could go home with them instead of staying here, but Father wouldn’t have ever allowed that. He hated Uncle Albert enough as it was.” Bernadetta looked down at the headstone. “Well, Uncle… it was nice talking to you. I know I must look really stupid doing this, but it really helps, so thanks. Anyway, um, Edelgard…” She looked around skittishly for any sign of Anselm, nervously worrying her dress with her hands. “A-Are you and Anselm finished?”

“I’m afraid so. We’ll leave for the monastery tomorrow morning.” Edelgard looked at the stern, sharp facade of the manor. “I’m sure Count Varley won’t mind if we take our bags and spend the night at the inn.”

“Yes, please,” Bernadetta said, shuddering. “You have no idea how scary my room is when it’s got nothing in it. It’s like sleeping in a dungeon.”

* * *

The next morning, with the sun still low in the sky and the clouds painted a dull orange and violet, Edelgard and Bernadetta checked out of the inn and loaded their carriage for the ride home. Edelgard was exhausted; she hadn’t slept well the last night or the night before, and it was beginning to take its tool. If she was lucky, she hoped it would be easier to sleep in the carriage once it was in motion.

The carriage was on the road for less than an hour before it came to a sudden stop, rousing Edelgard from what might have been a decent cat-nap if only she’d had a few more minutes. She threw aside the fur cloak she’d been using as a blanket. “What’s going on? Why have we stopped?”

 _“Eh? Who goes there?”_ she heard the driver call out from outside.

 _“Prince Anselm von Hresvelg,”_ another voice answered. _“Pardon me for stopping you, but I must speak to Lady Edelgard.”_

“He really wants you on your side, Edelgard,” Sylvain commented from the corner of the carriage opposite Bernadetta as Edelgard opened the door and stuck her head out. “I mean, I can’t blame him.”

Anselm had ridden up alongside the carriage on a horse of his own, a thick and billowing crimson cloak and feathered cape wrapped tightly over his shoulders. “El,” he said as Edelgard leaned out of the door. “Thank the Goddess I was able to catch you before you got too far.”

“I thought we had reached an impasse,” Edelgard said.

“So had I. But at the break of dawn a messenger owl came to me bearing news from Enbarr from one of my allies.” He produced an envelope from under his voluminous cloak and held it out at arm’s length. “Now you will see that even if you disagree with me, you cannot support Burkhart.”

“Is what he wants so bad that you’ll risk everything to avert it?” Edelgard asked, taking the envelope from him and rummaging in her bag for a letter opener.

“That’s only the half of it. I fear he’s being used by the people he’s brought into his inner circle—used to weaken the Empire from within and soften it to our rivals’ advantage.” He leaned closer toward her and lowered his voice. “Ask yourself, why would a celebrated court mage in Faerghus who has served the Kingdom for over twenty years so suddenly resign from her position, instigate a conflict with the Knights of Seiros, and find asylum by reinstating herself into her house?”

Edelgard felt all of the chill of the Pegasus Moon’s treacherous winter and more penetrate the marrow of her bones. “Lady Cornelia… What does she have to do with Burkhart?” she asked, though she feared she already knew the answer.

She cut the envelope open and pulled out the letter, and there she found the answer she’d expected. All this time, she had worried that Anselm had been a pawn of Those Who Slither in the Dark, but they’d had their eyes on another member of her family—one she’d never thought to suspect.

Anselm’s expression grew darker. “El… our brother has married Lady Cornelia von Rusalka.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry, but I'm going on hiatus and there's not going to be another update until the first week of January 2021. It's hard news to deliver but I hope you understand and can find it in your hearts to forgive me. In the meantime, enjoy the salacious edelgrid h*ndh*lding content and berniegard brainworms!


	32. A Mask of Her Own Face

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard, upon returning to Garreg Mach, is forced into a risky gambit and has to attend a Zoom meeting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So how about that new year, huh? I'd been hoping to get this chapter out on Wednesday or Thursday but was distracted by oh you know
> 
> Take care, be safe, and thank you so much for reading!

Edelgard’s history came to her most clearly in dreams.

She remembered Anselm dragging her out of their shared cell, rat-bitten fingernails long enough to be considered claws digging into her wrist. “We’re escaping,” he told her, his pale lips as chapped and cracked as a vast expanse of salt flats splitting and bleeding as he broke them apart to speak. His hair was a rat’s nest, once black, now speckled salt-and-pepper with flecks of silver and white.

She stood with him in the hallway, steadying him as he struggled to stay on his feet; his veins glowed faintly with exertion from using his Crest of Seiros to break the bars. In the cell across from them, Pascal and Hedwig were asleep and curled in each other’s arms, emaciated and feverish, their little chests barely rising and falling as they clung to life. Pascal had streaks of gray and white in his curly locks of aquamarine hair; Hedwig had inherited the same pale chestnut hair as her father, just like Edelgard, but her hair was now almost as silvered as his (Edelgard wondered with a pang of horror if that was happening to her own hair, too). Flies crawled across their cheeks and lighted on their eyes to lick the salt of their sweat and tears, and rats nibbled at their toes with teeth stained red as cherries.

She shook the bars of the cell impotently, hoping to scare the rats away. _“Hey!”_ she shouted out. Her voice tore at the inside of her throat like sandpaper. _“Get away from them!”_ Hot tears cut through the blood and grime caked on her cheeks. _“Get away from Pasc! Get away from Hedy!”_ She rattled the bars again and the rats perked up and scurried away. One slithered over her foot; she yelped and nearly fell backward, only for Anselm to catch her.

“Shut up! You want us to get caught?” he hissed in her ear. “Come on.” He started down the hall, then noticed Edelgard wasn’t following behind him. “El? Come _on!”_

“What about Hedy and Pasc?” she asked him.

“We’ll come back for them later,” Anselm said.

“What if they get hurt while we’re gone?”

“They’d slow us down. They’re too little.”

“We can’t just _leave_ them!” Edelgard protested.

“They can’t come with us!”

“I’m not going if they’re not going and that’s final!”

“Fine!” Anselm snarled. “Then stay here and die like a rat, El! Just like all the others!” And with that, he did an about-face and started off down the hall.

“Wait,” Edelgard called out. She didn’t want to be alone. She couldn’t bear to be alone. She hurried after him and grabbed him before he could get too far. “Please, Ansy. If we each carry one of them…”

He set a hand gingerly to the blossoming black and violet bruise on his shoulder where he’d rammed the cell door open and winced. The arm was completely limp and lifeless now. “I’m not carrying anyone, El. We’re going to escape and find the Knights of Seiros. They’ll save all of us. They have to. They work for the Goddess.”

“The Goddess won’t help us,” she said, shaking her head. Dagmar had prayed more fervently than any of her other older siblings, and she’d still died just as painfully as the others.

Anselm whirled around to face her, his bloodied and bruised face demonic in its fury. “Don’t you say that!” he snarled, grabbing her by the collar of the ragged burlap tunic that passed for clothes down here. His knuckles scraped against the sores dotting the contour of her collarbone hard enough to bring fresh tears to her eyes. “Don’t you _ever_ say that! The Goddess doesn’t forgive blasphemy!”

“Well, she doesn’t reward faith, either! Dagmar and Immanuel are dead!”

“Shut up!”

There was a commotion from down the hall, around the corner. Anselm scowled. He stood in front of Edelgard and held out one arm. The other, the one with the grotesque bruise purpling his skin, hung limp at his side. “Get ready, El. Try to hurt as many of them as you can.”

The guards, soldiers and mages all clad in beaked black masks like enormous anthropomorphic ravens, rounded the corner. They were upon Anselm before he could throw a single punch, and while they were distracted, Edelgard had no choice but to hurry back to her cell. Her feet, tired as they were, moved on their own—and made her run away like a coward.

She covered her eyes. All she could hear were the sickening sounds of armored fists colliding with unprotected skin, of young and weak bones crunching under steel-toed boots, of screams and howls of pain. “Ansy, I’m sorry,” she croaked, tears streaming down her cheeks, suffocating her, turning the air in her lungs to molten lead. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

_“El! Edelgard! Get over here! Help me! You coward! I hate you!”_

She huddled in the corner of her cell, squeezing her eyes shut and clasping her hands over her ears to keep out the sounds. Anselm was still screaming for her help.

At last, she opened her eyes and pulled away her hands. She couldn’t hear the screaming anymore.

Looming over her in the hallway was Duke Aegir, the fat, toadish man who’d imprisoned her and her siblings down here and left them at the mercy of Uncle Volkhard and his crow-masked minions. He bent his knees and squatted down in front of her, one plump hand gripping one of the bars to support himself and the other resting on his knee. He looked more like a toad than ever before.

“You were right here the whole time,” he sneered, “weren’t you, darling little Edelgard?”

Edelgard glanced beyond his girth and caught a glimpse of what had once been her elder brother. Her stomach wrenched and she tasted bile in the back of her throat.

She nodded frantically, so vigorously it felt as though her head would roll off her neck, as though her very life depended on it.

Duke Aegir smiled. “Good,” he said. “You’re a _very_ good girl, El. Your papa would be proud.” Her cute little nickname, so sweet when it came from the mouths of her siblings and her father, sounded like a slur dripping from his wicked lips. He stood up and rejoined his retinue of torturers. _“Is the brat still alive? Good. Throw him in the next cell over and bring him a healer. He’s due for another session tomorrow morning…”_

Edelgard snapped awake to find that the carriage had come to a halt. She blinked and rubbed the weariness from her eye as the carriage’s interior came into focus. She had wedged herself into one corner of the carriage, draped in her cloak like a blanket; Bernadetta was curled up in the corner next to her, still fast asleep, and Ingrid and Sylvain sat across from them.

“Are you alright?” Ingrid asked her.

“Pleasant dreams, Sleeping Beauty?” Sylvain asked with a smirk.

“Not particularly,” Edelgard said, catching her breath. She had to take a deep breath to calm her nerves. The same dream. She’d had the same dream three times now, each night she’d been at Varley Manor and on the way back to Garreg Mach; the contention between herself and Anselm must have triggered it. Was it an accurate account of past events? Who knew—no one else who had witnessed or participated in it was still alive. “But it was nothing to concern yourselves with. Have we arrived?”

Ingrid drew back the curtains covering one of the windows. Beyond the glass panes were the familiar stone walls of Garreg Mach, as immediately recognizable as any home. “Looks like it.”

The door on Edelgard’s side swung open and the driver beckoned the passengers out. “Thank you,” Edelgard said to him. She tapped Bernadetta on the shoulder. “Bernadetta, wake up. We’ve arrived.”

Bernadetta stirred and blearily opened her eyes. “W’r back?” she mumbled.

Edelgard stepped out of the carriage and onto solid ground, her neck aching and her legs full of pins and needles, and as she stretched, the others followed her out. They’d arrived in the marketplace just in front of the monastery gates with sunset about an hour or less away. The sun hung low in the sky and its light, shifting from blinding white to dull amber to duller orange, matched the glow of the blacksmith’s forge. The rest of the shopkeepers were packing up their wares and shuttering their pavilions for the night.

“Home, sweet home,” Bernadetta sighed, taking a deep breath of the crisp dusk air. “Ah, I missed my bedroom so much…”

Unusually morose, Sylvain quietly moved on to the gates. He’d been quiet the whole day; though he liked to put on mopey airs to stir the hearts of his many spurned lovers, his attitude now seemed surprisingly earnest.

Ingrid examined a pamphlet posted at the battalion guild’s pavilion. “Varley archers,” she mused, squinting to lead it in the dying dusk light. “Bernadetta, why is there an archery battalion from Varley available for hire at the guild? I thought your father hated bows.”

“Oh, he probably just said that because I’m good at them,” Bernadetta said, shrugging.

Anselm, who’d ridden alongside the carriage the whole way and had lagged only a minute behind at most, dismounted his horse and gave it a grateful pat on the snout. “Thank you, Celestine. Another excellent ride,” he said, fishing in his pocket and producing a sugar cube for the horse to eagerly lick up. His face was pallid except for his cheeks and the tips of his nose and ears, which were bright red; white frost speckled his dark hair and glazed his crimson cloak. A thin trickle of blood dripped down one nostril, as the bitter cold had burst some of the blood vessels in his nose; self-consciously, he produced a handkerchief from the depths of his cloak and discreetly dabbed it away.

Bernadetta let out a surprised yelp. “Y-You followed us the whole way?!”

A smile lit up his face. “I think we will have far better opportunities to get to know each other better here, my dear, than at your ogre of a father’s house. And, of course, there’s the matter of the grave news I bring. Edelgard,” he added, “I assume Lord Arundel is still here?”

Edelgard nodded. “Yes, watching over Hedwig and Pascal.”

“Good. And the captain of the Knights of Seiros… who is it now? I had heard that Jeralt had been reinstated at the beginning of the term, but that there were complications…”

“You’ll want to see Lady Catherine,” Ingrid offered, fixing a crick in her neck. “Her office is on the second floor.”

“Thank you.” Anselm offered her a polite bow. “I do hope we haven’t missed supper. Garreg Mach’s cooks know better than anyone else how to warm one to the bones in winter, do they not? Now, Edelgard, I would ask you to prepare your uncle for my arrival.” With a flourish of his cape and cloak, he took the reins of his horse once more and led her to the monastery’s stables.

“I suppose I should be going,” Edelgard said to Bernadetta and Ingrid, and she headed for the gates.

Ingrid and Bernadetta followed her, since it wasn’t like they had anywhere else to go at this hour. Bernadetta hurried past both of them, eager as always to hole herself up in her room for the night, leaving Ingrid and Edelgard alone.

“You didn’t look alright,” Ingrid said. “While you were asleep… Sylvain wanted to wake you up. I told him not to.”

Edelgard cringed and folded her arms over her chest. The one thing she hated about the nightmares that plagued her in her weaker moments was how vulnerable they made her, especially when she was in a situation that required her to sleep in close proximity to other people. Moaning and crying out in one’s sleep tended to lead to people asking uncomfortable questions with private answers. Or almost worse, worrying about and pitying her behind her back.

“I understand,” Ingrid said. “I won’t pry. But if everything that’s going on is worrying you—as it should be—well, it wouldn’t be fair of me not to help.”

“Thank you,” Edelgard said. “Like I said, though… it was just an unpleasant dream. Nothing to concern yourself with.”

Ingrid frowned. “I mean, one of your brothers is trying to pull off a coup and the other one is…” A worried furrow creased her brow. “Those rumors about Lady Cornelia… are they really true? That her daughter was the beast-tamer we fought at Remire, and that she turned her into a…”

“It’s all true,” Edelgard said.

“Then I hope you can stop her. Let me know if there’s anything I could do.” Ingrid placed a hand on her shoulder. “A good supper might help.”

“I’ll join you later,” Edelgard said, laying her hand atop Ingrid’s. “I’ve got to see my uncle and tell him about this first.”

She did not find her uncle Volkhard, though, before Dedue found her. To say he accosted her did not do justice to the suddenness with which he appeared before her in the dark and empty great hall, his icy blue-green eyes piercing and his face set in a stoic, neutral frown. He just seemed to coalesce out of the shadows in front of her.

“Lady Edelgard,” he said. “I see you have returned… safely. His Majesty will be glad.” He spoke in a low voice, just barely a whisper.

Edelgard considered cutting to the chase and questioning him about Cornelia’s plans, but thankfully remembered to hold her tongue. If Thales believed she had been replaced, then Dedue probably believed so as well, and she would have to act the way her replacement would have acted.

“It was an uneventful trip,” she said. “Anything exciting happen while I was away?”

“You are aware of Hapi.”

“Yes?”

“Professor Hanneman is researching a way to restore her to human form. He must not succeed.”

“Of course.”

“As Hapi is now, a dumb beast devoid of reason, she is no threat to us. But if she is made human again, she will have to be put down before she reveals too much to His Majesty.”

“You can trust me to handle that,” she said.

 _“I_ shall trust myself to handle that,” he replied. “Do what you must to impede Professor Hanneman’s progress.”

Edelgard nodded. “I understand.”

“Vual has spoken highly of your talents, Vepar. Do not disappoint.”

She smiled. “You have nothing to worry about, Dedue.”

“I hope so. It is a… relief,” he said, obviously managing his tone even more carefully than usual—it seemed he wasn’t happy about having to replace her—“that you have arrived. His Majesty was very close to learning the truth.”

“I’ll see to it he never does,” she said. “By the way, have you seen Lord Arundel? I’m supposed to meet with…” She thought about how Vepar might speak about humans in private. If she was anything like Kronya… “…that old fool.”

Dedue nodded. “He is at the pond with your younger siblings.”

“Great. I suppose I must be civil to those whelps.”

He wrinkled his nose in disgust, and for a moment Edelgard wondered for a moment if she’d misspoken. “Yes.”

“Oh, do you miss poor Edelgard?” she asked him with a mocking lilt to her voice, trying to channel her inner Kronya as best she could. Her tongue felt like it was coated in slime. How did people just go around _acting_ like this?

“Her termination is… most regrettable.”

“It was her own fault.”

“That it was.” He turned his back on her and walked off silently into the shadows, vanishing like a ghost.

So this was what it was like, she supposed, to be an infiltration agent for Those Who Slither in the Dark. She couldn’t ask questions anymore, couldn’t pry—but who knew what secrets would be revealed to her without any effort on her part, simply because she was trusted to receive them?

It was often said that when the Goddess closed a door, she opened a window. Edelgard had found herself facing too many closed doors and having to make her own windows to put much stock in that statement, but perhaps there was something to it. It was nice not to have to make her own window for a change.

She took off her eyepatch—she probably didn’t need it anymore; her eye only bothered her infrequently now anyway—and slipped it into her cloak. Not only did _she_ not need it anymore, _Vepar_ didn’t need it: from now on, she was wearing a mask of her own face.

It was an advantageous position—unbeknownst to Thales, Cornelia, or Dedue, both of the Agarthan replicants installed in Garreg Mach were double agents.

So why did she feel more vulnerable now than ever?

She headed for the pond to see Volkhard and found him, as Dedue had said, there with Hedwig and Pascal. She found Flayn there as well, loudly and enthusiastically inviting them to go ice-fishing with her tomorrow.

 _“—assuming Professor Byleth would be free to assist us; I have never gone ice-fishing before! My big brother has always been concerned I might fall through the ice…”_ Flayn whirled around to face Edelgard as she approached. “Ah! Edelgard! How wonderful to see you have returned, my friend!” she said, beaming, her cheeks rosy.

“Edelgard,” Volkhard said. “It is good to see you back so soon. And without your eyepatch—I’m glad your eye feels better. I hope you have good news for me.”

Edelgard told him what she had to say to him. Volkhard’s grin vanished quickly and, slowly, slowly, a pained grimace crawled across his face.

“That,” he said, “is _terrible_ news. Are you certain Anselm is telling the truth? I have heard nothing from Burkhart about his marital choices.” He thought for a moment, then went pale, as though he’d just seen a ghost. “But then again… while Lady Cornelia was here, she did tell me she had received a marriage proposal from someone in Enbarr… _Oh, dear Goddess.”_

“But… why is Burk marrying someone who’s wanted by the Knights of Seiros?” Pascal asked, a heartbreakingly aghast look on his round, innocent face. “Why would he do that?”

“M-Maybe s-s-she c-cast a s-spell on him,” Hedwig said, grabbing Edelgard by the arm and squeezing her hand nearly hard enough to leave a bruise. “Is—I-Is that p-p-possible, El?”

“I suppose anything is possible. I have heard rumors from the Knights of Seiros that she can even transfigure people into beasts.” Volkhard raised his hands to his face and rubbed his temples. “And I suppose Anselm is keen on knowing if he can count on my support now. I will have to get a good night’s sleep, if I can, before I speak with him. Otherwise, we may come to blows.”

“I am so sorry for all of you,” Flayn said. “It seems there is no good news to be found outside Garreg Mach anymore.”

“If Anselm wants to steal the crown,” Pascal wondered aloud, “and Burkhart is being manipulated by an evil witch… then who’s right? Which of them should be Emperor?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know anymore, Pascal,” Volkhard said, patting him on the shoulder.

“Perhaps,” Flayn suggested, “Edelgard here would make a good ruler.” There was a note of forced levity in her voice that no one else seemed to pick up on.

Edelgard patted her on the shoulder. “Thank you for the vote of confidence, Flayn. But I don’t see a crown in my future.”

“At any rate, we must reach out to Burkhart,” Volkhard continued. “If this rumor is true, we must implore him to annul the marriage posthaste. I will see if I can speak to Lady Rhea about this and have knights escorted to the capital. And Edelgard, I’d like you to write a letter to Burkhart, since you were there when Cornelia attacked the knights.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Edelgard said.

“Find Anselm and tell him I’ll see him in the morning. I am in no mood to entertain him tonight. Don’t let him know where we’re staying, or I fear he’ll find me and start badgering me prematurely.” Volkhard’s tone was curt now, frustrated, calling to Edelgard’s mind the way Thales would speak to her when she was being particularly rebellious against him. “Can you do that for me, El? El, are you alright?”

Edelgard nodded, realizing she’d been silent for too long. “Yes, uncle. Just… wrapping my mind around all of this. It’s so much.”

“I understand. It’s far _too_ much, in my opinion. Take care of yourself.” Volkhard peeled Hedwig off of her. “Come along now, Hedy, Pascal. It’s nearly nightfall. The curfew is to keep _us_ safe as well, not just the students.”

They left Edelgard alone, but she wasn’t alone for long.

_“You shouldn’t have told them that.”_

Claude’s voice slipped through the encroaching darkness as swiftly and cleanly as an arrow from his bow as he approached her from behind. She whirled around to face him.

“No blind spot anymore, I see. I guess you’ve got to have both eyes wide open now, huh?”

“Claude, what are you doing here?” Edelgard tensed up, contemplating her options. Had her conversation with Volkhard already blown her cover? Could she catch and restrain Claude if he tried to hurry off and tell Dedue that she hadn’t, in fact, been neutralized and was just as much a threat as ever?

“I was just having a post-dinner, pre-sleep stroll. Get the digestive system rolling before I tuck myself into bed. You know I try to rise and set with the sun—when I’m not busy, of course.” He drew closer to her. “Anyway,” he added, lowering his voice—

As soon as he was in whispering distance, Edelgard grabbed both of his arms by the wrists and reeled him in.

“Whoa, there! Edelgard, Your Highness—” He fluttered his eyelashes and gave her a flirty wink. “Aren’t you worried Ferdinand might see us like this? I know he’s not jealous of the _girls_ who fall for you, but another man might be another story…”

She pinned his hands behind his back. They were so close that they might as well have been kissing, but now she had a firm enough grip that he couldn’t wriggle free. “What shouldn’t I have said?”

“Don’t you think it might’ve been a mistake to tell Volkhard _all_ about Burkhart’s marriage?” he asked. “Is that really what Vepar would have done?”

“I see. Is that it? What _really_ gave me away?”

“You touched Flayn without flinching or grimacing.”

“I’m supposed to be one of the best infiltrators among the No-Eyed People.” Edelgard’s eyes bored into his. They were so close that the tips of their noses were nearly touching.

“Well, if I was wrong, I’m sure Vepar wouldn’t have faulted me for giving her a few tips. After all, she hardly had any time to observe you.”

“I don’t suppose I can trust you not to tell your new friend about this?”

“Why would I? Anyway, I’m glad to know you’re the real deal. I’d have been heartbroken if you’d been killed. I’ll admit, I was pretty worried, especially since you’ve been spending so much time conversing in low, conspiratorial voices with…” He stopped himself. “Well, I’ve said too much, haven’t I? Just be wary of people who want to spend… too much time with you. Just because you’re wearing a mask of your own face doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods just yet. Take care… and if you need a few tips on pretending to be someone you’re not, let me know.”

With that, he tried to slip his wrists out of Edelgard’s grip, but she held on fast.

“Not this time, Claude,” she said. “Do I have your word that you won’t blow my cover?”

“Only as long as I have yours that you won’t blow mine,” Claude said.

“Of course; fair is fair. So… who are you behind that mask of yours?”

Claude smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes. In fact, it strayed as far from his eyes as possible. It was a grim smile. He exhaled and the cloud of his breath tickled her face. “Prince Khalid of Almyra.”

Edelgard was nonplussed. “I knew that already,” she said. “Nader told me. _You_ yourself told me when you were under the influence of—”

Claude took advantage of her momentary lapse to slip out of her grasp. “Well, then, thank you for keeping it a secret!” he said as he scampered off.

* * *

Edelgard had hoped to catch Anselm in the stables, but it seemed he had already left. However, curfew or no curfew, Dimitri still had stable duty for the rest of the term, so she wasn’t surprised to find him there. She also wasn’t surprised to see Marianne there, given that her best friend was a horse. But what _did_ surprise her was the sight of Dimitri and Marianne locked in an embrace and, though it was hard to fully discern in the last few minutes of daylight the sun provided as it sank under the horizon, she was _certain_ their arms weren’t the only parts of themselves wrapped around each other.

Edelgard once again felt sorry for Hilda.

She reversed course and ducked behind the corner before either of the lovebirds could realize they were being watched and gave them some privacy until the two of them parted ways and left the stables. Dimitri rounded the same corner, shuffling off in a daze, but snapped alert with a sharp and surprised intake of breath as he ran into Edelgard.

“El—Edelgard!” he hissed, stumbling backward to avoid bowling her over. His hands fumbled up and down his front as though he needed to make sure that nothing was askew or exposed. “Er—I, um… Y-You did not see anything, did you?”

“See what?” she asked innocently.

“Exactly. I, um…” He took a deep, anxious breath, sucking air through gritted teeth with a sharp hiss, and self-consciously ruffled his silvery hair. The sight of a Dimitri in love was unexpectedly adorable. “I see you have removed that patch. Does your eye feel better now?”

“Much better.”

“You look much better without it. It made you look too… warlike. Anyway, I hope your meeting with your brother was not too disagreeable. And what of Bernadetta?”

She sighed. “My brother is an affable enough man, but completely intractable, so it was in fact quite a disagreeable meeting.”

“I am sorry to hear that.”

“As for Bernadetta, she is fortunate to have found so many friends in the Blue Lions. Her father is quite a vile man and she needed all of the support we had to offer.”

“I see. Would that Dedue and I could have accompanied her as well. I am glad you all returned safely… I hear the roads through the mountains are treacherous this time of year.”

Edelgard wondered if he even knew that Count Galatea had been killed. Dedue certainly wouldn’t have informed him that he had been replaced or that his replacement had intended to replace _her_ next. “It was an uneventful trip, actually. My legs are still stiff and there’s a bit of a crick in my neck, but that’s it.”

They made small talk for a bit longer—awkward, painful, tortured small talk—until Edelgard asked: “So, who’s the lucky young woman? If it _is_ a woman?”

Dimitri’s face turned as red as an apple. “I… th-thought you said you had not seen anything.”

“I didn’t, but I know what a boy hopelessly in love looks like,” she said.

“Is it that obvious?” he asked.

She laughed. “You’re adorable, Dima. So… is it the Professor?”

She had never seen a face go from red to white so quickly. “What? No!” he protested. “I-I mean… I know she is hardly any older than us, but she is our professor. Besides…” He looked away. “Well, um… I thought you had noticed, but… she obviously fancies you.”

Edelgard was dumbfounded. “You think Byleth is…”

“You two must be. All the time you spend together, all the private meetings you have… you spend so much time alone together.”

She couldn’t argue with that. “There’s nothing like that between us,” she said. “Besides, I’ve seen the way she looks at you. I think she feels something for you.”

“Y-You must be imagining it,” Dimitri said.

“And I’d always thought you felt the same way. I’m sorry; it seemed obvious to me that you were head over heels for her.”

He sighed. “I… I do care deeply for her,” he said. “I think… I think the world of her. But loving the Professor is like loving the stars or a sunset. You do not expect them to love you back.”

Edelgard swallowed a lump in her throat. How many times had she thought that herself? “So… who _does_ love you back?” She had to admit, for all the times back in her academy days when Dorothea had flirted with her, she’d been too stubborn in her own self-hatred to admit that anyone could feel any sort of deep affection for her.

“Swear you won’t tell a soul.”

“Of course, Dima,” she said.

Dimitri took a deep breath and glanced furtively around himself, seeking out any eavesdroppers that may have been hiding in the shadows. “It is… Marianne.”

“I should have known. You two are here together almost every day.” Edelgard smiled. “I’m happy for you.”

If he could know love and truly accept it into his heart at this stage of his life, she realized, then perhaps there was more hope for him than she’d ever imagined. Yes, his ideology (inasmuch as he even _had_ one) was still half-baked and wrong; yes, he was still enthralled by Those Who Slither; but everything else aside, he had accepted that somebody loved him earlier than Edelgard ever had, and that was a point in his favor.

Dimitri was silent for a while. “El… her father, Margrave Edmund, has not given her hand in marriage to anybody. She does not think he has any plans to. Do you think I should send a proposal to him?”

Edelgard couldn’t help but laugh. “You want to make her your queen?”

“Should I not?” he asked, a vulnerable, innocent look in his wide eyes. “I suppose I should be prudent in who I wed. Nobility and royalty, of course, do not marry for love. I am certain there is some house within the kingdom whose loyalty I will need to cement through marriage—”

“I don’t think there’s any harm in asking,” she said. “And speaking of political ties, isn’t the Margravate of Edmund a territory you would like having close relations to? The margrave has a seat at the Alliance roundtable, if I recall, and presides over several ports of trade. You would do well to be on good terms with him.”

Dimitri blinked, dumbstruck. “I… suppose you are right. I will speak to Marianne about it.” His shoulders slumped and he bowed his head. “I fear she may refuse, though. She thinks she is as much a beast as I am; perhaps she fears I deserve better. Or what if her father were to say no?”

“Just ask,” Edelgard said, taking his hands in hers. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

He smiled. “True. Thank you, El. I will see what Rodrigue thinks. By the way, as long as we are alone… Ah, when was the last time we were alone? I believe you’ve wanted to tell me something. Something about Thales.”

Edelgard cursed herself. Finally, now that her disguise mandated her silence, she had the chance to tell him without a soul overhearing. But if she told him, then he would tell Dedue, which would tip him off that she was only pretending not to be herself…

“I thought I knew who Thales really was, but I was mistaken,” she said.

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “I had figured it might have been one of the cardinals. People like Cardinal Aelfric… the Church pontificates endlessly about what he did _for_ children, but nothing about what he did _to_ children,” he said darkly. “Between you and me, I feel nothing for him.”

“Do you?” she asked. There was a chance, she supposed, that he had been lying about spending the night crocheting and had actually gone out in his Hurricane King costume to stab Aelfric in the chest thirty-seven times. But why would he have done that, knowing that his fellow classmates would see it more as a brutal and senseless murder than any act of justice? It would have made more sense for somebody else to have worn the costume… but whether or not that was true, wouldn’t Dimitri have been more horrified nevertheless by the acts being attributed to his alter ego and how his peers had reacted to them?

“I do not know the Hurricane King’s heart,” he said, “but anyone who strikes at the heart of the Church is a friend of mine. Anyway, we should retire to our quarters. Curfew is upon us.”

“Have you had dinner yet?”

“I have a pack of salted meats in my drawers,” he assured her, “for when I miss dinner.”

Edelgard nearly laughed. “Do not ever say that to Sylvain,” she said, suppressing a snicker.

His brow furrowed. “Wh— _Oh.”_

He put a hand on her shoulder. “I do not know what I would do without you, El,” he said to her as the two of them made their way from the stables to the dormitories. “I hope… however things work out, I can trust you to be at my side forever.”

“That would be nice,” she said. But it couldn’t be so. For starters, she was already dead.

* * *

“So, Edelgard, what’s it like being dead?” Hilda asked.

Edelgard had retired to her room for the night, though she’d doubted she would do much sleeping; she’d slept for much of the day, after all, so she wasn’t that tired. And so, while she would rather have kept reading the book she had on loan from the library to pass the time, she was not so upset as she might have otherwise been when Hilda came knocking on her door.

“It could be worse, honestly,” Edelgard said while Hilda sat behind her on her bed and started separating her hair into strands for braiding. “Do you _need_ to be breaking curfew right now?” she asked, listening for the sound of the guard’s footsteps down the hallway (Hilda had managed to sneak next door while his back was turned).

“Yes. I’m bored.”

“If you’re bored, read a book. Do something to enrich yourself.”

“Never.”

Edelgard sighed, wincing as Hilda tugged on her scalp. “I swear, if you give me pigtails, we’re not friends anymore.”

“We’re already not friends. Hey, have you ever painted your nails?”

“I can’t say I have. I always wore gloves, anyway, so who would see them?”

“Even in the middle of summer?”

“You know how Dimitri is covered in scars from the neck down?”

“Yeah— _ohhh,”_ Hilda said. _“_ So you’re vain.”

“So I don’t want people asking questions,” Edelgard said, irritated. “Or stirring up unflattering rumors.”

“Oh, there were _so_ many rumors about you. Didn’t you know?”

“Yes, Hubert kept me abreast of all of them. He even started a few of them himself to draw attention away from what I was really doing.”

“So,” Hilda said, “what do you do now that you’re an honorary No-Eyed Person?”

“I believe the correct term is ‘Agarthan replicant.’ Though I’ll admit it lacks the poetic flourish of ‘No-Eyed People’ or ‘Those Who Slither in the Dark.’”

“You’ve got that right. What do you do now that you’re an honorary Agarthan replicant?”

“I do what my replacement would do.”

“If you didn’t already, I’d say that now you’ll have to start acting like a huge bi—”

_“Hilda.”_

“What?” she asked innocently.

Edelgard rolled her eyes. “Most importantly, I _don’t_ do what my replacement _wouldn’t_ do. First off, I doubt it would be prudent of me to warn Burkhart about Cornelia. Uncle Volkhard wants me to write a letter detailing the terrible things she’s done, but of course, if I send one, she’ll know and my cover will be blown.”

“You can tell Thales you were forced into it.”

“The whole purpose of replacing me was so that I _wouldn’t_ be so meddlesome. We have to be subtler in our meddling now.”

“Or we can both just sit back, relax, and let the world fall apart around our ears,” Hilda said. _“Finally,_ a vacation.”

“Second,” Edelgard said, “now I have to _stop_ Dimitri from learning the truth about Duscur. At any cost.”

“And he doesn’t know you’ve been replaced, right?”

“Of course not; that would defeat the purpose. If he knew his own allies had killed me, he’d turn on them—”

Edelgard stopped as her words caught up with her brain. It was as though someone had suddenly lit a lamp inside her head. “Hilda, don’t let this go to your head, but you just might be a genius.”

Hilda leaned forward. “I’m listening.”

“I write a letter, purportedly by my past self, warning Dimitri that I’m going to be replaced for knowing the truth. You deliver it and make up some story about finding it in my room. Dimitri realizes I’ve been ‘replaced’ and starts asking his handlers if it’s true. They can deny all they want, but it will be a bridge too far, especially after Remire and Cornelia’s betrayal…”

“…And as his first act of vengeance against the No-Eyes,” Hilda finishes, “he finds you and beats you to death with his bare hands for being an impostor.”

Her mood deflated, Edelgard slowly and regretfully nodded. “I was simply thinking aloud. I can’t say I’ve ironed out all the kinks in my first draft, can I?”

“If you’re still taking suggestions, I’d like to _not_ be the one who has to tell Dimitri his dear sister, whom he loves and cherishes more than anything, has been replaced by a pasty ghoul by the pasty ghoul who replaced his… uncle? Is Rodrigue his uncle?”

“Fair enough,” she told Hilda. “Nevertheless, Those Who Slither think they’ve successfully replaced me, and we need to find some way to make Dimitri find out.”

Cutting their impromptu strategy meeting short, there was a knock on her door. She got up off the bed, her hair half-braided, and opened the door to find Seteth—or rather Vual—standing expectantly in the hall, his hands folded behind his back. He no longer needed a cane, it seemed, or at least he was no longer _pretending_ he needed one.

“Lady Edelgard,” he said, “I apologize for rousing you at this hour, but the two of us must speak in private. Hilda, go back to your room or I shall put you on permanent stable duty with Dimitri.”

Hilda sighed and left the room.

Edelgard stepped back. “Very well, Seteth. Come in.”

“Not here,” he said. He looked furtively up and down the hall. “Put on your boots and your cloak.”

“It’s curfew,” she said. “Do you expect me to break curfew, Seteth?”

“I shall overlook it this time,” he said.

She got dressed and he led her out of the dormitories and away from the academy grounds, into the less well-trod parts of the monastery. Edelgard could see the faint silhouette of a familiar guard tower rising to meet the two of them.

“Now that you’re an Agarthan infiltrator,” Vual said to her, “you must act like an Agarthan infiltrator. And that,” he added, leading her to the tower and producing a strange black box from under his coat, “means attending our teleconferencing meetings.”

“Your what?” she asked before she recalled the times she’d seen Glenn at the base of this very tower, speaking to thin air.

Vual placed the strange black box on the stairs and opened it up. Within was a device far less complicated than the encryption machine, but still arcane and unfamiliar. A row of dials flanked a glass pane with hatch marks like those on a yardstick and a needle like a compass underneath. The box sprouted a shiny metal antenna made of telescoping tubes. Vual fiddled with the dials for a bit, causing the needle to sway back and forth; a squawk of horrendous noise burst from the box like a horde of maddened hornets before quieting into a less offensive crackling buzz.

“Radio isn’t very reliable on the surface,” he said, “but it’s necessary for timely communication across long distances. This box converts your voice into invisible and inaudible signals that are picked up by repeaters and passed along until they reach their destination. It’s difficult to keep repeaters in useful places where the church won’t discover them.”

Edelgard had a feeling Vual enjoyed sounding like the smartest person in the world. His exposition, though, _was_ making her quite curious about what beneficial technologies her empire could salvage from Shambhala. “Instant communication across all of Fódlan?”

“If we had control of the surface,” he said with a sage nod, “and Operation Andediluvia did not monopolize our meager manufacturing resources, we could build proper radio transmission towers all across Fódlan. Imagine being able to send a message from Enbarr to Fhirdiad in an instant.”

“It would certainly make things faster,” she agreed. She’d seen terrible Agarthan war machines before—turrets that fired blasts of lightning from one end of the battlefield to another, hulking golems with swords made of burning light and armor as hard as mythril—but _communication_ was the real game-changer. She was more relieved now than ever before that she hadn’t given them free rein of her empire. Imagine if she’d let them or even _helped_ them build such towers; her empire would have become theirs before she could have even blinked.

A voice cut through the buzzing undercurrent—Thales’ voice. _“Vual. This is Thales. Respond.”_

Vual pulled a small lever and a glass bead lit up red. “Vual here. Vepar is also with me.” He pulled the lever again and the glass bead went dark. “He can only hear us,” he explained to Edelgard, gesturing at the glass bead, “when the light is on. That means we’re transmitting.”

Edelgard nodded. This technology was over her head, but that was straightforward enough.

“Play it safe. Speak only when directly spoken to. Vepar is an irritable person and prone to sadism, but she’s quite respectful in front of her superiors. That should come naturally to someone of royal breeding.”

“I’d figured as much,” she said.

 _“Acknowledged,”_ Thales said. _“I am glad to have such skilled operators within Garreg Mach. See to it your reputations do not fall short of my requirements.”_

Vual pulled the lever. The light went on. “We shall see to it, sir.”

 _“Our Lorentzian bridge generation tests at Research Facility Tau are intensifying. Now it is more important than ever that the facility’s location is protected. You must divert attention…”_ The hissing tide of buzzing and crackling noise intensified; Vual irritably adjusted the antenna until Thales’ voice regained its previous clarity. _“… county.”_

“Could you please repeat that last sentence, sir?” Vual asked. “You’re breaking up.”

 _“You must divert attention from the village near the castle in Gaspard county,”_ Thales repeated. _“I assume you can ensure that this location will be kept safe from future meddling?”_

Edelgard’s blood ran cold. There was another facility just like the one that had been under Remire… under Ashe’s hometown.

“I shall do my best, sir,” Vual said. “Though it will be out of my hands if there is another breach of nuclear material. People are bound to be interested if the same ‘plague’ that struck Remire rears its ugly head elsewhere. That is up to the engineers to prevent, not me.”

_“No excuses, Vual. You now occupy one of the highest positions of authority in the Church of Seiros. Do what is necessary, no less. And what of the Immaculate One and her thralls?”_

“Jeralt’s sudden departure may prove a surprising windfall for us. The Knights of Seiros’ morale has declined.”

Thales hummed, sounding almost bored.

“I have also learned what the Immaculate One has planned for Professor Byleth and Lady Edelgard,” Vual added. “It seems she intends to use both as vessels for the Fell Star’s consciousness.”

_“Well, now that one of the beast’s intended vessels has been removed and replaced, we can hardly allow poor ‘Edelgard’ to fall victim to such a plot.”_

“I am doing everything I can to shield her from Rhea’s influence.”

_“See to it that it is enough. And what of the so-called ‘Holy Tomb?’ Have you gained access?”_

“I have yet to enter it personally, sir. However, I will find out the entry mechanisms by the end of the month.”

_“Very well. I am counting on your success; the resources in the Holy Tomb will make our victory assured.”_

Edelgard wondered what resources _were_ in the Holy Tomb. Even after the Empire had taken control of Garreg Mach and even after five years of using it as a base of operations, her people had never learned how to control the entry mechanism that Rhea commanded so effortlessly, and so the tomb remained closed to outsiders. Whatever resources it had beyond Crest Stones and moldy old bones, though, if Thales wanted them so badly, they must have been terrifying.

_“Now, Vepar, speak to me. What news do you bring?”_

She was struck dumb for a moment. _Thales was speaking to her._ If she misspoke, he would realize who she really was in an instant; he was far too shrewd and clever not to.

 _“Vepar, speak,”_ Thales growled.

More than just a moment.

She looked to Vual. He gave her a stern nod.

“My apologies, sir,” she said, addressing the device. It was amazing to think that her voice traveled into that box, turned into something inaudible and intangible, and flew through the air halfway across the continent before transfiguring itself once again into human speech. There were legends and fairy tales about ‘stones of far-speech’ that did the same, but she’d always thought they were only stories. “My finger slipped.”

 _“Take care not to let it slip again,”_ Thales sighed. _“Report.”_

“I have returned from an excursion to Varley territory. Lady Edelgard’s presence was requested.”

_“And?”_

“I met with Prince Anselm. He did not suspect me at all.”

_“Good. So far, you live up to your reputation. What else?”_

“He is aware that Prince Burkhart has married—” She paused. Cornelia had to have an Agarthan name, didn’t she? If she didn’t use it, would it blow her cover?

Vual surreptitiously pulled the lever again, silencing the both of them from Thales’ perspective. _“Namtara,”_ he hissed, then flipped the lever.

Edelgard cleared her throat. “That Prince Burkhart has married Namtara.”

_“Did you mute yourself again?”_

“Apologies, my lord. I had to sneeze,” she said.

_“I see. And has the news reached anyone else?”_

“Now that it’s reached Anselm, it will spread like wildfire. The entire empire will know about it in a week, probably. This may make it difficult for Prince Burkhart to become Emperor.” She wondered if she’d said that with the wrong inflection. Which prince was Those Who Slither in the Dark propping up? Between Burkhart and Anselm, who played more into their hands? She’d initially thought they’d tricked Anselm into acting, but in any hypothetical war, Anselm’s Adrestia would be as staunch an ally to the Church of Seiros as Dimitri’s Faerghus had been in her world, while Burkhart’s empire would likely be more neutral. But were things really that simple?

_“Many nobles will staunchly support Prince Burkhart no matter what, out of sheer decorum if nothing else; many other nobles will flock to Prince Anselm out of disgust for their crown prince. As long as there is division in the Empire, Namtara’s purpose is served. The more she is reviled, the more controversial her marriage to him is, the better.”_

“Of course.”

 _“Continue to act within your guise as Lady Edelgard,”_ Thales said. _“See to it Dimitri no longer harbors any doubts about me. And if you should find an opportunity to arrange the Fell Star’s death, or our pet beast’s… do it.”_

Edelgard’s blood ran cold. “Are you saying Hapi should be terminated immediately, sir?”

_“As soon as she proves dangerous.”_

Vual checked the miniature clock he carried within his cloak. “Pardon me, sir, but perhaps we should wrap this up? It is getting late.”

_“Of course. Do take care, my faithful and valuable servants. I have no doubt now that you will avoid the fates meted out to Solon and Kronya… but for your sake, do not dare prove me wrong.”_

“Yes, sir,” Vual said.

“Yes, sir,” Edelgard said. Then she realized that she had an opportunity here to probe one of the many mysteries that had been frustrating her as of late. “Wait.”

_“Yes, Vepar?”_

“I have a question about Claude von Riegan.”

Vual gave her a strange look, furrowing his brow in bemusement.

 _“Hmm? What_ about _Claude von Riegan?”_

She began to worry she had made a grave error. Vual’s finger was headed for the lever. “The brat’s a crafty little cockroach. Is there anything I should… do about him?”

 _“He is insignificant. The Fell Star and the beast are more pressing concerns. Stick to your duties,”_ Thales said. _“I have nothing more to say. Good night.”_

A frustrating non-answer, but probably the best she would get. “Thank you, sir.”

Vual pulled the lever one last time and the machine was left producing nothing but that crackling buzz again. He pushed the antenna back into the machine and fiddled with the dials until it fell silent, then closed the box and slipped it back under his cloak.

“He was in quite a hurry to leave,” Edelgard noted.

“He’s constrained,” Vual said to her with a very un-Seteth-like smirk, “by the testing schedule.”

“Another tidal surge?” she asked, bracing herself. “This late at night?”

“Scientific progress never sleeps. What, pray tell, was that last question about?”

“I’m suspicious about Claude. I know he’s on Dedue’s side, so I figured I could use this opportunity to see if he had any ties to Thales.”

“Well, I do hope his answer was satisfying. My core nearly leaped from my chest there.”

Edelgard supposed she should be relieved. If Vual knew nothing about Claude, then he really was some kind of free agent and not someone connected to Thales.

The surge struck her like a hammer to the back of the head and an axe to the front of it. Vual caught her before she could fall out of the guard tower’s staircase and subject herself to a humiliating concussion and kept her steady until the splitting, burning pain had passed and she was no longer torn between two worlds. To think that Thales was suffering the same agony at this very moment, wherever he was, made her feel at least a little better.

She caught her breath. “S,” she said, panting as cold sweat made even colder by the cold air beaded her brow. “The new research facility… Ashe’s hometown…”

“Yes,” Vual frowned and Edelgard knew it was genuine. “This is a bad situation for us. The village and its people are in legitimate danger, and if we allow the tests to be proven conclusive, Operation Antediluvia will proceed at full scale. If that happens, Thales wins. But we will expose ourselves at worst and incur his wrath at best if we attempt to interfere and shut down the facility. What we need… is an unavoidable _casus belli.”_

“An inciting event that forces us to intervene against our own ‘best laid plans,’” Edelgard summed up. The sight of the crater that had once been Remire haunted her, all those corpses burned beyond recognition… and Ashe’s only family could end up among those dead, sacrificed to Thales’ apocalyptic endgame. “Can we engineer one?”

“We can hope that nuclear material escapes the facility and causes a health crisis; if Ashe’s siblings are as smart as he always said they were, perhaps they would send for Professor Manuela and the Knights of Seiros. It would be difficult for me to ‘stop’ that.”

“But that would mean trusting the enemy to make the same mistake twice.”

Vual nodded. “Exactly. We will have to think, and think quickly. Now allow me to escort you to your quarters before you catch another cold.”

The bitter wind howled over the walls of Garreg Mach and blew across the lawn, kicking up swirling clouds of powder snow from the snowdrifts and assaulted the two of them like a hail of needles as they made their way back from their meeting place.

Edelgard hardly noticed the stinging wind. Her thoughts darted frantically between two poles now—how she could expose Those Who Slither’s latest act of treachery to Dimitri, and how she could keep Ashe’s hometown safe.

* * *

Morning brought with it a third problem.

After a fitful sleep, she woke up the next morning with the sun in her eyes and something hot, rough, wet, and smelling strongly of raw meat dragging itself against her cheek.

Edelgard was awake in an instant. She tried to struggle, but found herself pinned to the bed by something very warm, very furry, and at least as heavy as a horse, and realized quickly that Hapi had grown resentful of how much time the least furry member of her adopted litter had spent away from her.

“Hapi,” she grunted, placing her hand under the beast’s chin and trying to lift her head, “This—is unacceptable—behavior…”

Hapi let out an irritated meow and pressed a paw against her chest, purring so loudly that Edelgard almost couldn’t hear herself think.

“You don’t need to look after me. Where are your babies?”

As if on cue, half a dozen tiny faces poked out of Hapi’s mane.

“Clever girl,” Edelgard muttered.

Hapi gently clamped her jaws around her arm and tried to pull her out of bed. She succeeded. Edelgard fell to the floor with a thump, the impact softened only marginally by her rug, and as she picked herself up she saw that her bedroom door had been completely separated from its hinges and also snapped in half.

“Hapi, you ruined my door,” she scolded the beast.

Hapi pinned her down and started kneading her paws against her.

 _“Release my fiancee, you beast!”_ Ferdinand von Aegir’s voice boomed through the hall. Edelgard caught a glimpse of him standing at her door, or what was left of her door, still in his pajamas, with nothing to defend himself with but an ornamental saber that Edelgard knew from experience could only just barely cut butter, let alone a beast’s hide. _“Do not fear, Lady Edelgard! I shall protect you!”_

Other students were gathering in the halls. _“Out of my way!”_ Dimitri snarled, shoving Ferdinand aside. _“El! I’ll save you!”_

Byleth’s voice rang through the hall. _“Get back, everyone!”_

“Professor!” Ferdinand protested as everyone else drew back. “A beast is mauling my—”

“It’s only Hapi,” she replied, strolling into Edelgard’s bedroom with Leonie and Marianne _(“Only_ Hapi?” one of the students piped up in response). Leonie was, of course, as alert and well-composed as ever; Marianne was disheveled, her steel-blue hair falling over her shoulders in lieu of their usual tightly braided bun. “Edelgard, are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” Edelgard said while Hapi continued to knead her. Now she knew exactly what dough felt like. While Hapi didn’t mean her any harm, she expected she’d be sore all over for days.

“I’m sorry,” Marianne said, gently coaxing Hapi off of her. “She was frightened and went to the only other place in the monastery she felt safe.”

“My bedroom?” Edelgard asked, wriggling out of Hapi’s clutches. “Hapi, no. Bad.”

“Maybe she wanted to make sure _you_ were safe,” Byleth said.

“What happened?” Edelgard asked. Had someone tried to kill Hapi? She had more than her fair share of enemies—Catherine, as far as she knew, still wanted to put her down, and now Those Who Slither were considering the same.

“Professor Hanneman tried to take a blood sample,” Leonie said. “Professor Manuela’s taken him to the infirmary.”

Edelgard’s heart sank. Speaking of _casus belli,_ this was exactly what Catherine needed to get herself a nice red fur coat.

“He’ll be fine,” Byleth assured her. “Just a few scratches.”

Edelgard scratched behind Hapi’s ear, hoping to quell her own nerves as well as the cat’s. “Is that what this is all about? Were you worried about me?”

Hapi rubbed her cheek against her hand, then rubbed her cheek against her entire face, purring all the while.

“I appreciate it, but you’ve made a mess of my room.” Not only had the door been busted down, but there were books strewn across the floor, mud tracked onto the rug, and claw marks on the floorboards.

Hapi let out a chirrup. She didn’t sound sorry at all.

“If you were human, you would appreciate how serious this is.”

Hapi meowed at her.

“Follow me.” Edelgard inched her way out of the room, grabbing her cloak on the way and pushing past the crowd of her fellow students. Hapi followed her down the hall, down the stairs, and outside. The students gave her a wide berth. A _very_ wide berth.

“Good girl,” she said, and once the two of them were standing in the snow outside the greenhouse Hapi sat down and tucked her paws underneath herself. Like most cats, Hapi could be surprisingly well trained when she wanted to be, though those occasions were far and few in between. _“Very_ good girl.”

While Edelgard scratched at the base of Hapi’s horns, Dimitri and Dedue hurried down the stairs behind Byleth, Marianne, and Leonie. Hapi stood up, rising to her full towering height, and growled at them, a long and low-pitched threatening whine humming in her throat.

“Um… Dimitri, Your Highness,” Marianne whispered, taking him by the arm, “I… Please don’t take this personally, but she doesn’t seem to like you.”

Dimitri took a few steps back. “Oh. I understand. Pardon me.”

Edelgard felt a hand clamp around her arm and drag her backward.

“Edelgard,” Ingrid asked, “are you alright?” Like most of the rest of the students, she had been rudely awakened by the commotion; it was a rare sight for her golden hair to tumble so lazily over her shoulders. Still, though, she looked just as alert and ready to fight as she always did… even though she was completely unarmed.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Edelgard insisted.

“Nothing to worry about? A _monster_ broke into your bedroom! And not just _any_ monster—She worked for Solon! What is she doing in the monastery? Why are you treating her like a giant kitten?”

Byleth took Ingrid aside. “We need her to tell us more about what happened in Remire. She can’t do that the way she is now, so we’re keeping her until we can make her human again.”

Edelgard caught sight of Dedue standing next to Dimitri (both a healthy distance away from Hapi). He stared directly at her and slowly drew a finger across his throat. Edelgard nodded in response, his silent message received loud and clear. This was going from bad to worse.

“She’s actually quite tame,” Byleth added while Ingrid gawped at her in disbelief.

“Well… if you say so, Professor,” Ingrid said, relenting. “Edelgard, have you been scratched or bitten at all? Any injuries?”

“No,” Edelgard insisted while Ingrid looked her over like a mother hen. “Ingrid, I appreciate your concern, but I don’t even have a scratch on me.”

“You’re overreacting, Ingrid,” Annette said, patting the beast’s flank. She had been very faintly mumbling a nonsense song under her breath. Edelgard wasn’t sure what a ‘skimbleshanks’ was, but it seemed to be keeping Hapi calm. “See? She wouldn’t hurt a fly! She must’ve just been brainwashed or something in Remire.”

 _“What in the Goddess’ name is going on out here?”_ Catherine called out, stomping across the yard. Shamir was close behind. Hapi crouched down and hissed at the new intruder, her ears pressed back and hackles raised, fangs bared and tail raised.

“Nothing,” Byleth said. “Hapi just got lonely.”

Catherine’s hand fell to her sword. Hapi growled and spat at her.

“Wait,” Shamir said, grabbing Catherine by the arm. “It’s bad luck to kill a jaguar demon.”

“I didn’t think you were superstitious.”

“I’m not. Back in Dagda, you kill one and five more come running. Pretty bad luck if you ask me.”

“In Dagda.”

“Yes. But why take the risk?”

Catherine sighed. “Professor Byleth, you know what Alois and I decided about this. If it hurts someone, we’re putting it down. Professor Hanneman is in the infirmary right now.”

Leonie stepped forward. She had a temper as short as her close-cropped auburn hair and just as fiery. “You’re not going to put her down! That’s not what Captain Jeralt would do, and I promised him I’d look after her. If you want her, you’ll have to go through me.”

Catherine looked down at her, most likely noting that she herself was in full plate armor and had a sword, whereas Leonie was dressed in her uniform and an old cloak of Jeralt’s and had a hunting knife on her belt. “I’m captain of the Knights of Seiros,” she said matter-of-factly.

“I’m Captain Jeralt’s greatest apprentice,” Leonie spat back.

Catherine kept looking down at her, her brow furrowing. Edelgard could tell that she was asking herself, ‘what would Rhea do?’ and then recalled the time her world’s Caspar had recounted to her a conversation he’d had with Catherine in which she’d told him, quite bluntly, that she would kill a child without hesitating if Rhea told her to.

“Perhaps,” Edelgard said to her, “we should ask Hanneman what he thinks.”

Catherine’s frown deepened. “I think he’ll agree with me in the interest of public safety.”

* * *

 _“Kill_ her? Are you mad, Captain?” Hanneman gasped, his eyes bulging so dramatically that they risked popping right out of his sockets. He stood up from the cot he’d been sitting on. He’d shed more layers of clothing than Edelgard cared to see him without, topless save for an undershirt with one sleeve cut away; his arm was wreathed in bloody bandages _(‘Just a few scratches,’_ Byleth had said). “If anything, I’ve half a mind to march right up to her and try again—”

“It _mauled_ you, Professor,” Catherine argued.

“A risk worth taking! Captain, if I pull this off, I can write the book on Crestology! No, _two_ books on Crestology, one on Crest corruption and repair and the other on Crest-induced bestial transfigurations! All I need to push my research further is a blood sample.”

“If it’s a blood sample you need, you’ve gotten plenty,” Manuela said, taking him by the shoulders and pushing him back down into a sitting position. “Of your own, that is. Simmer down and settle down, you old goat.”

“Manuela, you know I respect you as a physician,” Hanneman spat back at her, “when you aren’t stinking drunk, that is—but what do you understand of the passion of scientific discovery? This will put my name in the history books!”

“You’d be in the history books, alright—as a dead fool. I think Hapi is adorable, but you know full well she doesn’t care for you, and if she’d aimed just a few inches to the right, your heart wouldn’t be inside your ribcage anymore.”

“Humbug! I had the situation under control.”

“Professor, if you don’t mind me asking,” Edelgard asked Hanneman, “what were you intending to do this morning?”

“I’m glad _someone_ finally asked!” he replied, glaring at Manuela and Catherine in turn. “I think I might have developed a partial cure for Hapi’s affliction.”

“Then administer it to her,” Catherine said.

“I’d advise against that,” Edelgard said. “There’s no way of knowing which _part_ it will cure. Isn’t that right, Hanneman? We could restore her human mind but not her human body… or worse, she could end up with the mind of a beast in a human body.”

Hanneman nodded. “Or anything in between. We could get lucky, of course, but things would more likely than not go horribly wrong. Sadly, I have reached the limit of what I can do with hair and saliva samples. I need blood.”

It was probably only the fifth-creepiest thing Hanneman had ever said.

“Why didn’t you try to sedate it first?” Catherine asked.

“I _did_ try,” Hanneman said. “I simply did not expect the ether to wear off so quickly. I might have to double the dose. Or triple it.”

“The last person who should be administering ether to anyone or anything should be _you,_ you pompous old buffoon,” Manuela chastised him. “You think my job is _easy,_ don’t you?”

“Considering you’re drunk as a skunk half the time you do it, it must be!”

Catherine pounded her fist on Manuela’s desk. A cup of water (or possibly ‘water’) on the desk rattled and shivered from the impact as the loud bang of her gauntlet hitting varnished wood rang out. “That’s enough! Hanneman, use your cure today, or it dies today.” She sighed and gave Edelgard a weary, put-upon look before turning around and heading out the room. “It’s a miracle it took that thing this long to hurt someone, but it is what it is.”

“You can’t kill her; she’s a mother!” Manuela shouted at her back.

An eerie and quiet calm descended over the infirmary. Edelgard swore the rest of the room’s occupants could hear the mad hammer of her heartbeat. Hapi would die today by Catherine’s hand, or she would be killed by Those Who Slither in the Dark—even if the cure was a failure, the slim chance it might succeed couldn’t be risked. And her alter ego, hidden by an invisible mask, couldn’t afford to fail here.

She had to concoct a plan to kill Hapi without killing her.

Hanneman was the first to break the silence. “I… suppose a piecemeal cure _is_ better than no cure at all. Even if it doesn’t restore her completely, if it has any effect on her body or mind, I can use it as a jumping-off point.”

Edelgard took a deep breath. “How is the cure administered, Professor?” she asked him.

“I suppose she could just ingest it,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of it; like I said, I don’t expect the cure to do much the way it is now—”

“Well, let’s pour out a saucer of milk, mix in the cure, and set it out in front of her,” Manuela huffed. “That should be more than enough. I swear, Hanneman, for all the wisdom that comes with age, you can be so _helpless_ sometimes.”

“I’m not fond of leaving a job half-done,” he retorted, “or experimenting on a one-of-a-kind specimen with half of a treatment.” He stood up and collected his shirt and tweed coat. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I shall procure our supplies. In the interest of science, I must see the results in-person.”

“Hanneman, you stubborn, obstinate old windbag!” she said, snatching the coat from his hand. “I just closed up four lacerations in your bicep. You nearly went into shock. Just tell me where you’re keeping the cure and I’ll deal with it.”

“I’m afraid you might mistake it for brandy and drink it, you sow!”

“Ugh! Do you think I’m _that_ much of an irresponsible souse? Perhaps I ought to have let you bleed out.”

“Perhaps that would have been preferable to hearing you lecture your—”

“My what? My betters? Well, I’m sorry my attitude offends your noble blood—”

“Why don’t _I_ take care of it?” Edelgard asked. An idea had come to her. “Professor, tell me where you’re keeping the cure. I’ll take it and administer it to Hapi.”

Hanneman calmed down. “Ah… yes, that is agreeable. She does trust you most, after all.” He reached into his coat pocket and produced a ring of keys. “The third-largest key is to my office; the second is to my cabinet. Look for a small boiling flask filled with red-brown liquid on the cabinet’s middle shelf.”

Edelgard took the keys from him. “Thank you, Professor. I’ll see to it.”

“If you could write down your observations,” Hanneman told her, “I would most appreciate it.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” she said, opening the door. “Oh, and Professor Manuela—I want you to tell Professor Byleth something.”

Manuela smiled at her. “Yes?”

Edelgard drew close to her and whispered her plan into her ear.

“Got it,” she said. “You’re a crafty little—”

Edelgard put a finger to her lips.

“Right. I’ll speak to your professor.”

She thanked Manuela and stepped out into the hall. Hanneman’s office was practically a few steps away; she unlocked the door and slipped inside. His cabinet stood in the corner, and with the other key, she opened its doors. Flasks and bottles of all shapes and sizes, many empty, some full of various colorful liquids, greeted her. Among them stood the one she was looking for—a small one with a round body and a narrow neck about one-third filled with red-brown liquid and stoppered with a cork.

She slipped the cure under her cloak, locked the cellar, and left the office, locking the door behind herself, then headed downstairs.

She expected Dedue to find her quickly. He did—at the foot of the stairs of the great hall.

“Well?” he asked.

“Hanneman made a potential cure. And if he doesn’t use it today, or if it doesn’t work, Catherine will put Hapi down.”

“Then she will be put down. Do you have it?”

“No, but soon.”

With a morose frown, Dedue gave her a slow nod.

“Oh, don’t act so glum, Dedue. You said it yourself that she would have to die,” she taunted him. “There’s nothing you can do. It isn’t fun, is it? Watching Dimitri swallow Thales’ lies day in and day out and knowing that everything you do drives the truth farther and farther away from him… and keeps him an ignorant little puppet.”

She watched Dedue’s eyes turn icier and icier. She’d struck a nerve.

“If you could reveal everything to him… would you?”

“I would do… whatever is best for His Majesty.”

Exactly the oblique, evasive answer Edelgard expected from him. She knew Dedue had no great love for Those Who Slither in the Dark—after all, his ‘Men in Black’ were, in his own words, as dangerous allies as they were enemies. He was biding his time, she supposed, until he could strike at them, just as Edelgard had done in her world. Perhaps he would change his tune if someone filled him in about Operation Antediluvia… another potential plan to consider.

“I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “You know what we’d do to him if he wasn’t… useful anymore.”

Dedue left her, and Edelgard went on.

Next, she had to find Claude.

* * *

“I need something that can put an Albinean moose to sleep for a few hours,” she said as she stood in the middle of Claude’s room.

Claude raised an eyebrow and leaned back in his seat. “Sorry,” he said with a disarming little smirk, “but I’m used to poisoning people.”

“It also needs to be red.”

“That… doesn’t make it easier for me.”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t devised _something_ that can put down a cavalry unit’s horses, or a flying unit’s wyverns. I know you have. It’s ridiculously improbable that such a thing could escape your consideration, especially considering how common wyvern husbandry is in Almyra.”

He thought for a moment. “Why do you need to put Hapi to sleep?”

“To save her life.”

“Well… I have the depression serum. I could put some non-toxic red dye in it…”

“Do it.”

“For what?”

“For everything I’ve learned about the No-Eyed People.”

“Deal.” Claude went to his drawers.

“I need the serum in a small boiling flask,” she added.

“Got it,” he said, setting out an appropriately shaped flask and putting it on his desk. A small bottle of clear liquid came out next, then a small burlap sachet.

“Fill it one-third of the way.”

“That’s my whole supply,” he said.

“You can make more.”

“I don’t have the ingredients anymore. I won’t be able to get them until spring, at earliest.”

“Claude, you won’t get everything if you don’t follow my instructions to the letter.”

“What exactly are you doing?”

“What I must.”

With a sigh, Claude went back to work, pouring all but a tiny bit of the bottle’s contents into the flask and opening up the burlap sachet to take a pinch of russet-colored powder. When the powder fell from his pinched finger and thumb down the flask’s neck and into its round body, it turned into slow and blossoming swirls of dark reddish-brown like wisps of smoke from a flame. He gave the flask a swirl, gripping the neck, then capped it with a cork and vigorously shook it.

“Well,” he said, “here it is. Enough depression serum to leave a moose down in the dumps.” He handed the flask to her. “Use it well.”

Edelgard took it.

“And now,” he said with a wry smirk, “everything you know?”

“I’m afraid I don’t have the time right now,” she said.

“Over dinner, then?”

“If Ferdinand will allow it,” she answered with a wry smirk of her own.

She left Claude’s room and hurried downstairs and out of the dormitories, taking care to keep both flasks separate enough that she wouldn’t confuse them. Out on the lawn, a few students were still gathered, but most had gone off to feed themselves or begin their training and studies for the day. Hapi was curled up between the far wall of the academy’s common rooms and one of the skeletal trees planted on the lawn, her bright scarlet fur striking against the churned snow, her head raised and alert. Half a dozen kittens were curled up at her side. Byleth, Marianne, and Leonie stayed close to her; everyone else kept their distance, especially Catherine, who kept a watchful eye on the beast.

She wasn’t headed for Hapi yet. Instead, she made her way to the kitchen and scullery.

“El,” Dimitri called out.

He caught up with her with just a few long-legged strides. “I hope you’ve talked some sense into Catherine,” he said. “That beast… Hapi… she must know _everything_ about Cornelia. Perhaps even who Thales really is. We need to restore her humanity.”

“I know—I’m working on it,” she assured him. She produced one of the flasks from under her cloak and let the sunlight catch the swirling currents of the wispy, unctuous layers of the liquid within. “Hanneman gave me something that might do just that. With any luck, it’ll work.”

“How will you feed it to her?”

“I’ll mix it into a bowl of milk,” she said.

He looked down at the flask. “You said… it _might_ work?”

“Hopefully, it will. We only have one chance.”

He frowned. Evidently, he didn’t like those odds at all. “Well… if anybody can succeed with only one chance, it’s you and Professor Byleth.”

He had no idea how correct he was.

Edelgard put the flask back. “Thank you. If the Professor truly has the power of the Goddess, then I suppose it’s not too much to hope for a miracle.”

She headed to the kitchen, downstairs into the scullery, and took a bottle of milk off the shelf and a large bowl.

On the lawn, with all of her materials gathered, with Byleth, Hanneman, Marianne, Leonie, Dimitri, and Dedue waiting with bated breath and Catherine standing with one hand on Thunderbrand’s hilt, Edelgard set down the bowl in front of Hapi, emptied the bottle of milk into it, and poured in Claude’s poison. Her heart rattled guiltily in her chest as Hanneman’s chest swelled with anticipation. She gave the bowl a few swirls until the red currents swirling through the white milk turned the whole mixture a pale pink.

She stepped away. Dedue stared at the bowl, then at her. She met his gaze, then lifted her head, looked up to Claude’s window and gave a curt nod. Understanding, he nodded back.

Catherine ordered the rest of the students away, leaving only herself, Byleth, and Edelgard to observe.

Hapi slowly and gingerly picked herself up. At her full height, she towered over everyone—seven feet at least from paws to withers. She bowed her head, sniffed the bowl of milk, twitched her whiskers skeptically…

Edelgard swallowed a guilty lump in her throat. She felt her hands shaking and fought back the tremors. Hapi had trusted her to protect her—to carry on the work of her Aunt Anselma. That wasn’t what she was doing here. She was signing Hapi’s death warrant. Her eye hurt again, a knifelike stinging pain driving into her skull; she pressed her hand to it in a vain attempt to dull the pain.

Hapi began to lap at the discolored milk. Soon it was gone; her tongue scraped the bottom of the bowl.

And then she took a few lumbering, uneasy steps backward, swaying on her paws, leaden eyelids falling over her scarlet eyes. She crumpled to the ground in a heap and a tangle of fur and lanky limbs, completely unconscious.

 _“Oh, goddess, please,”_ Hanneman whispered, on tenterhooks as he leaned forward on his tiptoes and set a well-inked pen to his notebook. Edelgard knew that what she had done would break his heart.

Minutes passed.

Nothing happened.

“It didn’t work.” Byleth looked crestfallen as the words hesitantly, frighteningly quietly, left her mouth. The look on her face alone would have been enough to make Edelgard weep, but she forced it all back. Even though all of the students had been driven away, she could still feel Dedue’s eyes on her back. Perhaps it was her own paranoia, or perhaps she was still being watched and carefully assessed. She felt as though she were bound in chains heavier than any shackles she’d ever felt around her limbs.

“I… thought it would at least do _something,”_ Hanneman mumbled, his face falling.

“I’m sorry,” Catherine said. “At least it won’t hurt.”

“No.” Byleth shook her head. “We can drag her somewhere safe while she’s unconscious, somewhere she can’t cause trouble… We can’t do this! My father wouldn’t…”

“I can redouble my efforts,” Hanneman said. “Lady Catherine, please, give me one more chance—”

Edelgard wanted to curl up in a corner somewhere somewhere dark and cold, where someone like her belonged. She wanted her feet to carry her there and leave her there to rot. She wondered if Manuela had relayed her message to Byleth while she’d been meeting with Claude. She knew Manuela well enough to trust her not to be flaky when it mattered most, but this was a different and younger Manuela. If everything went wrong here…

No. There was no blaming Manuela. It would still be Edelgard’s fault.

As much as she wanted to crumble in despair, forced yet again to demand the ultimate sacrifice from someone else for the sake of her own goals, but instead she mentally re-affixed her mask. But standing on the precipice of the point of no return, she tried to steady herself, but when she closed her eyes, all she could see was the look on Byleth’s face seared into her eyelids like a brand.

“Not here,” she said, hanging her head in defeat. “Not like this. Not in the academy, right in front of the dorms. Even a beast… you can’t execute a beast in full view of where we all live and sleep, Lady Catherine. Please, at least take her where no one can see her.”

Catherine sighed and let of of her sword’s hilt. “You’re right. I’ll get more knights. We’ll haul it away while it’s still asleep.”

“Lady Catherine, please—” Hanneman begged, looking more distraught than Edelgard had ever seen him. “You would be destroying volumes of knowledge—and a _person!”_

“I’m sorry, Hanneman. You had your chance, but I have to do whatever it takes to protect Garreg Mach. I know better than anyone else how dangerous these beasts can be to students and I don’t want to take another chance.”

He shook his head in disbelief and took a halting step back.

“I’m sorry, Professor,” Edelgard said. “You—knew there was only a slim chance of success.” Her voice stuck in her throat. _She_ was the real monster here, not the beast lying in the snow or the knight stubbornly hell-bent on righteous slaughter.

“Ah, well… you… did your best, Edelgard,” he said, demoralized and defeated. “It was I who failed here. May the Goddess forgive me.” He sighed. “I cannot believe you’re doing this.”

* * *

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Alois said. He stood back from Catherine, a wicker basket containing a half-dozen sleeping kittens hanging from the crook of his elbow. He rested his hand over the basket. _“Don’t watch,”_ he whispered to the kittens.

Hapi lay on the floor of the catacomb’s twisting and bone-lined passages, still completely unconscious. Catherine had Thunderbrand drawn, its glowing red-orange blade casting a fiery light that crawled across the skulls and ornately-arranged femurs and ribs that created macabre decorative designs across the walls.

Edelgard felt drained and demoralized, but stayed strong. The plan was still on track… for now. But plenty of students had seen Catherine, Alois, and Byleth dragging Hapi’s body down into the catacombs for a private execution, and she didn’t want to think about the looks on their faces. Especially Dimitri, Marianne, Leonie… their crestfallen yet accusing stares…

She looked to both of the gathered knights, then to Byleth, and took a deep breath. “I think we’ve put on enough of a show now,” she said. “Don’t you think, Professor?”

Byleth nodded.

“What are you talking about?” Catherine asked.

“A—A show?” Alois asked, a furrow in his brow.

“There are agents loyal to Cornelia within Garreg Mach,” Byleth explained. “We don’t know who or how many, just that there are. If there’s a chance Hapi could be turned back into a human and tell us what she knows, they would kill her.”

“Which is why,” Edelgard said, producing Hanneman’s flask from her cloak, _“we’re_ going to ‘kill’ her first. _This_ is the real cure; what I gave Hapi was a sedative and nothing more. We’re going to use it here and see what happens. If nothing happens, we can keep Hapi safely down here while Hanneman works on another cure in secret. But if there are any positive developments, we might learn a thing or two about Cornelia.”

“I’m sorry we had to mislead you, Catherine,” Byleth said. “But the fewer people up there that knew, the better.”

Catherine let out a nervous laugh. “I’ve always known you had guts, Professor,” she said, “but you keep on surprising me. It’s no wonder your students are over the moon for you.” She turned to Edelgard. “Alright. Give it a shot.”

Edelgard removed the cork from the flask while Byleth took Hapi’s head in her arms and lifted it up, prying her mouth open. The beast was as limp as a ragdoll; if not for the occasional twitch of a whisker and the warmth of her body beneath her fur, she might have already been dead.

She looked to Byleth. _“If this doesn’t work… If something goes wrong…”_

 _“I’ll go back all the way to this morning,”_ Byleth whispered.

Edelgard nodded, tipped the flask on its side, and let the concoction trickle down Hapi’s throat.

They waited.

Alois took a few very big, very careful steps backward, distancing himself from Hapi as much as he could. His back kissed the bone-laden walls and he let out a shocked and terrified yelp. Catherine tightened her grip on Thunderbrand’s hilt, just in case. Byleth took a deep breath and prepared to turn back time.

For a few seconds that seemed to last days, nothing happened.

Then the seizures began. Hapi’s body shook and convulsed, a wild tangle of lanky limbs whipping through the air, a tempest of claws and fur. Byleth grabbed Edelgard and pulled her a safe distance away. The flask fell from Edelgard’s hands and landed with a clatter on the stone tile floor. The dim light barely illuminated Hapi’s body as it twisted, shivered, quivered, and contorted. Hapi made no sound whatsoever—no hissing, growling, yowling, or anything else. Though it was hard to discern any detail, Edelgard thought she could see fur receding into flesh, hints of bare skin…

Edelgard felt sick to her stomach. The tight and cramped corridor swirled around her, turning the skulls into cackling fiends. She felt her feet slip and skid on the floor as she tried to keep her balance and keep herself upright. Screams and wails and moans of her own imagination rang in her ears; vicious invective long since forgotten spewed out of anger and betrayal; half-remembered begging and pleading for help. She felt tears stream down her cheeks, suffocating her, turning the air in her lungs to molten lead.

Byleth’s hand fell to her shoulder, anchoring her back to reality. “You don’t have to look,” she assured her.

Edelgard squeezed her eyes shut and fought to control her breathing. All she could hear were claws scraping against stone, the erratic dull thumps of body constantly in motion thrashing against the floor. She took a deep breath and exhaled as the sounds of turmoil faded away, opening her eyes.

At last, Hapi’s body had returned to rest, lying in a heap on the floor. She was no longer the moose-sized mostly-feline beast she had been a minute ago, but Edelgard couldn’t exactly call the sight she beheld ‘human.’ For starters, though the body had a much more human shape, it was comparable in size to Dedue or Raphael, still had _quite_ a lot more fur than the typical human, and, if Edelgard’s eyes weren’t deceiving her, still had a tail.

Edelgard felt herself fall into Byleth’s arms. She hardly realized it until she felt the back of her head sink into her bosom and strong arms curl around her waist. Her legs felt like jelly; they’d completely collapsed under her weight. Her breath filled her lungs in long, shaky draughts and came out in sputtering gasps. She shivered as she collected herself and tried to will the strength back into her legs; Byleth held her until she could carry her own weight again.

Catherine sighed in relief. “Better than nothing,” she said. “A _lot_ better. How long is she going to be asleep now?”

“Most of the day, at least,” Byleth said.

Alois, who’d had his hands pressed over his eyes for the duration of the transformation, peeked through his fingers. “I-Is it over? C-Can I… Can I look?”

“It’s over,” Byleth assured him. “Yes, Alois, you can look.”

With a relieved sigh of his own, Alois let his hands fall from his face. “Ah, that was frightening. I—” And then he caught sight of Hapi, and presumably of something that was probably a naked breast, because his hands flew right back to his eyes. “Ah! My darling wife, please forgive me!” he cried out.

Realizing that Hapi’s nudity was probably a problem, Byleth shrugged off her jacket and laid it atop her. Edelgard doubted it would be enough to preserve her modesty; while Hapi was no longer moose-sized, she was still a mountain. But perhaps some memento of Byleth’s—and, if Edelgard remembered correctly where that jacket had come from, Jeralt’s—would put her at ease when she woke up, like a child’s favorite blanket or plush doll.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Catherine said. “When we go back up to the surface, people are going to expect my sword to have blood on it. Won’t they get suspicious if we all come out squeaky clean?”

Edelgard felt a pit open up in her stomach. Of all the things to forget! Why hadn’t she asked Claude for some fake blood? If anybody had some, it would be him!

“You’re right,” Byleth said. “Hmm… Give me your sword.”

“I’m not giving you Thunderbrand.”

“No, your other sword.”

Catherine reached to the saber sheathed at her opposite hip and handed it to her. “Alright, but I don’t see what you’re going to—”

Byleth held the saber, drew the Sword of the Creator from her side, called upon the power of the Crest of Flames, and with a one-handed grip on her sword shattered the saber’s blade at the hilt. The pieces of the steel blade clattered to the floor as the glow permeating Byleth’s sword and throbbing through her veins faded away.

Catherine stared, her mouth agape, and while it was hard to tell in the dim lighting from the torches burning dully in the wall sconces, she might have been blushing.

“Now I see,” she said after a long pause, finally picking her jaw up off the floor, “why Jeralt called his company the ‘Blade Breakers.’”

“You can say the blade snapped off when you drove it through Hapi’s heart,” Byleth said, handing the saber’s hilt back to Catherine. “People will believe you.”

Catherine gingerly took the hilt and just held it, staring at it as though she’d never seen it before in her life. “I… guess. I mean, she was asleep. It isn’t like she could fight back or get any licks in. Not the kind of tale I’d tell at the bar, exactly.”

Edelgard might have said something pithy about knights there, but was too exhausted to need to hold her tongue.

“Well, if our work is done here, I suppose we can leave this place, right?” Alois asked Catherine. “Right, Captain? _…Please,_ Captain?”

“Um… yes,” she said. “Yes, let’s get going.”

Before the four of them left, Edelgard approached Hapi and crouched beside her as she lay in repose, lighting a flame in her hand to better illuminate her. It was easier now to see familiar contours of a human face underneath a shaggy mane of tangled scarlet hair. But there were still horns sprouting from her temples, curled and black as onyx; still armored scales as black and lustrous as polished obsidian padding her shoulders and running down her spine; still large swaths of short, soft scarlet fur dotted with black rings and rosettes covering her skin, draped over her back, running down her arms and legs. The furred tufts of pointed ears poked out of her hair and the tips of sharp fangs protruded from her lips. Furry paws that were not quite paws but not quite hands and feet either were capped with thick, sharp black claws.

Edelgard placed a hand to Hapi’s brow and felt its warmth, allowing herself to feel relieved. Though she wondered, if this body was not fully human and not fully beast, what did that mean for the mind within it?

“I promised you I’d find a way to bring you back, Hapi,” she whispered, so relieved she might have started crying again. “You’re halfway there now.”

She, Catherine, Byleth, and Alois left the catacombs, grim and glum as they emerged back into the daylight. In the blinding light, Edelgard’s relief vanished and guilt rushed into the empty spaces in her heart yet again.

Before her eyes could adjust to the sunlight, she felt hands seize her and a jolt of terror ran through her body.

 _“El,”_ she heard Anselm say, _“I heard what happened. Are you alright? Is that beast dead?”_

 _“Lady Edelgard,”_ she heard Hubert chime in—she’d barely spoken to him and vice versa for what had felt like weeks— _“Please, I beg of you to forgive me…”_

As the light faded, she saw Leonie running up to her, her face twisted in anger. “You didn’t,” she said, looking to her and then to Byleth, her eyes wide and mouth agape in horror and her brow furrowed in fury. “You—You didn’t just stand there and _let_ them, did you? Professor Byleth, how could you? What about your promise to Captain Jeralt? Your own father! Catherine, how could you?”

Byleth bowed her head. “We did all we could,” she croaked.

“It’s dead,” Catherine said, lifting the bladeless hilt of her saber and showing it off. “I did what I had to do.”

“You betrayed Jeralt,” Leonie continued, spitting every word out of her mouth, her invective as sharp as arrowheads. _“You betrayed Jeralt!_ All of you! Every last one of you cowards! Don’t you have any shame?! _You’re_ the real monsters here! He’d be ashamed of you if he were here!”

There were other students there, too—Claude and Hilda looked as aghast as Leonie, though not nearly as enraged; Dedue kept an impassive expression that nevertheless seemed more fraught than ever before, a nervous and almost guilty shift of his eyes that spoke to a turmoil as great as Edelgard’s own, if not greater; Marianne stood with her head bowed and hands anxiously kneading each other, pale and shivering, and Dimitri, with his hand on her shoulder and his eyes drawn to her distress, was too preoccupied for once to lash out against Catherine in anger.

Long ago, when she had cast away the Flame Emperor’s mask for good, Edelgard had hoped her days of playing the villain to her friends had been behind her.

They weren’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I'd wear it to a hoedown, and I'd dance with all the belles  
>  And none of them would know that I was secretly myself  
> I'd rob my own apartment and I wouldn't give a damn  
> [I'd blame it on the person that nobody knows I am](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ws-49HHK60)_
> 
> (i'm sorry, i had to)


	33. The Haunting of Castle Gaspard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a mysterious letter brings the Blue Lions face-to-face with an old enemy and a familiar face.

The same night as Hapi’s ‘death,’ Edelgard returned to the catacombs with Byleth, breaking curfew with the explicit permission of the Knights of Seiros. She had expected the initial sedative effects of Claude’s poison to wear off some time after nightfall and wanted to be sure that the first face Hapi saw upon waking up was a friendly one.

They found Hapi where they had left her, curled up in the winding tunnels with Byleth’s old gray jacket clutched in her paws. Catherine and Alois had brought down the largest set of tunic and trousers they had been able to find and laid them next to her. Edelgard held in her arms a bundle of her spare bedsheets, just in case Hapi would have wanted something with her scent. She laid them at her side as well.

Hapi continued to sleep, her chest gently rising and falling, but then suddenly stirred. “Stand back,” Byleth told Catherine and Alois. “You know she doesn’t like you.”

The knights stood back. Byleth crept closer, flanked by Edelgard, Hapi, and Hubert, their feet slowly and silently slipping across the dusty floor.

Hapi cracked open her eyes. Though her face was human enough, the pupils of her scarlet eyes were enlarged and reflected the light from the wall sconces as gleaming golden disks. She slowly propped herself up and stretched, her fur bristling, then appraised her guests. “Chatterbox,” she mumbled, looking at Byleth. Her head swiveled a few degrees until she was facing Edelgard. “Auntie Anselma…”

Edelgard felt her heart leap. She could speak—and intelligibly! Though her body hadn’t changed completely back, her mind seemed quite intact. Hanneman would be overjoyed.

Hapi stood up and looked around. She was tall—even hunched over, she was eye-to-eye with Hubert—and nude save for red and black fur that crept up her arms and legs and across her shoulders. Her tail swished back and forth behind her as though it had a life of its own, flicking its tip. “Where’s Jeralt? Where am I?” she mumbled. Her voice came out quiet, slow, ponderous, as though she were trying very hard to remember how to speak. She looked down at herself. “Why’m I naked? And… big…” She very carefully examined her forepaws as though she’d never seen them before, curling her fingers and watching the black claws that capped them gleam in the light. “And… paws. Huh. How’d I get paws…?”

“It’s good to see you again, Hapi. I don’t suppose you recall the last few weeks?” Edelgard asked her. She cleared his throat, more flustered than she would have liked to admit by the sight of a giant, naked beast-woman. “We, er… brought some clothes for you.”

Hapi idly scratched her back. “Huh. I’m fuzzy.”

“Please,” Edelgard said, motioning to the clothes.

Hapi acquiesced and put on the tunic and trousers. They barely fit, but rendered her mercifully decent all the same. She sniffed the air, twitched her ears, and swished her tail. “Um… okay. The fuck happened to me?”

“You were a giant cat for a while,” Byleth said. “Remember any of that?”

Hapi shook her head.

“What _do_ you remember?”

“Um…” She rubbed the back of her paw against her brow. “Uh… head feels… slow,” she mumbled, slowly lowering herself to the floor and nestling herself in the sheets Edelgard had brought.

“It’s okay if you don’t remember,” Edelgard said, approaching her slowly and carefully. A more complete cure would, she hoped, restore whatever of her mind was still closed off to her.

“I remember…” Hapi sniffed the air again. “Where… babies?”

Alois stepped forward. “Don’t worry about the kittens,” he said. “I’m keeping them in my quarters for now. Actually, I’d love to bring some of them to my daughter—she’s wanted a pet for months—”

Hapi hissed at him, her ears pinned back and pupils narrowed to slits, her fangs bared and glistening in the torchlight as she ensconced herself in the blankets and pressed herself to the wall and she pulled herself up to her full height. Her fur bristled. She must have been nearly seven feet tall.

He held up his hands. “Uh—n-nice kitty, I didn’t mean to—”

She hissed at him again, caught sight of Catherine, hissed at her, and scurried deeper into the catacombs.

Byleth glared at both of the knights. “Both of you, stay back,” she said, and she led Edelgard after her.

They found Hapi huddled in her blankets and tucked into an alcove some distance away. Edelgard eased closer to her, slowly, slowly, until Hapi’s claws cut through the air and she found herself dragged into the alcove with a pair of strong arms wrapped as firmly as shackles around her.

Edelgard quickly discovered that as human as Hapi may have been now, she could still purr. With a pang of equal parts dread and secondhand embarrassment, she feared that Hapi might keep trying to groom her, but the seconds passed and no attempt was made to start licking her hair, thankfully.

“Aunt Anselma,” Hapi murmured.

“I’m not Aunt Anselma,” Edelgard told her. “Anselma was my mother. I’m Edelgard. Do you remember me, Hapi?” Her memories, it seemed, were all a jumble, as though her mind were a library with all its books torn from the shelves and thrown into a haphazard pile on the floor.

Hapi thought for a moment, then slowly nodded. “A little.”

“I’m sorry,” Byleth told her, crouching beside her. “Catherine and Alois just want to help.”

“Bad,” she hissed. “Evil.” She curled a paw around the back of Edelgard’s head; Edelgard felt sharp claws press gently into her scalp. “Evil people.”

“It’s alright,” Edelgard said, reaching out and scratching behind her ear.

“They just want to know what you know about Cornelia,” Byleth said.

Hapi shook her head. “Hurt.”

“They want to stop her,” Byleth continued, “so she can’t hurt more people the way she hurt you. You need to tell them everything about her plans, what she’s done…”

Edelgard ruffled the fur on the back of Hapi’s neck. “Hapi… do you have trouble recalling things from when you were fully human?”

Hapi nodded. “My brain’s all cloudy.”

Edelgard could only feel the deepest sympathy for her. How many days of freedom had she had since the fateful day Cornelia had snatched her away from her home? Wherever she went she exchanged one prison for another and another and yet another, no matter how sympathetic her jailers were. And not just a prison of stone now but a prison of her own mind, her thoughts and memories locked behind a wall of bestial fog.

“Edelgard,” Byleth suggested, “do you think that Professor Hanneman might be able to make a complete cure if he has a sample of Hapi’s blood?”

Hapi recoiled. “My blood?” she gasped, shuddering.

“Your transformation has something to do with what Cornelia did to your Crest,” Edelgard explained to her. “Hanneman was able to study your Crest enough using just hair samples to devise the incomplete cure that made you what you are now… but we may be able to make you fully human again if he has a blood sample to work with. Of course, as a beast, you couldn’t consent to having your blood drawn…”

Hapi vehemently shook her head. “No. No blood. No sharp things.”

“I cannot say I blame you,” Edelgard told her, stroking her fur to soothe her. Hapi started purring again. “But please think about it. You deserve to have what was done to you undone.”

Hapi thought for a moment. “Okay,” she mumbled.

Byleth took a drinking flask from her hip, uncorked it, and poured its contents onto the floor, then took a dagger from her belt. “Do you think Hanneman just needs a few drops?” she asked.

Edelgard nodded. “We’ll just give you a small prick,” she assured Hapi. “And Professor Byleth can heal you afterward. It’ll barely hurt.”

Hapi nodded, gulped, and hesitantly offered to Byleth a paw. There were patches of bare skin, rough and black, on her palm and the tips of her fingers, just like any animal’s paw pads. Byleth brought the dagger’s edge to one of the pads and with a swift flick of her wrist cut it open. Hapi let out a yelp and yanked her paw back; Edelgard held her tight to keep her calm and combed her fingers through her mane as Byleth turned her paw over and let blood trickle into the flask. For a few seconds, blood flowed from the gash and Hapi whimpered until Byleth had had enough and took the flask away. Then, with a green glow wreathing her hands, she sealed the wound she had made.

Hapi let out a relieved sigh and retracted her paw, holding it close to her chest.

A few seconds of silence passed.

“Oh, shit,” she said. “You’d better go.”

Edelgard and Byleth left her behind, reconvened with Catherine and Alois, and headed out of the catacombs.

Byleth handed the flask to Catherine. “Bring this to Professor Hanneman,” she said.

Catherine looked down at it. “I guess he could use a drink,” she said.

“It’s blood.”

“Oh.” She wrinkled her nose.

“Hapi’s blood. Tell him to keep working on a cure. It’s too late for Hapi, but there’s no telling how many other people might need to be saved from Cornelia’s sorcery.”

“Got it,” Catherine said, packing away the flask.

The knights returned to their posts for the night, and Edelgard returned to the dormitories with Byleth.

She found Claude waiting for her at the head of the stairs, his eyes narrow, his brow furrowed, his arms crossed over his chest.

“You used my poison for murder.”

Edelgard had never heard such venom in Claude’s voice. His eyes were sharp flecks of jade, his mouth pulled into a tight scowl. She tossed a lock of her hair over her shoulder. “And what of it? I did what I had to do,” she said flippantly.

“You switched it for Hanneman’s cure, didn’t you? I’ve never seen the poor guy so depressed. You broke his heart, Edelgard.”

Edelgard wondered if she were being watched. “I’ll do worse than break yours if you don’t get out of my way.”

“Where’s the real cure?”

“I dumped it into a flowerbed.”

“You killed her. With my poison. My peaceful poison.”

“How many of your ‘peaceful poisons’ lead to death in the same way?” she retorted. “The cure wouldn’t have worked anyway. But no matter; Hapi von Rusalka is dead. Make sure Dedue knows that. And make sure he reports favorably about me to his friends in the Men in Black. I performed admirably, considering the circumstances.”

“I’m sure _they’d_ admire you,” he spat.

Edelgard smiled and winked at him. A cold smile of his own cracked his stern visage, and he winked back.

“Good night, Edelgard,” he said. “May the gods forgive you, because Hilda, Leonie, and I sure as hell won’t.”

* * *

The week passed by in a blur. The more looming danger Edelgard found herself surrounded by, the faster time seemed to pass. Anselm darted across the monastery just as quickly as the hands of the clocks seemed to spin; Edelgard would find him on one side of the monastery chatting with monks and knights in the morning and on the opposite side in the afternoon plying Bernadetta into spending some time with him, and in between she would find him having the occasional argument with Volkhard and pestering Vual for an audience with Archbishop Rhea. He would make time, too, to tutor Edelgard in calculus and dark magic, which was really nothing but a ploy to wrest from her secrets about Cornelia she no longer had the opportunity to tell. Dedue was watching her more often than not, and when he wasn’t, Claude was. Edelgard visited Hapi whenever she could, wondering if the amnesiac fog clouding her head would fade away in time, but it seemed to be a permanent fixture of her half-beast state, as were her hysterical reactions to Catherine and Alois; she would not be forthcoming until Hanneman’s cure was complete.

Friday morning, Edelgard pulled her bedroom door open to find Annette waiting for her in the hallway, not quite as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as usual.

“Hey, Edelgard,” she said. “Wanna get breakfast together before class? If you don’t mind, that is…”

“I don’t mind,” Edelgard said, following her into the hall. “You seem more… tired than usual,” she added as the two of them left the dormitories, noticing that Annette was struggling to stifle yawn after yawn. “I do hope you’ve been remembering not to work yourself to the bone.”

“Uh-huh,” Annette said, clasping a hand over her gaping mouth. “Ugh, I didn’t sleep well last night… and I’m sore all over. Brawling training is just, phew. I’ve never been so sore. So, the soreness is just your muscles breaking down when you’ve worked them too hard, right? Then why doesn’t healing magic make you less sore?”

“I’ve never had any sort of aptitude for faith,” Edelgard said, “so I can’t really say.”

Annette giggled. “And yet you’re the one the Goddess talks to.”

“Not anymore.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

They sat together in the dining hall. Annette only picked at her food, though, a glum frown on her round face. “I’m sorry about Hapi,” she said. “You… You and Professor Byleth did what you could, okay?”

Edelgard nodded. “It’s unfortunate, but… yes. We did what we could.”

“I had a horrible dream last night about it. Well, sort of. Actually, it was about Mercie.” Annette took a deep breath. “Cornelia turned her into a horrible monster—not a nice one like Hapi, one all scaly and slimy and snarly and… murder-y, and she had to be… you know.”

“Dreams have a bad habit of throwing our worst and most pressing fears and anxieties to the forefront. I didn’t sleep well last night, either.”

“Y-You don’t think Cornelia would do something like that to Mercie, do you?”

Edelgard rested her chin in her hands. “A monster… I’m not sure. But I’ve been thinking. Hapi was at Remire, and so was the Death Knight. Do you think it might be possible, however unlikely, that Mercedes…”

“That’s ridiculous!” Annette exclaimed. “That’s totally ridiculous, Edelgard. It’s—It’s silly! Mercie’s so sick, she couldn’t wear heavy armor like that! Even a steel cuirass wears her out sometimes.”

“I know. But perhaps there’s something in the Death Knight’s armor that makes her stronger.”

“It’s just impossible.” She shook her head. “It’s not. If Cornelia… if she _did_ turn Mercie into a monster, do you think she’d remember me?”

“I remember something Sylvain said,” Edelgard added, “after Remire. He said it seemed like the Death Knight wasn’t interested in seriously hurting us. If it was Mercedes, it would make sense that she’d pull her punches against us.”

“Mercie can’t be the Death Knight,” Annette insisted.

Edelgard sighed. Well, she’d tried to warn her.

After breakfast, the two of them encountered Manuela and Hanneman in the main hall, and as expected of the two of them, they were arguing.

 _“It’s hardly any business of yours where I plan to go, you paternalistic old gasbag!”_ Manuela spat at her counterpart. She was wearing a thick and heavy traveling cloak and had traveling bags in her hands and a sword at her side.

 _“Hardly any business of mine? Just yesterday_ you _were lambasting_ me _for this same behavior, woman!”_

_“Oh, this is hardly the same! Don’t you try to stop me or I’ll put this sword through your gut.”_

_“Ugh, you incorrigible tart—”_

“Excuse me, professors, what’s the matter?” Edelgard asked, stepping a safe distance in front of the bickering professors.

“Anything we can do to help?” Annette asked.

Manuela’s dark and moody expression brightened. “Oh, hello, Edelgard, Annette! Good morning to the two of you. I’d like it if you could tell this old goat to butt out and mind his own business,” she said, giving Hanneman a sharp glare.

“Professor Manuela needs somebody to impress upon her that she cannot simply leave the monastery to investigate some faraway medical phenomenon,” Hanneman huffed. “Lady Edelgard, Annette, you are both responsible students. Please help me mind this overgrown child’s business.”

“What kind of medical phenomenon?” Edelgard asked.

“That is not minding her business!”

“Not a _phenomenon,”_ Manuela scoffed, “a _plague!_ The same exact symptoms I saw in Remire—”

“What about Remire?” Annette gasped.

“Children, don’t encourage her!” Hanneman protested.

“A letter came for me in the rookery just this morning,” Manuela said, “from Gaspard county. Jasper and Laura—”

“Ashe’s brother and sister?” Annette gasped, her eyes widening in horror. “What’s wrong with them?” she asked, panicked, her voice rising to a squeak.

“They’re in perfect health, but they say people in the village just past Castle Gaspard are falling horribly ill. They begged me to come and see what I can do— _begged_ me, Hanneman,” she said with another cutting glare aimed at her counterpart. _“And_ they say the Death Knight was sighted there. And he still owes me for that dagger he put in my gut a few months back!”

“A plague and the Death Knight in Gaspard?” Edelgard asked, just to make sure she’d heard correctly. Convenient, albeit horrifying news—either _casus belli_ had fallen right into her lap, or Vual had engaged in some forgery (likely the latter). “Professor Manuela, dare I say that might be more than you can handle on your own.”

“My sentiments exactly! And in this weather—” Hanneman said.

“We’ll help you,” Annette said. “Right, Edelgard? Let’s go get Professor Byleth. She’ll send our class out with you!”

Hanneman shook his head, one lone voice of reason against the rising tide. “I suppose I should notify Hubert in case he wishes to join you.”

“We’ll go get our professor,” Annette said. “Have you seen her?”

“I caught a glimpse of her on the pond,” Hanneman said. “I shall feel less concerned for your safety, Manuela, if she and her students are there. I do hope that is an acceptable compromise.”

“Fine, you old worrywort,” Manuela sighed.

Edelgard and Annette headed for the pond, where just as Hanneman had said, Byleth was out on the ice with a fishing rod. And Flayn, Pascal, and Hedwig were there (supervised by Volkhard and Vual, of course), along with Anselm.

 _“See, brother? It is not dangerous at all!”_ Flayn was saying to Vual. _“The ice can support all of our weight quite comfortably, so long as one is careful not to slip. Professor Byleth, may I please try?”_

 _“Professor!”_ Annette called out, cupping her hands around her mouth. _“We need to talk to you!”_

She and Edelgard stepped onto the ice and joined Byleth and the others, wasting no time in explaining themselves.

“Sure. I’ll gather the rest of the class,” Byleth said without a moment’s hesitation. She looked to Vual.

“If Professor Hanneman is worried for Professor Manuela’s safety, I can think of no better assurance than the Blue Lions,” Vual said. “Actually, I would like to travel with you.”

Flayn was taken aback. “B… Brother… you have never so much as entertained the prospect of leaving me behind before.”

Vual’s face fell; likely he feared he’d done something to damage his cover. “Flayn,” he said, “I think you will be more than sa—”

“I do not wish to hear it! Please, bring me with you! I—I refuse to let you out of my sight, f—brother!” She balled her fists and stamped her foot on the ice. “The last time you were gone, you nearly perished! And I had to drag you all the way through the mountains…”

“I understand,” Vual said. “Yes, of course. I suppose we shall leave tomorrow?”

Byleth nodded. “First thing in the morning, as is standard. I’ll ask Catherine and Alois to fill in for our seminars next week.”

* * *

Professor Manuela and the Blue Lions rode out from the monastery that Saturday. Vual rode on a rented wyvern (Seteth’s own personal wyvern, which he had cared for very attentively and which had no problem discerning that Vual was an impostor, was ‘sick’) along with Dimitri, Ingrid, and Flayn, gliding across the sky and keeping apace with the rest of the group. Hubert accompanied Edelgard, but seemed oddly begrudging about it and seemed to be avoiding her gaze.

It was a few days’ journey to Gaspard territory, but an uneventful journey, and when the gloomy exterior of the empty Castle Gaspard passed them by, they arrived at Ashe’s hometown. The bitter winter had not been particularly kind to it, insofar as it was kind to anybody, but Edelgard saw no sign of plague as they went down the street to Lonato’s manor, and to her bemusement, neither did Manuela.

They met Ashe’s siblings Jasper and Laura in the parlor after stabling their mounts. The twins were glad to see the Blue Lions again, but Manuela’s greeting only perplexed them.

“What letter?” Laura asked her.

“The letter you and your brother sent me,” Manuela said, wrinkling her brow. She rummaged through her cloak. “The one that said there was a plague and—the Death Kni… This letter!” she exclaimed, producing it.

Jasper crossed the parlor and took a look. “This isn’t either of our handwriting.” He showed it to Laura, who nodded in agreement.

“We’d have used House Lonato’s seal if we’d written it,” she said.

“Then somebody forged a letter from the two of you,” Dedue said, “to lead us here.” His icy gaze roved around the room, coldly assessing his classmates. Edelgard tried not to react when it settled on her.

“Who’d forge a letter to drag us out here in the middle of winter?” Sylvain wondered. “I mean, not that I don’t like seeing you guys again, but what would they have to gain?”

“So,” Manuela said, taking a sip of her tea, “there’s no plague.”

“Thank goodness, no, Professor,” Laura said, shaking her head. “Although the Brodbecks’ youngest has pneumonia and Father Koch has shingles, if you’d like to help with that.”

“And no Death Knight,” Manuela said.

“No,” Laura said, but Jasper leaned forward in his chair.

“But I think there’s—” he started.

“Jas, please,” Laura told him, resting a hand on his shoulder and trying to pull him back.

“I think there’s a ghost haunting Castle Gaspard!”

The parlor was utterly silent.

“Um… well, you’ve all traveled a long way,” Laura said, standing up, “and it’s an honor to have you, so you’re welcome to spend the night here…”

“A _ghost?”_ Dimitri asked, shaken.

“Or perhaps multiple ghosts,” Jasper said. “I see lights in the windows at night—”

Laura rolled her eyes. “It was just your imagination, Jasper.”

Vual seized on the boy’s remark. “You have seen lights in the castle’s windows at night?” he asked, leaning forward and steepling his fingers.

“Not just once, either,” Jasper said, nodding, “but every night these past few nights. And there are strange noises sometimes…”

“Ghosts aren’t real,” Ingrid said. “It’s probably thieves rummaging through the castle. If you’d like, we could do something about it.”

“Yes,” Dimitri said, his voice frosty. “If any man dares to plunder the memories of good men like Lonato and Ashe, he should pay the ultimate price.”

“We haven’t seen anyone around the castle,” Laura said. “Aside from a few passing knights and merchants on their way to town.”

“But there’s no harm in checking, right?” Byleth asked. “We’d be happy to do it for you.”

“Thank you,” Jasper said, letting out a relieved sigh. “I’ll tell the cooks we’re having guests over for supper.”

The manor’s servants collected the guests’ belongings and led them to their guest rooms. Gaspard Manor was nothing like Varley Manor; the land was, for starters, far less wealthy and its former lord had been far less given to ostentation regardless. The décor was warm and inviting, though the walls were sparse and the floorboards creaky.

“I can’t believe we’re going ghost-hunting,” Bernadetta quavered as she followed her classmates upstairs. “We’re students, not exorcists! What if we get haunted? Or cursed?”

“I’m sure it’s not ghosts, Bernie,” Ignatz assured her. “It’s like in those mystery stories where they take off the monster’s mask and it’s just a cranky old man or some shady merchant underneath.”

“There are no ghosts but those who dwell in our minds,” Dimitri said. “The sources of the lights in the castle’s windows have flesh and blood, and we shall spill that blood to punish their trespasses.”

When everyone had settled into their rooms, Dedue found Edelgard and Vual and took them aside into his bedroom for a private meeting, closing and locking the door in their wake.

“Research Facility Tau is within the castle basement,” he said to the two of them. “Under no circumstances should the rest of the class be allowed inside.”

“Is it?” Vual asked, reacting with mock surprise. “That seems especially dangerous. Though I suppose we lacked a means to construct a new underground facility quickly and silently enough.”

“It also means that somebody forged a letter to draw us to the facility,” Dedue said, his gaze growing icier. “Somebody who knows of its existence wishes for us to find it.”

“That is possible, though exceedingly unlikely,” Vual admitted, and though he hid it well, Edelgard could hear a nervous tremor seep into his voice. “Vepar and I will occupy ourselves with ‘searching’ the basement while the rest of the class stalks the upper levels. We shall see to it that nobody discovers the facility.”

Edelgard spoke up. “You deal with the stupid little apes we call classmates,” she said. “Leave the facility to us.”

“Of course,” Dedue said. His eyes seemed to pierce her very heart, as though he could lay bare her soul and read her lies like an open book. “Your work so far has been exemplary, Vepar. A far cry from Kronya and her offensive pantomime. In public, sometimes I forget that you are anything but Lady Edelgard herself.” His tone was deadpan, but it felt oddly mocking—for a moment, Edelgard felt naked, as though her deceit had become the proverbial emperor’s invisible clothes.

Vual cleared his throat. “Expect nothing less from my protege, Dedue. I dare say she could do just as good a job replacing you.”

Dedue’s eyes narrowed as he ruminated on the thinly veiled threat in Vual’s statement. “Of course.”

“Are you ever afraid, Dedue?” Edelgard asked him.

He seemed momentarily stunned by the sudden line of questioning. “To be afraid is not one of my duties. Fear has no place in my mind.”

“Doesn’t it worry you, though? Doesn’t it weigh heavily on your mind that when the truth comes out—and it will—all these friends you’ve made will turn their backs on you? That they’ll hate you?”

For a split second, there was a vulnerable, yet guarded frown creasing his face that made Edelgard’s heart ache. She hated that her disguise required her to be so loathsome and confrontational, especially since that momentary lapse in his stoic demeanor answered her question for her so conclusively. His heart ached with the same pain she had once felt, and yet she was forbidden from offering any kind of comfort.

“No,” Dedue said to her coldly. “To be hated, to be seen as a betrayer and a monster—That has been my reality as long as I can remember.”

There was a knock on the door, and they along with the rest of the guests were called down for dinner.

For supper, they were served fried Caledonian crayfish on a bed of greens and a seafood lentil soup consisting mainly of simmered white trout and chickpeas served with a white wine. Edelgard had often heard that fried Caledonian crayfish looked better than they tasted, so found herself taken aback by how delicious these ones in particular were. The golden breading around the tail was crisp and well-seasoned, pairing perfectly with the slightly sweet meat within, and she found that she didn’t even mind getting bits of shell stuck in her teeth. The soup, too, was surprisingly filling and tasty considering its few ingredients. Edelgard assumed that Ashe’s siblings had probably gotten plenty of cooking lessons from him and must have passed everything on to Lonato’s servants.

Flayn, of course, was in heaven. And she got along quite well with Ashe’s siblings, as despite her insistence she was roughly the same age as the typical student they, like Hedwig and Pascal, were closer to her in terms of maturity.

Vual, much to everybody’s surprise, was quite an animated conversationalist during the meal, with a genuine smile that lit up his face as he spoke with Ashe’s siblings. A few of the students seemed bemused by his behavior; Edelgard had to admit that it didn’t, in her opinion, seem to be a very Seteth-like way to behave. When not conversing with Jasper and Laura, he all but doted on Ingrid.

“My, my, Seteth,” Manuela said after dinner while their empty plates and bowls were whisked away. “You’re so gregarious tonight—and on only one glass of wine! I’ve never seen this side of you before,” she added, leaning closer to him to better flaunt her assets with a flirtatious come-hither look in her eyes.

Flustered, Vual seemed to finally realize he’d been acting a little out-of-character. “What can I say? It is rare that Flayn and I share a meal like this with such good company.”

“Well, perhaps I need to invite you to more dinners, then,” Manuela said, lazily sipping the last sips of her third glass of wine. “Now that I know what a lightweight you are.”

“If I am not too busy, perhaps,” Vual said, excusing himself.

After everyone had retired to their rooms for the night, Edelgard took Vual aside and met with him in her guest room.

“I’m worried your performance tonight may have been a bit… out of character,” she confessed to him.

“I understand,” he said, chuckling and shaking his head. “I simply could not help myself. Ashe spoke so fondly of his brother and sister; I have been looking forward to meeting them myself for over three hundred years now.”

“And Ingrid? You seem to be spending a lot of time around her. I’ve never known Seteth to play favorites.”

“Were you aware that Ashe named one of his daughters after her? He and his wife had originally agreed to name her after her grandmother, but when he saw the baby’s golden hair, he fell to his knees and begged.”

“Were you there?”

“I was. I was godfather to her and one of his sons, in fact.” He was smiling. “It must seem strange to you that this town holds such memories for me.”

“All the more reason to foil the enemy’s plans here, then,” Edelgard said to him. “I hope Dedue doesn’t start suspecting that something is afoot from this.”

“It would be a shame,” he said. “Dedue is a good man and a good friend… but as long as we are working at cross purposes, we must be careful around him.” He opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the hall. “Sleep well, Lady Edelgard. Tomorrow we go ghost-hunting.”

Edelgard closed the door on his back and started getting ready for bed. She’d only just slipped into her pajamas, though, when there was another knock on her door.

She opened it and found Hubert standing before her. “Hubert,” she said, “is there something you need to tell me?”

“Yes, Lady Edelgard.” He knelt before her, bowing his head. “I beg of you, please forgive me.”

She was nonplussed. “What do I have to forgive you for?”

“For speaking out against you and shirking in my duties as your retainer. It was wrong of me to snap at you. Whether I like it or not, you are Lady Edelgard, and it is my place to serve you and do as you command.” He took a shallow breath and let it out just as quickly. It was clear he’d been holding in his words for days, perhaps, waiting for the courage to say them to come to him. “No matter the circumstances, my behavior was unconscionable. I ask that you forgive me, and from this point on, I shall serve you to the ends of Fódlan.”

“Hubert, stand up.”

He lifted his head, looking for all the world like a confused puppy. “I… do not follow.”

“Stand _up,_ Hubert. You have no need to grovel.” She offered him her hand, and when he took it she pulled him to his feet. “You told me something I needed to hear. You are absolutely right; if anything, _I_ need _your_ forgiveness.”

Hubert’s shoulders slumped, as though his body was rebelling against the fact that he was a foot taller than her. “Lady Edelgard, that is simply ridiculous.”

“I hardly think so,” she said. “Stand up straight. So, do tell me, what brought on this change of heart?”

“Those few days you spent away from the monastery… I began to worry,” he said sheepishly, “that a sudden storm may spring up and put you in danger.”

“And would you have stopped the storm?”

“Or perhaps you could have been waylaid by bandits or worse. I began to fear I’d made some horrible mistake by leaving your side. As well,” he added, “Ferdinand took notice of our… separation and began to ask questions. Since I could not, of course, reveal your circumstances, he…”

“…Demanded that you prostrate yourself before me and beg for forgiveness?”

“Not in such dramatic language,” Hubert said, “but yes, he was quite irate. And on top of that, what example have I been setting for my younger sister?”

“I didn’t think you got along.”

“I do not; I find her annoying. But still, my father aside, family is still family. And my eldest brother Martel would be ashamed if he knew of my attitude—”

 _“Enough_ of that, Hubert.” Edelgard sighed and let Hubert into the guest bedroom so the two of them could converse in more privacy than the hallway allowed. “If anything, you deserve an apology from me,” she said, closing the door behind the both of them. “I can hardly blame you for being disgusted that I would shape you to be more like your counterpart.”

Hubert’s cheeks turned red. “I am sure the other Hubert is a good man in his own way,” he mumbled.

“My Hubert is a man who has suffered and lost more than I hope you ever do,” Edelgard told him. “That hardship shaped him into the man who could do whatever I needed of him. I cannot ask you to fulfill the same responsibilities, and I’m sorry that my doing so has damaged your faith. As for my own actions here and my disregard for your Edelgard’s life, I do feel… sorry. Unfortunately, things have gone too far for me to back down.”

Hubert was silent for a moment, then furrowed his brow. “Lady Edelgard… what have you done now?”

“Those Who Slither in the Dark believe that I have been killed and replaced by another agent, just as Kronya replaced Glenn and Solon replaced Tomas.”

She watched Hubert’s face fall. It collapsed slowly, like a calving glacier.

“Now they believe I am one of them,” she added. “And accordingly, I must see to it not to arouse their suspicions. That was why I had to… pretend to let Hapi die.”

“Pretend? So she is not dead?”

Edelgard nodded.

“Lady Edelgard…” Hubert hung his head. “So your situation has worsened. You are being called to do wicked things. And it is because of an assassin they sent for you, whom they believe succeeded… My failure, then, is worse than I could have imagined.”

“Don’t think of it that way. This was a tactical decision. I’m now privy to their plans. This can help us stop them and find a way to send me home.”

“But what if you cannot trick them the next time they order you to commit some heinous deed?”

“I know it is perilous, and I know it is wrong of me to endanger your Edelgard, but I have no choice. My situation demands actions I wouldn’t want to do otherwise, but I must. I’m sorry that I placed myself in this situation to begin with, but that is in the past. I wish things were different, but it has to be this way.”

“I understand.” He nodded. “I should not thank you for apologizing. You have every right to make your own choices; I am not your adviser or your brother, but your humble servant. But I do thank you for your sympathy toward your counterpart. Thank you for understanding.” He bowed to her and turned his back on her, reaching for the doorknob.

“One more thing, Hubert.”

He stopped and looked over his shoulder. “Yes, Lady Edelgard?”

“Your counterpart… has always had difficulty being honest to me. If he disagrees with a course of action I wish to take, he isn’t above subverting my will behind my back, but won’t dare criticize me to my face. I’ve been telling him for years that he need not mince words with me, but he still struggles to express himself. I’m glad you have no such compunctions. In some ways I believe you to be a better man than him—or at least a more mature one.”

Hubert smiled. “To hear such a compliment from you, Lady Edelgard, is an honor among honors.”

* * *

The next morning the Blue Lions set out for Castle Gaspard, all armed and armored. The castle loomed over them, lonely and silent as a tomb. No banners were unfurled over its ramparts, no signs of life save for roosting birds graced its grounds. Edelgard wondered what would happen to the castle. For now, it was abandoned, bereft of its lord; a microcosm of Gaspard territory itself. Over dinner, Jasper and Laura had revealed that in the absence of any living remnants of House Gaspard fit to inherit the house (while the two of them were slated to come into House Gaspard when they came of age, as stipulated in Lonato’s will, that was still about four years away), Count Rowe had gained temporary control over the territory and managed it from Arianrhod, occasionally sending knights from Rowe county to deal with problems that sprang up. The land was as headless now as the house that ruled it.

Venturing through the gatehouse and into the dead and snow-covered courtyard, hearing nothing but silence save for the crunch of snow under her classmates’ boots, it was actually quite easy to believe, if Edelgard had been the superstitious type, that the castle might have been haunted.

“I really hope the Death Knight is here, no matter what the kids say,” Manuela said, grimacing and clutching her side. “This wound aches terribly sometimes. I want him to pay for putting such an ugly scar on my beautiful skin!”

“I have the strangest urge,” Sylvain quipped, “to say something like, ‘Alright, gang, let’s split up and look for clues.’”

Byleth nodded. “We can cover more ground that way. Good idea, Sylvain. Professor Manuela, you take half of the class and search the east wing, I’ll take the other half and search the west wing.”

Manuela eyed Raphael and Ignatz. “Professor, do you mind if I temporarily take back the students you stole from me?”

“Not at all.”

“Lady Edelgard and I shall search the basement,” Vual said.

Byleth arched her eyebrows, concerned. “Just the two of you?”

“It’s less ground to cover,” Edelgard said. “I believe we will be sufficient.” Hubert gave her a concerned look, but didn’t offer to join her; he knew what she and Vual were doing and knew he couldn’t be a part of it.

“Are you sure, Seteth?” Manuela asked. “Your leg has healed up marvelously, but if you run into trouble…”

“I trust Lady Edelgard to protect me,” Vual said.

“Oh, alright. Just don’t put any more scars on that handsome face of yours!” Manuela chided him with a wag of her finger. “The eyepatch is quite enough.”

The class split into three groups and went their separate ways. Byleth led Dimitri, Dedue, Felix, Ingrid, and Annette to the west wing; Manuela led Ignatz, Raphael, Hubert, Sylvain, and Bernadetta to the east; and Vual and Edelgard descended into the castle’s depths.

Edelgard couldn’t say she relished the thought of venturing into a castle’s deepest bowels, especially not its dungeons—but what awaited her and Vual were not the typical dark and stifling corridors she had expected.

They hadn’t gotten far before a pair of guards in black robes and beaked facemasks appeared out of the shadows to stop them. Vual stepped forward and dropped his disguise, trading Seteth’s emerald locks for a feathery ice-blue mane and his warm complexion for ashen white flesh and blank white eyes. The mages, knowing he was one of them, did not impede him in the slightest and allowed him to lead Edelgard past them. She left her axe propped up against the wall and he left his spear.

Beyond the posted guards lay the castle’s dungeons and cellars. Those Who Slither in the Dark had turned them into a bright and almost impossibly clean place. The walls and floor were just about scrubbed clean. There wasn’t a rat or any other kind of vermin to be seen. Long, thin lanterns embedded in the ceilings hummed as they shone with a light nearly as bright and as white as the midday sun, and wires branched out from them and ran across the ceiling and down the walls. Machinery Edelgard couldn’t even begin to fathom the purpose of, esoteric devices of burnished steel and copper coils and multicolored wires, purred in odd, thrumming resonances that rattled her bones. Many of the basement’s walls had been knocked down to create a wide-open expanse, at the center of which was a massive ring exactly identical to the one that had stood in the facility underneath Remire. Neat and bold yellow lines had been painted around many of the machines, including the ring, and none of the mages milling about the floor seemed willing to step over them.

“Ah, the production floor,” Vual muttered under his breath. “It almost makes me homesick.”

One of the personnel standing in the middle of the room was unmasked and wore a wide-brimmed, peaked hat pulled down low across his brow. Edelgard recognized Myson instantly—and, sending a chill up her spine, he recognized her.

“Vual. Vepar.” Myson approached with a sneer on his face, the hem of his ornate and feathered warlock’s cloak swirling around his ankles. “What a… welcome surprise. What brings you down here?”

“We need to observe the status of the project,” Vual said, his tone of voice calm and collected.

“I don’t recall Thales requesting your observation.” Myson tipped up the brim of his peaked hat and glared suspiciously at them, his beady black eyes narrowing at them and his brow furrowing.

“Extenuating circumstances prompted an impromptu visit,” Edelgard spoke up, keeping her own voice level and her tone diplomatic.

“Whoa there. No need to talk like a princess down here, lady,” Myson chuckled. “You can take that disgusting mask off, too.”

“She finds it helps to stay in character whenever possible,” Vual said.

“The idea of us coming unannounced doesn’t bother you, does it, Myson?” Edelgard asked, turning the tables. “I do hope there isn’t something down here you’re trying to… _hide_ from Thales.”

Myson’s face couldn’t have turned any whiter, but somehow it did. Beads of sweat dotted his brow. “Of… course not. He knows we are progressing on schedule. We have nothing to hide.”

“Cost overruns, delays, unexpected setbacks… all natural things,” Vual said, joining in with Edelgard and increasing the pressure on him. “Nothing to be ashamed of. Be honest with us and we’ll see to it Thales gets a favorable report.”

Beads of sweat dotted Myson’s brow. “Thales is… well aware that our linear accelerator needs a new plasma window. A replacement has been salvaged from Shambhala and is on its way. But he doesn’t know our compact tokamak is at one-fifth efficiency. We’re running on batteries right now. We’ll have it fixed ourselves by the end of the week—just keep mum about it.”

Vual nodded and raised a finger to his lips.

“So,” Myson said with a smile he couldn’t help but make look extremely wicked, “how would you two like the grand tour of the production floor? As I recall, Vual, you weren’t able to see the Remire facility before…” He stuck out his tongue and blew a raspberry.

“No; unfortunately, my duties at Garreg Mach kept me far, _far_ away. Please, do show us around. Spare no detail.”

Myson happily obliged to show Vual and Edelgard every single inch of their facility, showing off his familiarity with the facility by turning around to face them and walking backward through it.

“You’re really selling your character, Your Highness,” Myson sneered at her. “You look _just_ like one of those dumb apes would if they caught a glimpse of Shambhalan techology.”

Edelgard collected herself. “Like Vual said, it helps to remain in character whenever possible.”

He sighed. “I’ll never understand you method actors.”

“I do have a question, though,” she said. “I’m no scientist, but there is something I’ve been curious about. I have heard that it is possible to transmit one’s consciousness from one timeline to another. Is that true? And…” She gestured toward the ring. “Can it be done with something like that?”

“Hmm… I’d tell you to ask Solon if he hadn’t gotten his idiot savant self killed last month. He was the expert in alternate timelines. It is possible, but our system here isn’t designed for it.”

“Is there a system that is?”

Myson arched his eyebrows. “Curious, aren’t you?” he asked with a sly smile. “There were prototypes in Research Facility Epsilon, but I don’t know if they ever worked. That site hasn’t been accessible since the Fell Star Wars anyway. I don’t even know if it still exists.”

Edelgard could have sworn she’d heard that facility’s moniker before. Hadn’t that been the place Claude and Hilda had found in the Almyran desert? She would have to question Hilda about it when she returned to the monastery… if she could get herself back on speaking terms with her.

A black-cloaked mage interrupted Myson’s tour. “Sir, we have a problem. Intruders in the castle.”

“Fucking pieces of shit. Where are they?”

“Searching the upper levels now.”

“It’s the Blue Lions class,” Edelgard said. “His Majesty insisted on investigating the castle’s ‘ghosts.’ Dedue and the two of us are seeing to it they don’t reach the basement.”

Myson rolled his eyes. “I’ll need more than a mud person’s assurance of that.” He turned to the mage. “Activate and send up the Death Knight. Let it deal with our rat problem. Exterminate them.”

The mage nodded and hurried off.

“The Death Knight?” Vual gasped. “The Death Knight is _here?”_

“Where else would it be? This is the most sensitive site outside of Shambhala itself. It must be protected at all costs.”

“Turning the Death Knight on the class will only reveal our presence to them,” Edelgard said, feeling a leaden lump form in her stomach. Her guts twisted around it like a knot of writhing snakes.

“Not if we kill them,” Myson sneered.

“You can’t kill Dimitri,” she said.

“We won’t have to. He’ll be a useless, blubbering wreck once we dispose of his friends. They’ll just think he’s gone mad again and lock him up in some asylum. And good riddance; we don’t need him anyway.”

“You cannot do this,” Vual said.

“Don’t let your disguises get to your heads,” Myson shot back. “You two may be the church’s second-in-command and a princess of Adrestia now, but you have no jurisdiction here.”

“Thales will know.”

“He will know I did the right thing to protect this site. Maybe he’ll even give me a medal.”

Another mage approached Myson. “Sir, Thales will be expecting another tidal surge this afternoon. We need to divert power to the gate.”

Myson rolled his eyes again and let out an aggrieved sigh. “I’ll head to the back room and override the power grid. You two—” He pointed to Edelgard and Vual— “Don’t touch anything. Don’t go outside the yellow lines on the floor. So much as trip over a wire and I’ll have your fucking guts for garters. Got it?”

They both nodded, and Myson hurried off with the mage and vanished into a side room on the other side of the production floor.

 _“We need to destroy this place,”_ Vual whispered to Edelgard. _“Immediately. I think I know where they keep the semtex. We’ll plant it, set it on a timer, and evacuate the class before the Death Knight catches up with them.”_

Edelgard glanced at the ring—what Myson had called the ‘gate.’ _“If the facility explodes at random, they’ll expect foul play. What if we made it seem as though the gate’s activation caused the explosion?”_

_“Good thinking. We’ll have to time the explosion to the test. Come with me.”_

Edelgard followed Vual across the production floor to a gated-off area made from one of the dungeon’s cells. With every step she took, she could feel the Death Knight drawing closer to her classmates. Would Mercedes still pull her punches this time, now that she was explicitly under orders to kill?

They reached the gate, only for one of the mages on duty to step in front of them. “Excuse me—this is a restricted area.”

“We have permission to be here,” Vual said. “We need to inspect the explosives for any visible signs of deterioration just in case you need to self-destruct the facility.”

The mage crossed his arms and peered skeptically down the long nose of his beaked facemask at him. “Thales sent you?”

“Thales sent us,” Edelgard said, nodding.

“I haven’t heard anything about explosives inspection.”

“It’s a surprise inspection,” Vual said. “You’re not meant to hear about them in advance.”

“Hmm… I’ll have to clear it with Myson first.”

“We don’t have time for that,” Edelgard snapped, “you purulent idiot! The Death Knight has been mobilized.”

“This facility may be discovered, and if it _is,_ we need to be certain that your self-destruct procedure is in working order _now,”_ Vual added. “Clear it with Myson if you want, but he is quite busy and I doubt he will appreciate being interrupted in the middle of tidal surge preparations. Do you honestly think that _this_ is time for the chain of command?”

That seemed to strike fear into the mage’s heart, and he produced a keyring and opened the gate to the cell. “Very well, sir. I’ll see to it he knows you requested it,” he said, ushering them through.

“Well, don’t hover over our shoulders,” Edelgard snapped at him, and he left the keys with her and scurried off. “This is delicate work!”

The mage left them alone as they settled amid the explosives. Edelgard was accustomed to black-powder explosive barrels—the Empire had almost exclusively made use of them during the war, as the Church of Seiros forbade the production of black powder as a heretical replacement for fire magic, and the church had only broken its own prohibition once near the end of the war out of desperation—but the cache she and Vual found was nothing like them.

What Vual called ‘semtex’ was a brick of a red-orange substance that looked as soft as molding clay or cheese. There were over a dozen of the bricks in the cell, along with a collection of small metal devices with tiny clocks and dials on them. Wires protruded from them, capped with tiny oblong metal cylinders.

“These blasting caps,” Vual explained, rifling through the tiny devices, “are the triggers for the explosives.”

“Like the fuse to a barrel of black powder,” Edelgard surmised.

“Exactly. The plastic explosive itself is completely inert until a powerful shockwave detonates it. You could play football with one and not set it off.” Vual picked up one of the bricks, hefted it in his hand, and casually tossed it to her.

Recalling how gingerly her soldiers had handled black powder, Edelgard’s heart hammered against the inside of her breastplate as she caught and fumbled with the brick. Her pulse raced and gradually slowed as it sat in her hands, inert. She noted it smelled almost exactly like marzipan, which somehow just made her feel even more ill at ease. Black powder had a metallic, sulfurous odor that at least warned people that it wasn’t safe. The idea that an explosive would smell like _food_ was disturbing.

“What you’re holding is very rare. These bricks may be half of the entire supply of plastic explosive on the planet. Shambhala doesn’t have the capability to synthesize it in mass quantities yet.”

The way he said _yet_ unnerved her. “So those devices are explosives as well?” she asked him, observing with unease the blasting caps he was examining.

“Yes, but _they_ will not reduce your internal organs to a fine pulp. You won’t even lose a finger,” he said, wriggling the metal stumps of the two severed fingers on his mechanical left hand. He appraised one of the devices like a jeweler appraising a diamond.

Myson’s voice carried across the facility. It was amplified tenfold; there was a tinny and metallic ring to his projected voice as though it was coming from a larger version of Vual’s radio. _“Trial Lorentzian bridge generation in T-minus thirty minutes! Power down all non-essential systems!”_ he barked. The lights overhead dimmed to a dull amber and then turned blood-red, casting the entire dungeon in ghoulish red-and-black chiaroscuro.

“I’ll set the bombs to Myson’s countdown,” Vual said to Edelgard. He took the semtex brick from her and squeezed it, leaving imprints of his fingertips on the brick’s surface. “This much materiel should lay waste to everything within the castle walls. Find the others and lead them out. With the Death Knight on their tail, I doubt they will want to do otherwise. I’ll be right behind you.”

Edelgard nodded and the two of them left the cell. Vual slipped the explosive and blasting cap under his cloak, and while his back was turned, Edelgard decided to take a brick and blasting cap of her own and hide it in her satchel, just in case it might come in handy later. She couldn’t let _all_ of this bounty of advanced technology go to waste, after all.

She hurried off of the production floor and into the dark corridors, leaving Vual to his work. The prospect that he might fail weighed heavily on her mind, but not as heavily as the prospect that today, the Death Knight would be playing for keeps.

“Hey,” one of the guards said to her as she took her axe up from where she’d left it and hurried past them, “weren’t there two of you?”

“I’ve got urgent business upstairs,” she huffed, not even sparing them a glance, “so fuck off, you troglodytes.”

That felt surprisingly good. She needed to find more excuses to curse. She wasn’t sure what a troglodyte was, but she recalled Kronya calling her and her friends that once or twice and assumed it was probably very insulting.

She found the cellar stairs and made her way to the great hall, then to the courtyard, and surveyed the area. Byleth’s team was in the west wing, Manuela’s in the east; but the Death Knight—the true, authentic Death Knight—could only be in one place at a time. Where was she now? Who was she pursuing? How could Edelgard collect both teams and evacuate them in under half an hour when they could be anywhere in the castle?

A lance of violet light tore through the east wing, bursting out of the inner wall and shooting across the courtyard with a deep and rumbling roar. The lance carved its way through the wall and angled its way through the roof, cutting through stone and wood like a hot knife through butter before dissipating. Stone crumbled away and the roof caved in on both sides of the partition.

That, at least, told her where the Death Knight was. At least Manuela was getting what she wanted.

Now, Edelgard figured, she needed to draw everyone out. The courtyard would be a good place to draw the class toward—all she needed was a signal.

She raised her hand, conjured a fireball, and launched a flare into the sky. It lit up with a blinding red glare in the sky just above the courtyard that for a few seconds turned the snow bright pink, visible from every inward-facing window in the castle.

Then a window in the east wing shattered and an indistinct black mass was thrown out of it, falling like a stone to the ground. The mass broke apart into two shapes—one, the Death Knight in her black and spiny armor, the underlayer beneath the segmented plating glowing fiercely violet; the other, Raphael, his armor singed and stained with ash and flecks of blood staining his golden hair. He lifted his gauntlets. “How’s that for a second helping? Oh, hey, Edelgard!”

Another two windows on the east wing shattered and Edelgard saw two bows, arrows nocked, protrude from each of them—Bernadetta and Ignatz. The Death Knight raised an arm to them, the crossbow-shaped device mounted on her armored forearm folding open and spitting violet sparks.

Edelgard struck at her back to distract her; before she could whirl around and turn on her, Raphael grabbed her arm and twisted it upward. The shot went wide and another lance of violet light tore through the air, moving in a slow and ponderous arc as the Death Knight struggled to wrest control of her arm from him. The lance, sharper than any blade, cut a horizontal line through the castle keep; the wall slowly began to slough off, stone grinding against stone.

The Death Knight’s crossbow split apart and reformed into a wicked scythe; with one fell swoop and an arc of scarlet blood she pushed Raphael back. He stumbled, a hand pressed to his gut as blood spurted from a smoldering gash in his breastplate.

“Your end has come,” the Death Knight intoned, breathing in heavy rasps. “I am no longer here to toy with you, as I once was.”

“Too bad… you’re great at it!” Raphael grunted, backing away as Bernadetta and Ignatz shot at the Death Knight. The arrows bounced off her armor.

Edelgard struck at the Death Knight again to distract her, the head of her axe reverberating against the haft of her scythe and rattling her bones. She forced the scythe down and planted her boot against the flat of the blade, pinning it down. She felt the Death Knight’s inhuman strength struggle to overcome the downward force and felt her own strength start to give out. In one motion, she took one hand off the haft of her axe and hurled a fireball at the Death Knight’s face.

The Death Knight reeled back, her gauntleted hands losing their grip on the scythe and allowing Edelgard to wrench it away from her.

 _“Lady Edelgard!”_ Hubert’s voice rang out across the courtyard as he and the rest of Manuela’s half of the class came running from the great hall.

The Death Knight retreated, gliding backward across the snow in a wide arc and putting a healthy distance between herself and her prey as Manuela rushed to tend to Raphael’s wound.

“Listen… you’re a big guy,” Raphael called out to the Death Knight as she recovered her momentum and her arc changed to bring her closer. “How about you take off that armor and come join us? Caspar and I’d love you as a sparring partner.”

“I am sorry. But there are things we all must do,” the Death Knight said, orbs of black miasma coalescing in her hands. “I must fight… and you must die.”

A fireball exploded on her shoulder, knocking her off-course and forcing her to stumble; a blossom of ice burst open in the same spot a moment later, putting deep cracks in the black armor plating. Edelgard grinned. Hubert still remembered that strategy from Remire, and it seemed he’d filled Sylvain in.

Edelgard tossed aside her axe and grabbed the scythe, rushing toward the enemy. The scythe felt like no weapon she’d ever wielded before—its head was heavy, but far lighter than she’d expected, and the haft was neither wood nor metal. She closed in on the Death Knight and struck her in the shoulder, shattering the damaged pauldron. A gash formed in the strange crystalline underlayer, spitting out a shower of sparks. It seemed this scythe was the only weapon she’d encountered so far that was strong enough to damage it.

The Death Knight let out an anguished roar and retreated further.

“Keep going,” Edelgard told her, knowing she’d just wounded a dear friend. “Leave this place. Whatever you’re here to protect is not worth your life.”

“Oh, but it is worth _yours,”_ the Death Knight said. “All of yours and more. I’m sorry, but I have no choice but to kill any who intrude on this place.”

A long dagger burst from her armored forearm and buried itself in Edelgard’s shoulder. The intense, jaw-clenching pain—so bad it made her want to vomit; it must have been a poisoned blade—was enough to make her drop the scythe, and the Death Knight snatched it up, folded it in on itself, and reaffixed it to her arm. The next thing Edelgard knew, she was staring at the Death Knight’s armored fist while the crossbow affixed to her arm began to glow with a violet-white light. At point-blank range, the light consumed her vision.

 _“Death Knight, stop!”_ Dimitri bellowed. A window shattered. Stone crumbled. Armor crumpled against an iron fist. The Death Knight was thrown to the side, her heavy boots stomping on the ground as she stumbled and staggered; her shot went wide and burned a hole in the ramparts.

Dimitri curled his arm around Edelgard’s waist while she pressed a hand to her shoulder to staunch the bleeding. “Death Knight,” he commanded, “I am Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd of the Kingdom of Faerghus! I order you to stop this attack!”

“I’m sorry, Your Majesty,” the Death Knight said, “but I mustn’t.”

Two arrows burrowed in the gash Edelgard had made in the glowing armor layer—what incredible eyes Bernadetta and Ignatz had!—and found flesh to bury themselves in. The Death Knight shot another lance from her crossbow, targeting the snipers; the bows retracted as Bernadetta and Ignatz beat a hasty retreat, and the wall exploded in a shower of stone and dust a moment later.

“El, are you alright?” Dimitri asked, propping Edelgard up against her.

The pain was great enough that Edelgard found herself seeing through a haze. Her vision doubled. For a moment, she saw two Death Knights closing in on two Huberts. “We need to get out. This castle… is going to be destroyed… in less than half an hour…” she gasped, spitting the words through gritted teeth.

The rest of Byleth’s class must have found their way down to the courtyard, because Edelgard felt Ingrid’s hands pull her away from Dimitri, and Byleth’s voice ring in her ears, _“Where is she hurt, Dimitri?”_ She felt Byleth’s hand take her by the wrist and open up the wound in her shoulder—the open air made it burn twice as hot—and a charge of soothing healing magic run through it.

 _“Byleth,”_ she gasped, nearly delirious for a moment. The pain still throbbed in her bloodstream, but was significantly lessened. Still, though, the heat burrowed into her brain and throbbed in tune with the rapid beat of her heart. The poison was still within her, working through her veins; her legs were going numb.

“Flank and corner him,” Byleth ordered her students. “Don’t let him get away!”

The courtyard became the most one-sided battlefield Edelgard had ever seen, with the foe outnumbered over ten to one. But the Death Knight, though injured, was still swifter and stronger than any of the Blue Lions and, as she had said, she was no longer toying with them. Sylvain was struck in the side and thrown to the ground, blood spewing in a crimson spray from a gash in his armor; Hubert narrowly parried the Death Knight’s scythe with his lance and barely managed to avoid one of her hidden blades; Ingrid struck at the Death Knight with a mighty blow, crumpling her breastplate, but wasn’t fast enough to duck under a swing of her scythe—if Dedue hadn’t been near her and hadn’t been able to grab her by the scruff of the neck and yank her back, she would have lost her head.

The Sword of the Creator cut through the air, its segmented blade blazing like serpentine fire, and struck the Death Knight again in the chest. The Death Knight grabbed the end of the blade with both hands, the permanent grin on her death’s-head mask seeming to grow even wider and more sinister, and bolts of black and violet lightning crawled swiftly up the blade and into Byleth’s hands, exploding in her face and throwing her clear across the courtyard.

The Death Knight was panting now, huffing and puffing, the voice modulation device in her helmet turning her gasps for breath into sinister death rattles. The Blue Lions had to be wearing her down, Edelgard thought. She’d never exhibited this much stamina before. She had to be reaching her limit…

Edelgard felt Dimitri rush her across the battlefield to Manuela, who was up to her elbows in triage; Annette and Hubert had managed to drag Sylvain over to her.

“Professor,” Dimitri breathed, panting, “El is…”

“Is she dying?” Manuela snapped, pressing bloody hands to the wound in Sylvain’s side and wreathing them in a healing glow. She was as ragged and disheveled as anyone else, blood trickling down her forehead from a wound in her scalp that had turned her graying mousy-brown hair dark red in places.

“The wound’s healed,” Edelgard said. “But the poison…”

“I’ve got antitoxin in my bag,” Manuela said to Annette. “Be a dear and…”

“Yes, ma’am!” Annette said, rummaging through the bag and tossing a glass vial filled with pale violet liquid into Dimitri’s hand. Loath to be holding such a delicate thing, he handed it off to Edelgard and let her pop off the cork and pour it down her throat. Within seconds, the last of the pain faded to a dull throb and her head cleared, the strength returning to her legs.

“Thank you, Professor,” she said.

“Just doing my job. Where’s Seteth?”

“I thought he was right behind me. We turned around and came back up as soon as we figured out the Death Knight was coming for you.” Edelgard took a deep breath. “Get everyone out of the castle. It’s dangerous here.”

 _“Everybody out of the castle!”_ Dimitri shouted out, his voice ringing over the tumult of battle. _“Retreat!”_

Across the courtyard, the Death Knight escaped from Ingrid and Dedue and made a beeline for the triage team. “I’m on it!” Annette shouted out, conjuring a blade-sharp gale of wind and hurling it at the Death Knight to slow her down and let the others catch up.

“Dimitri, be a dear and help me with Sylvain and Raphael,” Manuela said, lifting Sylvain to his feet.

“What about your revenge, Professor?” Sylvain muttered weakly, mustering a pained smirk.

“Oh, I got a solid hit on him. That’s plenty revenge for me. Besides, if I die here, Hanneman will probably conduct a séance and summon my spirit just so he can say he told me so one last time.”

As Manuela and Dimitri made for the gatehouse with Sylvain and Raphael, Edelgard tested her arm. Her shoulder still ached terribly, but the arm could move. “Hubert, we need to clear a path for the others,” she said.

Hubert took up his lance and conjured a coating of magical ice around its blade, glistening frost creeping up its haft and coating his gloves. “As you wish, Lady Edelgard. Assuming you can still make fire, I strike on your command.”

She and Hubert charged in, forcing the Death Knight back as the others began their retreat. Fire and ice caused more and more damage to the Death Knight’s black armor plating, cracking the lustrous obsidian-colored steel and shattering the complex network of segmented armor plates as one might crack the shell of a boiled lobster.

The chaos of the battlefield did not lessen, no matter how many combatants had exited it. The Death Knight was keeping her distance now, staying well out of melee range and resorting exclusively to magic attacks that tore through the castle’s crumbling ramparts. Ignatz and Bernadetta rushed out of the castle, turning to fire a few last parting shots at the Death Knight as they reached Byleth and helped her out.

A sharp bolt of blue lightning tore through the air and struck her on the chest. Arcs of electricity coursed across her armor, leaping across the gaps in the spiny black outer layer and crawling across the luminous inner layer. The Death Knight jerked and spasmed, momentarily immobilized long enough for Felix to dart in and drive a saber through the gap in her shoulder armor. Blood spilled down the edge of the blade.

Annette pumped her fist in the air. _“Alright, Felix! You did it!”_ she crowed. Evidently, he’d had plenty of trouble mastering Thoron.

The Death Knight, wounded and winded, swatted Felix aside with a heavy gauntlet as the luminous inner layer of her armor turned dull and gray and her segmented armor began to seal itself up. She seemed to shrink at least a foot as the armor compacted.

“Now’s our chance!” Edelgard called out to Hubert, Annette, and Felix. “Everyone, to the gate!”

“Wait—what about Seteth?” Annette asked.

“He’s right behind us,” Edelgard said, though she wasn’t sure he was anymore. What if something had happened to him? Had Myson caught him planting the semtex? Had his cover been blown? Had _hers?_

“I’m not leaving until the Death Knight is defeated,” Felix said, drawing a second saber from his hip and wiping blood from a split lip on his knuckle. “He’s humiliated me once enough. I’m taking him down.”

The Death Knight chuckled—or was it more of a _giggle?_ “That’s cute,” she said in her impossibly deep modulated voice. “I’ve humiliated you many more times than that, Felix.”

“Who cares? Felix, let’s go!” Annette protested.

Felix didn’t listen. Instead, he beat the Death Knight back with a flurry of quick, savage slashes of his blade, scoring the Death Knight’s weakened armor. “Come on! Is this the best you can do now, Death Knight? You’re boring me!”

The Death Knight backed away and summoned a cloud of dark spikes and hurled them at him, but he nimbly dodged every single one of them. Those dancing lessons really _had_ made him more agile. He followed up by striking her with another blast of lighting, momentarily paralyzing her again and giving him an opening to draw her back in.

His sword split her breastplate, revealing underneath, married to the armor’s inner layer, the unmistakable glint of a Hero’s Relic. Set in gold inlaid with sapphires and bronze was a Crest Stone that bore the Crest of Lamine—Mercedes’ Crest. The Rafail Gem, relic of the ancient hero Lamine, had been incorporated permanently into the Death Knight’s armor.

“A Hero’s Relic?” Felix gasped, shocked. “What the fuck are you?”

The Death Knight took advantage of his confusion to grab him by the throat. Before she could squeeze, he cast another thunder spell and sent an arc of lightning through her wrist, forcing her hand open long enough for him to rip the saber in her shoulder free and beat a hasty retreat.

Edelgard and Hubert leaped into action and struck the Death Knight with magic, forcing her back and giving Annette and Felix a chance to turn tail. With every flurry of bitter cold ice and searing flame that struck the Death Knight’s battered armor, the Rafail Gem glowed as though it were feeding on the magic and drawing it away from the armor’s wearer. The Death Knight, of course, continued to leer with its forged-in-iron grin. She had to be running on fumes now, but she was still indomitable.

As she held the Death Knight back, Edelgard glanced at the gatehouse for just a split second. “Hubert,” she said, “the gatehouse… if we can get on the other side and drop the portcullis, we might be able to delay the Death Knight long enough…”

“Long enough for what, dare I ask?” he asked.

“For the explosives in the dungeon to ignite and bring the entire castle down.”

“Explosives? Like what the Almyrans use? But Seteth…”

“I know.” Edelgard hated to suggest abandoning Vual, but she and Hubert were on their last legs. The Death Knight was stronger now than she’d been at Remire, and even in her weakened state she was winning a war of attrition.

“We cannot!” he protested.

Edelgard sighed. She’d forgotten, too, that Hubert didn’t know about Vual.

A spike of dark magic tore through Hubert’s side, lodging itself between his ribs and bursting in a shower of sparks. Hubert dropped to his knees, his face wrenched in agony, so anguished that he could not even scream in pain. As he fell, Edelgard grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him back up to his feet, dragging him back.

“Make your peace,” the Death Knight said, bearing down on them. “Your fate was to die the moment you set foot in here, and my fate was to kill you. There is nothing any of us can do about that.”

“Leave me, Lady Edelgard,” Hubert gasped as Edelgard carried him away. “Save yourself… You carry on your shoulders the lives of two Edelgards… I only carry one.” Blood spilled from his mouth; his eyes were hazy and unfocused.

“Never,” Edelgard hissed as the Death Knight pursued her. “There are some lives I can’t sacrifice, Hubert.” She entered the gatehouse and looked to the mechanism that raised and lowered the portcullis. The Death Knight continued to advance.

When Edelgard had just barely crossed the line where the portcullis came down, her legs gave out and she collapsed in a heap with Hubert on top of her. The Death Knight closed in on her.

A taut rope tied to a toothed wooden pulley and hand crank kept the portcullis up; Edelgard hurled a fireball at the rope and severed it, sending down the heavy wrought-iron grating suspended above the entrance between the jambs.

The Death Knight caught the spiked bottom of the portcullis in her hands before it could hit the ground and, her arms and legs buckling from the strain, lifted it over her head and stepped across the threshold, letting it slam on the ground with a deafening thud safely behind her.

Edelgard felt Dimitri and Ingrid rush to her side and grab her and Hubert and drag them away. The Death Knight pressed on, slowed considerably but still single-mindedly pursuing her targets—

 _“Get lost!”_ Annette shouted out, barreling forward with gleaming gauntlets strapped to her fists and leaping over Edelgard and Hubert. She struck the Death Knight in the face, razor gusts of wind circling her gauntlets and cutting through the steel death’s-head. The metal skull split and flew apart; the Death Knight’s back slammed against the portcullis and rattled the heavy wrought-iron lattice as she slumped to the ground.

 _“Woo! Alright, Annette!”_ Raphael cried out, clapping.

Annette, Dimitri, and Ingrid pulled Edelgard and Hubert the rest of the way out of the gatehouse, hurriedly dragging the two of them out of the castle and into the field where the rest of the class was waiting. Byleth and Manuela instantly seized on Hubert for emergency triage, while Ingrid and Dimitri dealt with Edelgard.

“El…” Dimitri gasped, panting. His pale face was beaded with sweat, his snow-white hair lank and damp. There was a dazed look in his icy blue eyes. “El…”

“Edelgard, are you alright?” Ingrid, slightly more lucid, asked her.

Annette let out an earsplitting scream that tore through the air.

The Death Knight had gotten back up and continued her inexorable march, now sans mask. At last, the face beneath the grinning death’s-head was fully visible.

Annette was first to see it, hence the scream. Everyone else saw it a second later.

Mercedes.

Her pale face was gaunt, her long white hair tied back and vanishing into her helmet. The dark gray crescent-moons under her violet eyes were darker and deeper than ever, hollow and sunken, and veins bulged on her brow, glowing constantly with the energy of an activated Crest. Her eyes were bloodshot and glassy, like a doll’s eyes. There was a blank look on her face, as though someone was wearing it as a mask itself.

“The end is nigh,” Mercedes said. Without the mask modulating her voice, she spoke her lines in the same breathy, soft voice she always had. “Make peace with—” She stopped, as though suddenly realizing that her voice and face were no longer disguised. Her brow furrowed. “Oh… Oh dear.”

Sylvain’s mouth traced the words _what the fuck_ but no sound came out.

“Mercedes…” Byleth gasped. “What are you doing here?”

A faint, bitter smile crossed Mercedes’ face. “I’m sorry, Professor. It’s just something I have to do.”

Annette let out another terrified, heartbroken wail. “Mercie,” she bawled, tears streaming down her cheeks as she stared at the gaunt and sickly face of her best friend, gaunter and sicklier than it had ever been. “Mercie, no… no, no, no, no, _no, no, no_ … please… _please_ tell me this is a sick joke or something… I… W-What d… What did Cornelia _do_ to you?”

“Annie…” Mercedes’ bitter smile curled into a frown. “Oh, Annie. I wish I could have told you.”

_“Why?”_

“We all have our fates. Mine is to be here. Mine is to be _this.”_ She fell to one knee, planting her hands on the ground to keep herself upright. The fiery glow faded from her veins. Her breathing became ragged, her chest and shoulders heaving, and blood trickled from both nostrils over her lip and down her chin. “It looks like… I’m spent. Even with the upgrades, I just couldn’t keep up with you all. You’ve taught our class so well, Professor. I don’t think I’m in any shape to kill any of you right now, not even Sylvain. I suppose I’ll have to go.”

“No, don’t!” Annette tried to run up to her, only for Dedue and Ingrid to hold her back. She kicked her feet impotently against the ground like a child throwing a tantrum, kicking up plumes of snow. “No! Mercie, I don’t want you to be the Death Knight! I want you to be my friend! Please, take that suit off and come back to us!”

Mercedes shook her head. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple. I can only live like this now. I’m too far gone… this suit of armor is the only thing keeping me alive. But, Annie… I will always be your friend, and I will always treasure you.” She held out her hand, a tentative smile crossing her sickly face. “If you come with me, maybe everything will be okay. We can bake sweets together and do each other’s hair and all sorts of things we used to do. Wouldn’t that be nice, Annie?”

Dedue and Ingrid kept holding Annette back. Annette shook her head wildly and vehemently. “No, no, no… no… this isn’t—this isn’t possible, Mercie, please tell me this isn’t possible! Please tell me that this is just pretend… you took a ghost story too far… just, please, for the love of the Goddess, Mercie, please…” Her voice gave out, but her mouth kept moving, her lips tracing wordless pleas.

“Mercedes,” Byleth said, laying a hand on Annette’s shoulder while the poor girl whimpered and sniffled, “we can protect you from Cornelia. Even if you’re trapped in that armor, you don’t have to serve her if you don’t want to.”

“Professor, dear, I wish I could believe that, but I’m afraid I know better,” Mercedes said.

“No, Mercedes, our professor is right,” Dimitri said to her, snapping out of his trance state. “Cornelia is an enemy to all of us. Come back to us. With your strength, we can defeat her together.”

She let out a laugh. “Oh, Dimitri. How you’ve grown; you don’t need your big sis Mercie anymore. I’m so proud of you.”

“Mercedes,” Edelgard added, “no one has their path in life chosen for them. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. Whatever is tethering you to this role you play—can you truly say that it is inescapable? Can you truly say you would rather be on its side than ours?”

“As wise as you can be, you’re surprisingly naive sometimes, Edelgard,” Mercedes said. She slowly turned her head from side to side, observing the whole class student by student. “My Blue Lions… you’ve all become so strong. I’m so, so proud of you all, my dear friends. But when we next meet, I’m going to kill every last one of you.” She smiled. “No hard feelings. It’s nothing personal. It’s just the way things have to be. Keep looking after the class for me, Edelgard.”

She vanished into a column of red light, leaving behind nothing but heavy bootprints in the snow.

 _“No!”_ Annette ripped herself free of her classmates’ protective grip and rushed to the spot where Mercedes had knelt a second ago, falling to her knees and sobbing. _“Mercie! Mercie, no! Mercie, please come back!”_

Annette wept unabated. Everyone else save for Edelgard and Byleth was too stunned to comfort her, so the two of them held her and gave her as warm an embrace as they could for her to cry into while the rest of the Blue Lions licked their wounds. A morose silence descended on the class as they all processed what they had witnessed.

“I can’t believe it,” Manuela muttered, dazed. “If… If I’d just put my foot down when Cornelia came to collect her… That’s what I should’ve done! I could’ve treated her just fine on my own without any help from that witch.” A dry sob wrenched itself from her throat. “Oh, Goddess… what have I done?”

No one answered her.

A few minutes later, a long rope fell over the parapet and down the castle wall; Vual slid down it to the ground, wincing and wringing his thoroughly-burned hands when he reached the bottom. He was back in his disguise as Seteth, of course, and there was a dark stain on his side.

 _“Seteth!”_ Manuela rushed to his side, galvanized into action. “Where have you been? What happened to you?”

“Oh, nothing, Professor Manuela,” he said, slipping easily back into Seteth’s clipped and no-nonsense tone. “I simply fell on a dagger. It is merely a flesh wound.”

“Well, let me see it,” she said, pulling back his cloak and rolling up his shirt to reveal a blossom of crimson on his undershirt.

“It is nothing,” he insisted, pushing her hands away and pulling his shirt back down. “Now, I think we should put a bit more distance between ourselves and this castle.”

Two horses and a pegasus carrying three young people raced to the scene, and Jasper, Laura, and Flayn dismounted.

“Brother!” Flayn scolded Vual. “This is why I wished for you to bring me with you!”

“Professor Byleth, Professor Manuela!” Laura exclaimed. “What happened here? We saw those strange lights…”

“Was it ghosts?” Jasper asked, trembling. “Were the ghosts real?”

“Oh, honey,” Manuela said as Flayn separated her from Vual. “It wasn’t a ghost. It was just the Death Knight.” Her casual tone of voice sounded especially fragile, the way it would when one of her romantic exploits blew up in her face and she would try to sound as though everything was fine. “Now why don’t we load the injured onto the horses and march back home?”

They did so, but the Blue Lions and Ashe’s family hadn’t gotten very far before the earth beneath their feet trembled and a deafening roar tore through the air. For a few seconds afterward, Edelgard could hear nothing but a high-pitched ringing in her ears, and when she turned around, she could see a thick plume of gray smoke billowing from Castle Gaspard as the castle keep, already destabilized from the battle, folded in on itself and collapsed. Debris fell from the air like stinging hail and a fog of dust settled on the snow.

Watching the billowing column of roiling smoke rise into the air, Edelgard thought about the brick of semtex in her satchel and felt a pang of awe and dread crawl up her spine.

* * *

The Blue Lions remained in Gaspard for a few days longer while those who had been dealt the worst injuries in the battle recuperated (just their luck, a snowstorm blew in the evening after the encounter with the Death Knight and deposited half a foot of snow over the town). When everyone was fit to travel again, the Blue Lions said farewell to their hosts and left for Garreg Mach, cutting southwest across the river through Arundel territory and then into the Oghma Mountains via the remnants of Remire. There was a strong north wind both days that turned the freshly fallen snow into a hail of icy needles; Vual, Ingrid, Flayn, and Dimitri flew low to the ground to keep the rest of the class in sight.

The skies became clear (though it was no less cold) when the Blue Lions reached Remire, promising an easy and uneventful final leg of their journey as the sun fell low in the sky at the traveler’s backs. Nothing remained of Remire still, but some brave and enterprising soul had constructed a lonely inn on the edge of the debris field. The inn, flanked by the woods that blanketed the foothills, was humble and small and didn’t seem like it had the space to comfortably hold the entire class, but it beat camping outside. The owner was a gregarious and fiery-haired merchant named Anna whom Edelgard could swear she’d seen in Garreg Mach’s marketplace.

While the travelers who’d flown stabled their pegasi and wyverns and the rest stabled their horses, Byleth went to speak with the inn’s owner about the whereabouts of Jeralt, who had stayed there after his expulsion from the monastery with the Blade Breakers for a short while.

“Far from ideal weather for flying,” Vual commented, rummaging in his saddlebags for spare blankets and offering one to a shivering Flayn and the other to Ingrid. “Take this. You two must be cold.”

“It’s fine, Seteth,” Ingrid said, pausing to blow into her hands to warm them and holding them to her cherry-red nose to warm it. “But thank you.”

Flayn, of course, took the blanket.

Edelgard stabled her horse, keeping close to her side the satchel she’d stowed her stolen brick of semtex in. Hubert stuck to her like glue, fussing over whatever lingering injuries she might have still had from the battle (aside from an intermittent ringing in her ears and a twinge in her shoulder, she wasn’t aware of any). Annette, usually the first to unload and start helping others unload their mounts’ burdens, was unusually slow and subdued, still more in shock from Mercedes’ revelation than anybody else; Edelgard decided to help her.

“Are you alright, Annette?” she asked.

“Fine,” Annette squeaked, her voice muffled by the scarf wrapped tightly around her nose and mouth to ward off the cold. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy; she’d been letting herself cry whenever she thought no one would notice (everyone had, though, but no one wanted to make her feel worse by pointing it out). “Thank you, Edelgard.”

Edelgard chose to ignore her words and picked up one of Annette’s bags herself, slinging one of her own over her shoulder to free up her hand. “Hubert, would you care to take her other bag for her?” she asked.

“If Her Highness wishes it, of course,” he said.

“Oh, that’s—that’s not necessary, really,” Annette stammered. “I can carry my own bags just fine.”

“You’re burdened with enough right now,” Edelgard told her. “This is the least we can do.”

She nodded and acquiesced, allowing Hubert to take her other bag. The class regrouped with Byleth and Manuela outside the front door to the inn.

“They won’t have room for all of us,” Byleth said to her students, “so we’ll have to double up, two per room, at least one group of three. Most of the rooms only have one bed, so some of you will be on the floor.”

“Only one bed, huh?” Sylvain asked with a dreamy smile on his face, clearly trying to force some levity into a group still thoroughly rattled by their encounter with the Death Knight. “Dimitri, you should’ve asked that girl you’ve been making eyes at to come along.”

Dimitri’s face, already reddened by the cold, turned even redder. “Girl? What girl? There is no girl,” he sputtered.

Felix bared a sardonic smirk. “Oh, does the boar have a sow?”

“She is _not_ a sow!”

“So there _is_ a girl,” Sylvain teased Dimitri. “C’mon. Fess up. What’s her name?”

“Knock it off,” Ingrid chided him. “This isn’t appropriate.”

“Just trying to lighten the mood.”

“I don’t mind if we all get the floor, as long as it’s indoors,” Ignatz said, accustomed to the more temperate winters of Leicester and southern Adrestia.

“Seteth, if you don’t mind, perhaps we could be the group of three?” Manuela asked Vual, drawing closer to him.

“If you do not mind sleeping on the floor,” he said curtly. “The bed, of course, goes to Flayn.”

“I could bunk with one of Professor Byleth’s students,” Flayn suggested with a smile, prompting Edelgard to wonder if she had noticed Manuela’s advances on her ‘brother’ and was trying to set them up.

“No, Flayn,” Vual chided her, glaring at some of the students he thought might have less than wholesome interactions with her. “We shall share a room.”

“Annette, Hubert, and I will be the group of three,” Edelgard offered, keeping an arm over Annette’s shoulders.

Byleth nodded. “That works. Everyone else, pair up and settle in. We’ve only got a few hours’ travel left to go tomorrow.”

As the rest of the travelers milled around and gradually paired themselves off, Vual put a hand on Flayn’s shoulder. “Let us go to our room, Flayn. I fear it shall only grow colder out here.”

Before they could go inside, the world and everything in it seemed to come to a sudden halt as a blood-curdling and bone-chilling scream, an almost bestial bellow equal parts terrified and furious, an outcry in the shape of a far-too-familiar voice, tore through the air and shattered the placid calm of the snowy woods:

_“FLAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYN!”_

A man emerged from the woods, disheveled and bedraggled, haggard, almost more of a beast than man, covered in dirt and grime with bits of twigs stuck in his hair. A tattered and rough cloak was draped over his shoulders to hide a body marred by old wounds and once-fine clothes that had been reduced to mud-stained scraps. Two fingers on his left hand terminated in stumps wreathed in old and yellowed bandages; he dragged one leg lamely a step behind the other in a halting and uneven gait. A swath of cloth wrapped around his brow and covered one eye; his remaining eye was as wild and furious as an enraged beast’s. His once neatly-trimmed chinstrap beard and shoulder-length hair had grown into a long and scraggly mountain-man’s mane, its emerald green color dulled and darkened.

 _“Flayn!”_ he called out again, his voice hoarse and cracking. He dragged himself nearer. Tears from his good eye cut a path through the dirt caking his cheek. _“Get away from that monster! Now!”_

All heads turned to Vual, who stared ashen and wide-eyed at the face of the man he had replaced. Flayn carefully extricated herself from his grasp and backed away, looking from one Seteth to the other with a look of dawning horror on her face.


	34. Mirror Image, Mirror Darkly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Vual's cover is blown and Edelgard struggles to preserve hers at any cost. Seteth makes a friend. Flayn has war flashbacks. Ingrid learns a lesson.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vual introducing himself to the Blue Lions:  
> 

The Blue Lions stood between two Seteths where there should only have been one. Flayn looked horrified as she looked from one to the other, her lips moving wordlessly as she struggled to rediscover her voice. Ingrid’s horrified gaze slowly shifted from Seteth to Vual, her fingers slipping from the blanket he had given her as a shawl and letting it slough off her shoulders, and one by one, the other students’ heads turned toward the impostor as well. Edelgard knew that their thoughts were turning to Solon, expecting Vual to throw aside his human mask and reveal to them a ghastly visage. Even Dedue looked shocked. Byleth was stricken—Edelgard knew she’d been worried about Seteth’s safety; in any other circumstance would have been relieved to have found out he was alive, but now was the worst possible time.

“Flayn,” Seteth gasped, his voice hoarse. He fell to his knees, his injured leg crumpling under his weight, and lost consciousness, lying motionless in the snow.

Another man came out of the forest behind him, holding a gnarled stick in his hand. He looked as though he could have been a mercenary: tall, wide, chiseled, with a hard and sharp face and wiry black hair. He had a large bag slung over one shoulder and a well-used hand axe at his belt. Underneath his cloak was a patchwork of leather and iron armor of varying degrees of craftsmanship and wear. “Jeez, Seteth. You’re pretty fast on that busted leg. You dropped your walking stick—”

He looked at Vual, then looked down at Seteth. “Huh. Why’re there two of you?” he asked him. “Uh, Seteth? Buddy?” He knelt down and gently prodded him with the butt of the walking stick, then started feeling for a pulse.

“I can explain—” Vual said, raising his hands, as Ingrid tackled him to the ground and pressed her forearm against his throat. Flayn let out a frightened scream as Felix and Sylvain grabbed her and pulled her away.

“You dastard!” Ingrid spat, driving a knee into his chest. “What are you? One of _them?”_

“Get a grip, Ingrid,” Felix said. “You’re acting like the boar.”

“Please,” Vual protested, his voice squeaking through his crushed windpipe. “Ingrid, please, let me go—”

“Ingrid, let him go,” Byleth said.

Ingrid let him go and pulled herself up to her feet, sheepishly dusting the snow off her knees.

“‘Them?’” Vual asked, sitting up and gingerly massaging his throat. “You must be referring to Brother Tomas—er, Solon and his ilk. Well, I can assure you that I am who I say I am,” he said, looking to Seteth and his companion, “which I suppose makes… _him_ an impostor.”

Edelgard could tell that saying those words was killing him inside from the way the light left his eyes.

Dimitri’s gaze landed on Seteth—the _real_ Seteth—and he couldn’t help but wrinkle his nose in disgust. Dedue was also closely studying Seteth from afar, though his discomfort seemed to be rooted in something much different.

Flayn looked between the two Seteths again, unsure of who to believe. Her eyes were still wide with terror.

“Well then, we should restrain this other Seteth for when he awakes,” Dimitri pronounced. “And question both of them. Only one of them is the impostor, obviously.”

“I mean, it’s possible that _both_ of them are,” Sylvain said, “but that’d be a real clusterfuck.”

“Watch your language around Flayn,” Vual snapped at him, making an admirable attempt to stay in character.

“Yes, sir.”

“And apologize.”

“Sorry, Flayn.”

“Apologize as though you mean it.”

“I’m sorry, Flayn.”

“Dedue,” Dimitri said, “get a rope from the stables.”

Manuela looked at him as though he had grown an extra head. “You can’t tie up an injured man! Here, let me have a look at him,” she said, rushing to Seteth’s side. “He at least deserves that much, no matter who he is.” She looked up at his companion and smiled. “And who might this handsome young fellow be?”

Together, she and Seteth’s mysterious companion brought him into the light that spilled over the snow from the inn’s well-lit windows. Flayn inched closer to them, but orbited them at a distance.

“Hey, everyone. Name’s Balthus. Pleased to meet you,” the other man said. “So, what exactly is going on here? Any idea why there’s two of ol’ Seteth running around? Doesn’t look like he’s happy to see you,” he said, looking at Vual.

“I have a few,” Felix muttered.

The door to the inn opened and Anna stepped out. “So, I’ve talked with the cook, and we just barely have enough of our perpetual stew for all of you, so in exchange for half-portions each I’ll throw in a slice of bread and a baked potato free of charge and an egg and toast tomorrow morning. Hospitality _is_ the name of the game, but you happened to catch us at a bad time…”

Her voice trailed off as she took stock of the scene.

“Those two’ll cost extra,” she said, pointing to Seteth and Balthus. “And if you break any furniture, it goes on the bill.”

“Thanks, Anna,” Byleth said. “Come on, everyone. Let’s go.”

Hubert grabbed Edelgard by the arm and pulled her closer as the class filed into the inn. “Lady Edelgard,” he whispered, “do you know what is going on here?” He looked to Vual. “Is that man…”

“I don’t know, Hubert,” she whispered back, fearing someone might overhear her if she was honest. “I hadn’t thought for a second that he could be an impostor.”

“Neither did I.” His brow furrowed and lips pursed in a grim scowl. “All this talk of impostors… I fear something terrible may happen to you, Lady Edelgard.”

“So do I,” she admitted.

Once everyone was inside the inn and standing in the common room out in front, Manuela laid Seteth down on one of the handful of tables scattered around the room.

“Y’know, I really can’t believe that _this_ Seteth would be the fake,” Balthus commented, scratching his head thoughtfully. “I mean, he remembered me.”

“How exactly did you and him… become acquainted?” Edelgard asked him.

“Well, a couple weeks ago I was camping out through the foothills a bit north of here, minding my own business, and found him half-frozen on the bank of a river. I thought to myself, he looked a little familiar, so I carried him to camp and cleaned him up a bit.”

“A _bit,”_ Manuela said, plucking a twig from Seteth’s snow-glazed beard.

“Imagine my surprise when I found out it was Seteth! I mean, I never thought I’d see old mister stick-up-the-ass again.”

Vual cleared his throat. “Ahem,” he said, gesturing toward Flayn, who was keeping a healthy distance away from him.

“Oh, you must be Flayn! Seteth would hardly talk about anyone else. I think I might’ve seen you at the monastery—Back then you must’ve been, what, ten? Eleven?” Balthus scratched his chin. “You don’t look much older. Guess you’ve got one of those baby faces, huh?”

Flayn stared at him, bewildered, for a few minutes. “Yes,” she said. “I simply look very young. I am roughly the same age as the average student…” Her voice trembled more than it usually did when she was dusting off that old, unconvincing lie.

“When did you last see each other?” Edelgard asked Balthus, hoping her probing would give Vual some ability to continue pretending to be Seteth. Although if he successfully convinced everyone that Seteth was an Agarthan replicant and not him… what would be done with Seteth? After all, Vual had gone through the trouble of sparing his life—now would that kindness simply amount to having to dispose of him in an even crueler manner later on? She couldn’t say she envied Vual’s situation at all right now; it was probably more dire than her own by an order of magnitude. But she supposed she was in it as much as he was.

“Oh, about seven years ago when I graduated,” Balthus said.

“Ah,” Vual said. “I thought you looked familiar. My, Balthus, how you’ve… grown. Would that it were under less… unique circumstances, but I am glad to make your acquaintance again.”

Balthus looked down at Seteth, then back to Vual. “You _sure_ this guy’s pretending to be you? I mean, he remembered what classes I took and everything.”

“I am sure he has been observing me for a long time,” Vual said. “One would have had to in order to develop an accurate profile; I am, after all, quite a private person.”

“You were a student?” Byleth asked Balthus, distracting him. It was a smart move—he threatened to be quite a bit more quick-witted than he looked. “Manuela and I are both professors. I just started this year.”

“And I came to the academy about six years ago,” Manuela chimed in, “so we must have just missed each other. I must say, if this Seteth is an impostor,” she added, gesturing to Vual, “he’s a damn good one.”

“Language,” Vual said sternly.

Balthus raised his thick black eyebrows and grinned, looking over the two women. “Whoa! Are all the professors as good-looking as you two now?”

“Oh my,” Manuela stammered, blushing and letting out a disarming little laugh. “I’m sorry, but no; Professor Hanneman still teaches the Black Eagles.”

“That old stickbug? Ha! Good to know he’s still kicking.”

“Yes, it’s a joy having him around,” she muttered dryly. She continued to look Seteth over, her good mood dissipating. “He’s burning up. Balthus, did you bandage these fingers?”

“Yeah, why? I’m pretty used to wrapping up my knuckles, so I figured it wasn’t much different.”

“It is,” she sighed. “Some of his wounds might be infected. And did you heal this leg?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a bit of a knack for healing magic. Not the kind of thing you’d expect from the Undisputed King of Grappling, huh?”

“You didn’t set the bone right before you healed it. I’ll have to…” Manuela looked over at Flayn and lowered her voice. _“…break it again so it can heal properly.”_ She focused on her host. “Er, Anna, was it? I know you’re short on food, but how about beer? I could use a stiff drink.”

“Plenty, but it’ll cost ya!” Anna chirped back.

“Name your price. You’ll pay the bill, right, Byleth?”

“I could use a drink, too!” Balthus added. “My flask ran dry a long time ago. This old hickory stick damn near drank half of it in one swig when he woke up. Never see the guy knock back a drink like that—didn’t ever think he had it in him.”

“So, there are two Seteths,” Raphael pondered, thoughtfully scratching his head. “And one of them is fake and probably evil, but we don’t know which… This isn’t the kind of problem to solve on an empty stomach; we need food! Hey, miss, how about that stew?” he asked Anna.

“If this one doesn’t wake up tonight,” Byleth said, looking down at Seteth, “let’s put both of them in separate rooms and keep watch over them in shifts.”

“That means more people bedding three or four to a room,” Felix grumbled. “Fine, as long as you don’t stick me with the boar.”

“I don’t think this one would _want_ to wake up; he must be in a lot of pain,” Manuela said with a sad shake of her head. She went rummaging in her bag. “I should give him something to keep him down…”

“As long as we don’t know who the fake is,” Sylvain suggested, “we should keep both of them down.”

“I… suppose it only makes sense that we would both be kept under surveillance,” Vual said. His eyes flitted uneasily toward Dedue. “I consent. You can interrogate us both to your heart’s content tomorrow morning.” He looked to Flayn, who’d wedged herself between Ingrid and Raphael and was staring at him as though he were a stranger. “And Flayn, please… I beg of you to trust me.”

* * *

Seteth’s unconscious body was moved to one of the bedrooms in the back so that Manuela could treat his wounds in private; Vual was restrained and kept under the class’s watchful eye. Byleth kept Balthus trapped in conversation (which required quite a herculean effort from her, given her usual laconic nature) to keep him from bothering Vual. The mood was fraught as everyone settled into the common room and had supper. Meager half-ladelfuls of stew slopped into bowls had to suffice; this little inn was indeed ill-suited to handle over a dozen guests at once. The Blue Lions filled the tables and more, and quite a few of them were reduced to standing as they ate.

Edelgard couldn’t quite say that the stew was that good, and the small portions only made the experience worse. Perpetual stew, a staple of inns across Fódlan, was as its name suggested, a constant work in progress. The pot was never allowed to cool and never allowed to empty completely, instead taking in more water and broth and more ingredients as quickly as the travelers passing by consumed it. Once, during the war, Edelgard had been forced to have the entire Black Eagle Strike Force quarter themselves at an inn in southern Hrym viscounty that had kept the same pot going, as the innkeeper had dubiously claimed, for over forty years.

It was a chimera of a dish, never tasting the same from day to day in the same inn, let alone from one to another. Some tastes would linger for weeks; others forgotten in days. Sometimes it would be surprisingly good, sometimes nearly inedible, but always _interesting._ In this batch, the gamy taste of rabbit and the overwhelmingly pungent odor of boiled cabbage melded not particularly nicely with a strong fishy aftertaste, and while some might have appreciated the unique melange, Edelgard was most definitely not among them. But it was more food than rations were, and hotter too, so she dug in.

It was a sign of the tense atmosphere that Ingrid and Raphael, of all people, were only picking at their food. Ignatz struggled to find another classmate to pawn off his food to, and for once Edelgard couldn’t tell if it was due to his usual sense of guilt or if the food was just that bad.

“I know the taste is far from harmonious,” Edelgard said to Ingrid, standing to offer her the stool she’d been sitting on, “but surely it can’t be that bad.”

Ingrid didn’t take it, but a smirk lifted the corner of her mouth ever so slightly. It was a smile so slight and so bittersweet that it looked as though she’d bitten into a lemon, but nonetheless it was the first time she’d smiled since the Death Knight had been unmasked.

“I just don’t have much of an appetite tonight. Here in Remire… I know it sounds strange, but I can almost feel Ashe’s presence lingering here, like a lost spirit that cannot find its way back to the Goddess. I still miss him.”

“So do I.”

“And then there’s Seteth.” Ingrid’s gaze drifted across the room to where Vual was sitting. “Honestly, Professor Manuela and everyone else can say he was just the same as always, but I feel like I’m the only one who thinks that when Seteth returned, he was… different. We’d spoken a bit before he and Flayn left and got along well enough, but when he returned, he just seemed drawn to me. He was so open and kind when he spoke to me about Glenn. And a few nights ago, the way he acted at dinner with Ashe’s brother and sister, he was so friendly…”

“That’s strange evidence of him being an impostor,” Edelgard commented.

“You said it yourself that an impostor might have strange attitudes.” Ingrid slipped a forkful of stew into her mouth, chewed thoughtfully for a long time, and finally swallowed. “If he’s an impostor like Solon… that means he’s _connected_ to Solon. Remire. Mer—the Death Knight. Maybe he led us to Gaspard so the Death Knight could kill us.”

Vual _was_ connected to the events in Remire, but not in the way Ingrid suspected.

“You sound as paranoid as Her Highness, Ingrid,” Felix spoke up. “We know he’s an impostor because the real Seteth screamed bloody murder at him and fainted. It’s not complicated.”

“Although if _I_ was an impostor who ran into my real self,” Sylvain said, “I’d scream bloody murder and accuse _him_ of being the impostor.”

Felix rolled his eyes.

“What? Y’know, I think I like _this_ Seteth a bit better, anyway. He lets Flayn get out a little more instead of holing her up in their quarters all the time.”

“I know it’s not a settled matter,” Ingrid responded, shooing them both away, “and I suppose I should give both Seteths equal benefit of the doubt. But after finding out the truth about Mercedes, I just… I don’t want someone else who was good to me to end up hiding a dark secret. I suppose I’m wary of people who are too kind.”

“Well then, I hope I am just kind enough,” Edelgard said, calling to mind her own dark secret.

She managed to force yet another tiny, weak smile out of Ingrid.

“I think we should be careful to withhold our judgment,” she added. “If we must take any lessons from our encounter with the Death Knight, it’s that nothing is as it seems. We need to be wary not of people who are kinder than we expect, but of anything that seems simpler than it appears. Think of all the simple truths you take for granted. Behind the veneer you’ll find something much more complex.”

“There you go again, Edelgard.” Ingrid sighed and rolled her eyes, but in a good-natured rather than frustrated way. “At least I know _you’re_ still you.”

After dinner, the Blue Lions drew lots to decide who would keep watch over each room, timing their shifts by the hour using the clock in the hall, and then parceled out the inn’s six available bedrooms between them; Seteth and Vual were kept alone in separate rooms, and so the students and professors had to split themselves up to fill the remaining four rooms. Byleth and Manuela took Flayn with them to the first room; Edelgard, Annette, Bernadetta, and Hubert took the second; Sylvain, Raphael, Dimitri, and Dedue took the third; Felix, Ignatz, and Balthus took the last.

Edelgard and her roommates settled into their room for the night. The inn’s rooms were small and homely, one bed each—this inn was dramatically underprepared for large travel parties, though Edelgard supposed it wouldn’t have been easy to build something larger in just two months in the middle of winter—and so they would have to decide who got the bed.

The anxious tension that had blanketed the rest of the inn did not follow into the bedrooms. Instead, as soon as she set foot in the room Edelgard felt weary down to the marrow of her bones. It had been a long day’s travel on top of the stress of Seteth’s sudden appearance. She was exhausted in body and mind and only when she had been separated from the majority of her classmates and the situation with Vual did she finally feel it.

Annette was especially lethargic. She had been ever since the battle with the Death Knight, but now she could barely even lift her feet off the floor, shuffling languidly like the living dead.

Hubert set Edelgard’s bags on the bed. “Lady Edelgard—”

“Annette gets the bed,” Edelgard told him.

Annette perked up at the sound of her name. “What? No, no, Edelgard, _you’re_ the princess—”

“I’ve no qualms against the floor,” Edelgard told her, nudging her toward the bed.

“Well, maybe Hubert wants it,” she said. Hubert shook his head. “Or Bernadetta?”

Bernadetta looked to Edelgard. Edelgard shook her head. “I-I’m fine with the floor,” she said to Annette.

“No way. I can tell you haven’t been sleeping well, so just take the bed—”

 _“I_ haven’t been sleeping well? Every time I’ve laid awake these past few nights, _you’ve_ been there longer,” Edelgard said, nudging her further. “Am I going to have to force you into bed? Hubert, take her by the arms while I pull the sheets aside.”

“I don’t need any special treatment,” Annette insisted as Hubert grabbed her and Edelgard forcibly tucked her into bed.

“I won’t hear another word of it,” Edelgard said, drawing the covers up to her chin and firmly tucking the edges of the bedsheets under the mattress. “If you won’t take care of yourself, then at least let your friends do it.”

Annette closed her eyes and sighed. “That’s what Mercie would tell me,” she muttered, her voice small.

“Any good friend would tell you the same.”

“Why, Edelgard?” She took a deep breath and swallowed down a lump in her throat, choking back tears. “Why her? Out of everyone in the world it could’ve been…”

“Out of everyone in the world,” Hubert muttered darkly, “she had the misfortune of being Cornelia’s child.”

“I just want to wake up and have her here with us. But next time we see her… she’s gonna try to _kill_ us. We’ll have to fight her…”

“I know,” Edelgard said, resting the back of her hand against Annette’s cheek. War, in its infinite cruelty, far too often turned friends into murderers. She and all of her closest friends—Annette included—had all spilled the blood of people they had once gone to school with, shared meals with, studied with, gossiped with. There was nothing harder than the first time friend became foe.

“Should I have known? Should I have suspected her? She was always missing when the Death Knight was around… I feel so stupid.”

“I didn’t start to consider the possibility until after Remire,” Edelgard admitted, “but I dismissed it just as quickly. The thought that the suit had been counteracting her failing health never occurred to me.”

“And now Seteth might be an impostor. Can we trust _anyone_ anymore?”

“I hope so,” Edelgard answered.

She, Hubert, and Bernadetta laid their bedrolls on the floor and snuffed out the lamp, all of them settling in for the night—as much as they could. Darkness fell over the room, blanketing everything in its smothering embrace, and as Edelgard laid on the floor and stared up at the ceiling, her eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness.

“None of you think Bernie’s suspicious, do you?” Bernadetta spoke up.

“No, Bernadetta,” Edelgard told her.

“Just asking,” she said, “because, um, Mercedes knew all those ghost stories, and I’m… well… people have always thought I was spooky. I _did_ tell the scariest story when we all went fishing together, after all…”

“Are you afraid we might start suspecting you of being an evil spirit?” Hubert asked.

“Both of you, quiet,” Edelgard told them. “Annette needs her sleep. We all need it.”

* * *

Nevertheless, Edelgard wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if anybody had trouble sleeping that night. In fact, she had initially thought she’d be hard-pressed to find someone who _could_ sleep. Not only was the inn more than a little drafty—she’d had to get up and take her cloak to use it as a blanket—Seteth’s sudden appearance weighed heavily on her mind. If Vual’s cover was blown, there was no telling what could happen next, but it wasn’t hard to imagine a total cascade failure following in its wake. Her delicate balancing act would collapse in on itself, taking with it the cover of darkness concealing Dedue’s secret liaisons and the skeletons in Dimitri’s closet…

As she found herself tracing the shadows on the ceiling and the phantom shapes that congealed out of the barely-visible whorls on the wooden slats of the roof, she resisted the urge to catastrophize as best she could, but she had to admit that she felt trapped like a rat. Perhaps even Byleth’s powers wouldn’t be enough to protect everyone.

Somehow, her roommates managed to fall asleep. Edelgard knew Hubert, Bernadetta, and Annette well enough to know what their sleeping sounded like—the slow rhythm of their breathing, the occasional snore or incoherent murmur—and they, somehow, were fast asleep within an hour. As the minutes ticked by and Edelgard waited for her turn to watch over Vual, she could hear faint and indecipherable snippets of furtive conversations bleeding through the walls.

There was a knock on the door.

Edelgard slipped out of her bedroll and picked herself up off the floor (it had been hard to make Annette take the bed, but few things could get in the way of an insistent Edelgard), stepped over Hubert, and made for the door, cradling a single candle-sized flame in her hand to light the room. She opened the door and found Flayn on the other side. She held a tiny spark of white light in her hand to light the way, and the way it lit her face from below, casting long shadows up to her brow, made her look even more troubled than before. Weary exhaustion dwelt in the deep and thick shadows under her eyes. Her cheeks glistened in the light.

“Edelgard,” she said. “I… hope I did not wake you,” she whispered, her voice soft and wavering.

“No, I haven’t been able to sleep,” Edelgard said to her. “Are you alright, Flayn? I can’t imagine this is easy for you.”

“No, no, not at all,” Flayn said with a sad shake of her head. “I hope I am not troubling you, but… as we are friends, may I please confide in you? I fear I have no one else to speak to.”

“Certainly. Come in,” Edelgard told her, stepping back and beckoning her inside. “Be careful not to tread on Hubert. He is a light sleeper.”

Flayn crept into the room with her, giving Hubert a wide berth and sitting down on the floor beside Edelgard’s bedroll. “Please, speak not a word of this to anybody else,” she said as Edelgard took a seat on the floor next to her.

“You have my word and my silence.”

She clutched at the hem of the blanket she held over her shoulders and drew it tighter to ward off the cold. Cold crept into this inn, into every room, like steam seeping out of a covered pot. “I… All the way from Magdred Way to the Oghma Mountains, I was with Seteth. I could have sworn it. I helped him walk. I carried him when he could not. I healed his wounds as best I could, I tended to him and bandaged his wounds and changed the bandages, I treated him when he was feverish. Never did I ever suspect—” Her voice cracked and she choked on her next words. “Never did I ever suspect,” she repeated, her voice barely a squeak now, “that he might not be him. But if the other one—the one who cried out my name with such fright and anguish—if _he_ is really my brother, then… Then I must be a horrible sister!” she sobbed.

Edelgard took her in and held her close, patting her gently on the back and letting her dry her tears on her shoulder. “Shh. Flayn, you are not a horrible sister.”

“But… I… I cannot tell which of these two men is truly him. How could I not be able to tell? How, Edelgard, could I be anything _but_ a failure when I cannot tell apart the man who has raised me—who has been at my side my entire life?” she cried, her voice muffled.

“Flayn, no. You haven’t failed in any way,” Edelgard assured her, recalling from the sound of her tears the same horrible way she’d felt around the brothers and sisters _she_ was supposed to know so intimately. “These two Seteths… aside from one being far scruffier and far more severely wounded, they are indeed identical. Not a pore on their skin is out of place. They even have the same fingers missing in the same places.” Recalling the damage to Vual’s artificial metal arm, Edelgard supposed he must have mutilated himself to exactly match Seteth’s injuries when he’d been captured. His dedication to the craft was indeed impressive, his singular lapse in judgment aside. “Beyond that, he must have keenly observed the two of you for quite some time. Whichever of them is the impostor, he has gone to every length to ensure that not even _you_ could tell him apart. It is not an indictment of your feelings for your brother, but a testament to the impostor’s skill… whoever he is.”

Flayn sniffled and pressed herself closer to her, burying her face in her shoulder and wrapping her arms around her waist. She held that position for a long while, faintly weeping, until the candle flame Edelgard had conjured burned itself out and flooded the bedroom with darkness once again. “Edelgard, do you recall when I told you about… how I once slept for such a long time?”

“Yes.”

“Long ago, there was a terrible war and my mother, my brother, and my uncles fought in it. I wished to help, but I was wounded so severely that I fell into a coma. My mother died from the wounds she sustained in the same battle.”

“I’m sorry,” Edelgard said. “War exacts a heavy toll on children.” She knew that well—she’d seen more than enough orphans created from her crusade to prove it.

“The ones we fought… I encountered them again when the Hurricane King kidnapped me, and again when we were driven from our shelter. They captured us. They wished to do terrible things to us…” Flayn shuddered. “What have they done to my brother? And why must they keep pursuing us? Why can we not live our lives in peace?”

“It seems to me the only obstacle you face is that faction,” Edelgard said. She wondered what war Flayn was talking about. A war that Seteth and others like him had fought in… what could she be referring to but the War of Heroes? “If they are crushed, then no one will stand in your way.”

“Do you think that is possible?”

“I will _make_ it possible.”

With a little laugh, Flayn pulled herself away and dried her eyes on the sleeve of her nightgown. “You are too good a friend for the likes of me, Edelgard. Thank you. I should return to my room before anybody worries about me.”

She left, leaving Edelgard alone with nothing but her thoughts for company until it was time for her shift. Felix and Sylvain returned from Vual’s room to their own room as Edelgard and Dedue took their places.

Vual’s room was lit by lamplight (the better to keep an eye on him) and he was sleeping, or at least pretending to sleep, while sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed with rope binding his wrists behind his back and his ankles. He lifted his head and opened his eyes the instant the door had swung shut behind his new guards.

“It is our turn to watch over you,” Dedue told him.

“A welcome change of pace,” Vual said quietly, looking up at him. His mouth was drawn in a tight, neutral frown and his eyes betrayed no concern or anxiety.

“I have questions for you.”

“The interrogation does not begin until morning.”

“I cannot ask these questions in public.” Dedue frowned at him, then looked to Edelgard. “Vepar, correct me if I am wrong. But is it not your policy to terminate those you replace?”

“It is,” Edelgard admitted, knowing what Dedue was going to ask next.

“Then why,” he asked, looking back down at Vual, “is Seteth still alive?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” Edelgard said. “Vual, this could ruin _everything._ Have you no sense at all?”

“I assure you, Vepar, Dedue, I can explain,” Vual told her and Dedue. “He was meant to be terminated. Somebody failed to carry out my orders to do so.”

Dedue raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps,” he added with a hint of dry sardonic wit coloring his cold voice, “the same somebody who sent that mysterious letter.”

“That is a possibility.”

“So, Dedue,” Edelgard asked him, “shall I go to the next room over and slit Seteth’s throat? Or do you want to do the honors?”

He glared at her, as though he could not stand to be in the same room as her. “Of course not. If either Seteth is murdered, then this situation becomes no less dire for us. An investigation of false identities becomes an investigation of murder.”

“Well, we can’t have two of them running around.” Edelgard crossed her arms and fumed. “I’m beginning to understand why Namtara turned that ‘daughter’ of hers into a beast. We could tie up this loose end quite easily if we could simply do the same to Seteth.” She glanced down her nose at Vual. “Or Vual, since he’s apparently as stupid as one already.”

Vual smiled at her as though to say he was proud of her performance as Vepar.

“However,” Dedue added, “if Seteth dies of natural causes… a corpse cannot be interrogated.”

“And how, pray tell, do you propose we kill him _naturally?”_ Edelgard asked him, very much not liking the direction this conversation was headed in.

“All medicine is poison with the correct dose. Administer an excess of the concoction Professor Manuela used to keep him asleep and free of pain and he will pass peacefully,” he said. His eyes were piercing as he studied her, as though probing for a sign of weakness. “His injuries were grievous. He is weak. No one will suspect foul play.”

Stealing medicine from Manuela would be easy enough; Manuela slept like a baby when she’d had enough to drink, and she and Balthus had nearly drank the whole inn dry between them. And no one would blame Manuela if the medicine had an unforeseen adverse reaction; everyone would just assume that he’d been far worse off than had been apparent. But getting herself alone in a room with Seteth, on the other hand…

“See to it that Seteth is dead by dawn, Vepar,” Dedue told Edelgard.

“But he’s under just as close watch as I,” Vual spoke up, voicing her concerns.

“I will see to it you have an opening,” Dedue said. “Go and procure Professor Manuela’s medicine.”

Edelgard crossed her arms. “What’s the magic word?”

He looked just about ready to kill her himself.

“Oh, you don’t like that, do you?” she asked, taunting him. “I suppose you don’t like me, either. Or him, for that matter,” she said, nodding at Vual. “Or Namtara, or Thales, or any of us. You’d kill every last one of us if you could, wouldn’t you? After everything we’ve done to you… to your people… to His Majesty?”

She could tell that he was forcing his scowl not to deepen, lest he betray his true thoughts. A subtle twitch of the eyebrow betrayed him. She knew he despised Those Who Slither in the Dark. She knew he would get rid of the whole lot of them if he could. Looking at him was almost like looking into a mirror. What a loathsome role she had to play, spitting out the same taunts she and Hubert had once endured themselves to a kindred spirit.

What if, she wondered, she and Vual presented themselves to him as saboteurs? Would he turn a blind eye to them as he had turned blind eye after blind eye to Edelgard herself? Or was the time for allowing failure after failure to slip past his notice long past? After all, he’d already had her ‘killed.’ Perhaps, just as Edelgard’s plots had required the war Thales had been longing to fight for four hundred years, Dedue’s plots, whatever they were, required Operation Antediluvia.

Edelgard was beginning to realize what it felt like to be in the unenviable position of standing against herself. Herself… and Hubert, for Dedue was in this world both at once.

“Please go and procure Professor Manuela’s medicine,” Dedue said, frustrated.

“Very well.” She made for the door. “Don’t be too gentle with him,” she said to him, gesturing at Vual on her way out. “But make sure he lives. Thales will probably want to kill him personally.”

“I wonder if you’re almost enjoying this,” Vual said to her as the door swung open and she stepped out into the hall.

Edelgard took a deep breath once the door had swung shut behind her. When she was out of sight, she pressed her palm to her eye and rubbed it until it stopped hurting.

The thought occurred to her that with Dedue and Vual in the same room together, the latter might not survive. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Dedue had been the mysterious figure who’d killed Kronya, and now she was giving him a golden opportunity to kill yet another turncoat Agarthan. Perhaps he knew how to make it look like ‘natural causes.’

If the worst came to pass, she supposed Byleth could turn back time and do something—but that was quite a gamble to make.

* * *

She found the room Manuela was staying in—at the other end of the hall, adjacent on the left side to Edelgard’s room—and slipped inside. Manuela shared the room with Byleth and Flayn, and all three of them were asleep. Byleth was as quiet asleep as she was awake, as was Flayn, but Manuela snored like a sawblade cutting through a tree trunk. Edelgard crept past them, controlling her breath the way Shamir had once taught her so that she could stalk as silently as possible—she knew Byleth was a light sleeper, and possibly Flayn as well. In through the nose, out through the mouth, out through the mouth again…

She cupped her hand around a tiny tongue of flame to keep the light from spreading and found the bag of Manuela’s medical supplies, and within it, a vial of syrupy blue-green liquid. Edelgard had used it for insomnia often enough in her world—about a quarter of an ounce of it would be enough to put somebody to sleep for a good eight to twelve hours. She didn’t know how much of it would be enough to kill someone, especially someone who wasn’t even human, but she was sure it could be done. Calm the body too much, slow its heartbeat down enough, and eventually everything just stopped. Hubert had told her that once.

She took the vial. It was half-empty, and with a single dose being about a quarter of an ounce, it had about four doses in it.

There was a change in the air.

 _“Edelgard?”_ Byleth mumbled. Edelgard saw her shadow rise from one of the bedrolls laid out on the floor.

 _“Professor,”_ Edelgard gasped, so shocked she nearly dropped the vial on the floor. _“I… Excuse me, I just…”_

Byleth looked at the vial.

 _“I can explain,”_ Edelgard whispered. _“Annette and I cannot sleep. When my shift is over, she and I will take just a little bit, enough to get some rest.”_

In the light from the flame, she could see Byleth frown and purse her lips thoughtfully.

 _“Forgive me for not asking permission, but I didn’t think I could rouse Manuela after everything she drank. But the insomnia, I fear, is unbearable. My eyes, my head…”_ She put a hand to her brow. _“They’re throbbing like a second heart.”_

Byleth nodded, knowing she was lying and knowing she had reason to. _“Alright. Just bring the vial back in the morning.”_

 _“Thank you, Professor,”_ Edelgard said. _“Oh, and… I fear something terrible might happen tonight. Perhaps a premonition from the Goddess.”_

Byleth nodded again, picking up on her intentions.

_“I hope you can do something this morning if… the worst happens.”_

Byleth’s powers were, hopefully, unimpeded; with the latest plans of Those Who Slither to plunge daggers into the tapestry of time foiled, it would be a while before more of their ‘tests’ began placing barriers around the power of Sothis.

With a slow nod and a wink, Byleth retreated to her bedroll and returned to her slumber, allowing Edelgard to leave.

As she crept out of the room, she heard low voices on the other side of the door, and out in the hall she saw the door to Seteth’s room opened a sliver and Balthus standing outside it, his back to Edelgard, speaking to Dedue.

Dedue looked over Balthus’ shoulder, spied Edelgard, and gave her a subtle ‘all-clear’ nod before asking Balthus another question. Picking up on the signal, Edelgard slunk down the hall and sidled through the door into Seteth’s room, quietly closing it behind her. The room was dark and quiet, dimly lit by a candle at its occupant’s bedside table.

She stood over Seteth as he lay in bed, his chest slowly rising and falling. As disarmingly and uncharacteristically rugged as Vual had first looked, Seteth looked even more out-of-character in his current state—wild, untamed, almost as much a beast as a man. He was gaunt, his uncovered eye sunken; the candlelight made deep canyons and trenches of the weathered contours of his bruised and scarred face. Though it looked as if his fever had broken, he still looked near to death. No one would be surprised if he didn’t survive the night.

The vial felt like a lead weight in her hand as she stood over him, dragging her down to the bowels of the earth. What was she doing here? Was she really going to do this? Her mind raced to find possible ways out—ways to fail without failing, just like before. But her mind, perhaps as a result of weariness, found nothing but dead ends and drew itself back to the path that lay before her.

Edelgard had never assassinated a man before. She’d _ordered_ assassinations, yes, but she had never done the deed herself, and while she’d executed men on the battlefield, standing over a sleeping man with a vial of poison was quite different. She had always kept on her conscience the lives Hubert had taken in her stead and by her command as though she had done the deed herself (she would have, of course, if Hubert did not insist on being her red right hand). But she had to admit that to be the one holding the murder weapon herself, to have such proximity, was different than she’d expected. It made her feel filthy in a way she hadn’t felt since the last time she’d worn the mask of the Flame Emperor. Could she sanction the cause for which she did this?

If Seteth died here, then Vual’s cover could be maintained indefinitely. No one would ever have to know the truth. Dedue was waiting outside for her. She couldn’t delay. To fail would mean exposing herself to danger as well—Those Who Slither in the Dark would question her competence, and from that point onward all things would fall apart.

But there was still a damp patch on the shoulder of her nightshirt where Flayn had cried in her arms earlier that night, and the closer she came to doing the deed, the colder it felt against her skin. Her throat was dry, her nerves inflamed; her heart pounded loud enough, to her ears, to rouse the dead. She could not bear to kill Seteth. But there was no time to plan a clever ruse the way she’d done with Hapi’s fake execution. She was alone, and could not leave this room until the deed was done; she would not get another chance.

Once it had been Byleth who had stayed her hand, the last time she had been given a chance to kill this man. It had been different then, though—Seteth had been an enemy combatant at the time, over five years into the war against the Church of Seiros, the Immaculate One, and her brood of beasts which through the church controlled the land in human guise.

Of course, Seteth did not look like a beast right now any more than Flayn did, and even if he had, that wouldn’t have diminished the crisis of conscience Edelgard now felt.

Once it had been Byleth who had stayed her hand, and now she wished Byleth was here again to do the same. But right now, that was like hoping from a miracle from on high.

 _What if,_ Hubert had asked her the other night, _you cannot trick them the next time they order you to commit some heinous deed?_

Seteth cracked open his eye, a rheumy film glistening in the lamplight. His lips parted and his mouth opened. _“Edelgard,”_ he whispered, his voice a weak and breathy hiss.

Edelgard was speechless. Her heart leaped into her throat.

 _“Flayn,”_ he rasped. He weakly raised an arm above the bedsheets, his fingers curled like talons as he reached out and pawed at her. _“Flayn… is she safe? Tell me… Edelgard… what has that monster done to her?”_

 _“Go back to sleep, Seteth,”_ Edelgard whispered back to him, getting down on her knees at the side of the bed. _“I have medicine that can help you sleep, if you…”_

He shook his head. _“Tell me. I beg of you to tell me. Is she in peril?”_

_“Flayn is fine. That other man hasn’t hurt her. In fact, he’s been treating her just as you would.”_

_“Has she… really mistaken him for me?”_

_“He has been doing a very good job. Everyone was fooled.”_

There was a glint of fear in Seteth’s eye. _“Countless times these men have separated her from me. Countless times they have caused her and myself immeasurable…”_ The word lodged in his throat like a bitter pill. _“Immeasurable anguish. Countless times they have taken our worlds from us. Lady Edelgard… not all monsters are enormous beasts. Some take the shapes of men.”_

 _“Seteth… hear me out,”_ Edelgard said. _“You need to remember. The man who replaced you—he was meant to kill you, was he not? Yet here you are, alive by his mercy, though it has caused him incredible harm.”_ She took a deep breath. _“His name is Vual. He is a good man—one who has renounced the wickedness of Agartha. He has been nothing but kind to everyone, and you have nothing to fear from him. In fact, he has been practically saintlike.”_

Seteth stared at her, as though he couldn’t comprehend what she had said. She could see in his face that the mere mention of the name _Agartha_ had awoken a great fear in his heart. He shook his head in denial.

 _“He chose not to have you killed, and the price of that failure may be his death. He chose to do the right thing knowing that he would only suffer for it later. Can you not see the virtue in that? The scriptures speak so often of virtue without hope or promise of reward, of virtue in extremis; surely_ you _of all people can quote chapter and verse,”_ she said. _“But he must live. We can see these monsters vanquished for good, if only you would trust him. It is the only way you and Flayn can truly live in peace. Seteth, please… I need your help,”_ she said, hearing earnest words she’d never thought she would say spill from her lips.

With that, he acquiesced, and she spoke to him, asking for his cooperation. He thought for a moment, seemingly more lucid, then slowly nodded in assent. Edelgard let a few drops of the vial’s contents fall into his mouth, enough to let him rest a few hours more, then emptied the vial out under the bed. She would feign surprise when he awoke in the morning and chalk it up to his physiology if Dedue grew suspicious or doubted her competence—simply protest that she couldn’t be blamed if his secretly inhuman physiology rendered him immune to an overdose of sleep medication.

She sneaked out of the room, silently opening the door and slipping behind Balthus’ back, and let Dedue glimpse the empty vial in her hand before slipping back into her own room. She stayed there until he knocked on the door to signal that the coast was clear.

“That took longer than I expected,” he said to her flatly, a suspicious eye falling upon her. She didn’t envy him for having to keep Balthus occupied for so long—he’d never been much of a conversationalist, while Balthus was quite convivial.

“He woke up,” Edelgard said. “I had to calm him down before I could administer the medicine. I thought he might scream if I forced it on him.”

Dedue nodded, satisfied with her response, and the two of them returned to Vual’s room. Vual, to her surprise, had what appeared in the dim and dusky lamplight to be a smug smile on his face. It vanished when he looked up at Edelgard from his vantage point on the floor, though, and turned into a pained frown. Just from seeing her, he must have known that she had done as she had been ordered to: that she had destroyed the life he had spared at such an extreme cost to himself and rendered moot that act of mercy and self-sacrifice.

“I’ve corrected your mistake, Vual,” she said to him.

Vual nodded grimly.

“My conversation with your counterpart,” Dedue told her, “has been interesting.”

“We have agreed on a partnership of sorts,” Vual explained to Edelgard, squirming against his bonds as he forced aside his crisis of conscience. “Yes, that is right, Vepar—I have informed him that we are both united in our secret agendas. The three of us will now work together to depose Thales once he has outlived his usefulness to us.”

Edelgard nodded, looking from one conspirator to the other. “You’ve taken quite a leap of faith, Vual,” she said. “If you had been mistaken, you would have signed your own death warrant.”

“I already did that when I permitted Seteth to live.”

“And as for you,” she said to Dedue, “it seems I was right. You _do_ hate us.”

“I would never be so small-minded,” he said.

“Oh, I’m certain you’ve stabbed more than one of us in the back before.”

He simply put a finger to his lips.

She held her relief within her, grateful at least for this. She had threaded a very dangerous needle yet again tonight, just as Vual himself had done. She wouldn’t have been surprised if, come morning, she started finding prematurely gray hairs among her chestnut locks.

* * *

Morning came, and with it, the Blue Lions gathered in the common room to deal with the question of the two Seteths. Flayn stood amid the students, an unusually stern and hard expression on her soft face, her arms crossed, as Byleth brought Vual out from his room and sat him down on one of the stools, his wrists and ankles still bound together to limit his movement. Moments later, Manuela came out of Seteth’s room with Seteth at her side, quite alive and well. He favored his injured leg, leaning on the professor as she led him to an adjacent stool.

Dedue shot a suspicious glare at Edelgard. She shrugged as if to say, ‘how should I have known it wasn’t a lethal dose?’ Vual, too, looked shocked—and relieved, if Edelgard was reading his face right—to see Seteth alive.

Vual and Seteth sat next to each other. Side by side, the two of them were mirror images; even identical twins were not this identical. The only differences between the two of them were purely circumstantial: Vual’s hair was smooth and straight and his beard (though Manuela had persuaded him to keep it a bit more ‘rugged’ than normal) neatly trimmed, and only a few lingering scars were visible on his bare skin; Seteth, on the other hand, was ragged and haggard, his hair matted and beard long and scruffy, the bruises and scars on his body were fresher, his complexion was still somewhat pallid, and he was thinner—half-starved and likely malnourished. There was a hollow, distant look in his eyes that made Edelgard fear he may have been delirious when she had spoken to him in the middle of the night.

Flayn stepped forward. “Brother,” she said, her tone of voice curt and clipped—she sounded surprisingly like Seteth.

“Yes, Flayn?” both Seteth and Vual answered at once.

“I am going to ask you a question only the real Seteth would know,” she said. “Seteth… both of you… what is Mother’s name?”

Vual was silent.

“Flayn,” Seteth said sternly, his voice still weak and trembling as much as his hands, “you know that we do not speak her name in front of—”

“Speak it here,” she snapped, sounding almost _angry._

He hung his head and looked down at the floor, as though ashamed to meet her eyes. “Eithlionn,” he whispered, his voice cracking as the name slipped from his lips.

Flayn clasped her hands over her mouth and stepped back, bumping up against Raphael’s girth as she stared at the two of them. There was a sharp, shuddering intake of breath; her chest heaved. “Oh… Oh, no… F—F-F… Fa…”

“Flayn, no,” Seteth said, but no more words escaped his mouth before Flayn rushed to him and hugged him, sobbing wordlessly into his chest.

“Flayn,” Manuela cautioned her, turning a nervous eye to Vual as she gently tried to pry her off of Seteth, “he’s still weak—try not to bruise a rib…”

“That simple, huh?” Sylvain muttered. “Then who’s this guy?”

Everyone stared at Vual as his gaze drifted from one student to another, lingering on Ingrid. A tense silence, broken only by Flayn’s muffled sobs, filled the room.

“I suppose,” he said, “there is no further point in pretending.”

Edelgard remembered the moment she had spoken the fateful words to her classmates in the Black Eagles: _I am the Flame Emperor._ The looks of hurt, shock, and betrayal, heartbreaking to see on those she’d found herself growing especially close to. She could see those same looks on the faces of the Blue Lions now, and the faltering furrow of Vual’s brow captured what she had felt on the inside at that moment.

The revelation had hardly sank in before a maelstrom of violence had swept through the Holy Tomb, and with everything that had happened next many of her classmates had had little chance to react until Hubert had spirited them away. Far from the monastery, Edelgard had stared at her classmates, all of whom had followed her in a daze they were only just snapping out of, and had worried that she had avoided being cleaved in twain by the Immaculate One’s ivory talons only to be torn asunder by her own fellow Black Eagles. They had followed her only because Byleth had, and once the panic had worn off and the haze of battle had lifted, they had had questions. Caspar, in particular, whose impulsive and hotheaded personality melded with an unshakable sense of justice and fairness, had had questions he had wanted to ask with his fists. If Byleth hadn’t kept the peace that night, they might have come to blows.

People were surprised to find out that Byleth had such a knack for teaching, considering her previous line of work and her unconventional (to say the least) upbringing, and they were even more surprised to find out that she was a natural mediator as well. Even long before Sothis had awakened within her, she had spent her childhood, quiet and withdrawn, reading people like books. She studied people as diligently as her students studied their subjects.

And so, the moment Vual removed his disguise and revealed his face to the Blue Lions, it was up to Byleth to step out in front of her students and hold them back. Fortunately for him, though, there was one key difference between Vual and Edelgard—he had been a good man.

“My name,” Vual said, no longer speaking with Seteth’s voice or imitating his stern and formal manner of speech, “is Vual. My face might be frightening, but I come in peace, as a friend.”

Flayn unburied her face to catch a glimpse of him, and at first sight, the face she saw was in no way friendly. A shocked and repulsed scream tore itself from her throat. For an instant, Edelgard thought she could see a flash of scales and talons.

“What the hell are you?” Balthus asked Vual. Like the rest of the students, he was transfixed by the sight of his corpse-pale skin and corpse-blue lips, the arcane tattoos which ran across his face, the empty white eye that somehow still saw…

“I can explain,” Seteth said, holding Flayn close in a soothing embrace. “Last night, I was feverish to the point of delirium when I encountered you all. My fear and concern for my sister, in my delusional state, must have gotten the better of me. However, this man saved my life, and I now see that he has been watching over Flayn with all of the diligence and care I would have hoped for.”

“So… there _isn’t_ an evil Seteth?” Raphael asked.

Ingrid still had a disgusted look on her face, a sour curl to her lips. She wasn’t the only one. Every student could see the more than passing similarities between Vual’s complexion and inhuman visage and that of Solon.

“Are you sure you’re not still running a fever?” Felix asked Seteth sharply.

Seteth shook his head. “Please, Felix, I would prefer if you did not speak with such impudence.” He let out a sharp and painful-sounding cough. “When Flayn and I were fleeing from the Hurricane King’s soldiers, we were captured and imprisoned. I helped Flayn escape, but failed to free myself as well and encouraged her to return to Garreg Mach alone instead. Vual was meant to disguise himself as me and dispose of me, but I now realize that instead of killing me, he gave me a chance to escape. Unfortunately, due to my wounds, it was only by the current of a nearby river I fell into that I was able to put some distance between myself and my pursuers.”

“And that’s when I found you,” Balthus said. “We headed south for Garreg Mach, some asshole stole my horse, and so on.”

“Yes. Thank you, Balthus.”

“That’s how I remember it as well,” Vual said. “The parts I was there for, at least. Thank you for vouching for me, Seteth.”

Ingrid stepped forward. “The people you work for,” she spat at him, “have caused us a lot of pain.”

“I’m well aware,” he answered. “Why else would I have defected? I used my cover as Seteth to distance myself from Solon’s ilk. I currently operate as something of a double agent.”

“Solon is dead,” Dimitri growled. “Our professor slew him herself. Who do you answer to now? Cornelia? Are you her lackey, as the Death Knight is?”

Seteth had a perturbed look on his gaunt face. “I feel,” he said, “as though I need a great many things to be explained to me. What, for Macuil’s sake, has happened while I was away?”

* * *

The Blue Lions had little to do while Seteth retreated to the inn’s washroom to catch up with the months of news he had missed and tidy himself up (with a great deal of assistance from Flayn and Manuela). Little to do but pack their bags in preparation for the final leg of the journey and process the revelation the morning had brought with it. Many of the students were dumbfounded, not sure how to react, and gave Vual a wide berth. Only Dimitri was willing to speak with him, with Dedue at his side.

“I feel so bad for Flayn,” Ignatz said, fiddling anxiously with his glasses. “I can’t imagine how she must be feeling right now. I mean… how would any of _you_ feel if you found out that a family member had been replaced and you hadn’t even noticed?”

Raphael scratched his chin thoughtfully, his eyes downcast. Bernadetta shuddered and pulled her hood over her head. Annette, her head bowed and shoulders hunched, let out a forlorn sigh.

“Unsurprised,” Felix huffed.

“Well, I can’t exactly criticize him for _not_ killing a guy,” Balthus said. “Good on him, I say. I mean, back at the academy I can’t say I never entertained the thought of giving Seteth a good walloping for all his nagging, so I guess this Vual guy’s got a good heart. Anyway, what’s a ‘solon?’”

Sylvain watched Vual like a hawk. “Is it just me,” he asked, “or is there something familiar about that guy?”

“He’s been pretending to be Seteth for a month,” Ingrid said, still disgusted. “He’s still using his body language.”

“No, it’s his voice. I swear I’ve heard it before.” He looked to his class. “Edelgard, Hubert, Professor, what about you?”

“He does sound familiar,” Byleth agreed.

“But where,” Hubert asked, “have we met another one of Solon’s ilk, face-to-face?” He stopped short, though, as though merely asking the question had brought him to the answer.

“At Remire,” Edelgard said. “That’s right, Sylvain. I hear it as well. I believe Vual might be the very same man we met underground—the one who helped Ashe destroy that machine.”

“He was at Remire,” Ingrid murmured, clenching her fists and taking a deep breath. “Professor, if it’s alright, I’d like to check in on the horses.”

Byleth held her back.

“He fell into the machine with Ashe,” Hubert said. “So how did he find his way here?”

“Do you think he ended up in the past with Ashe?” Sylvain wondered.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Felix said. “That would make him over four hundred years old.”

“Yeah, and Solon looked easily a spry nine hundred.”

Ingrid relaxed, staring again at Vual with new eyes. “You… think he _knew_ Ashe?”

Hubert stared at the Blue Lions, his jaw agape and eyes bulging. “…I beg your pardon?” He looked to Edelgard, a helpless and lost look in his eyes. “Lady Edelgard, is there something else you have neglected to tell me?”

Visibly dissatisfied, Dimitri broke away from Vual. Edelgard wasn’t surprised he had found his conversation to be a disappointment. Dedue and Vual had hashed out the terms of their partnership, and the most stringent condition was that while Vual could attest to the existence of Thales, he could not say anything about his secret identity or whereabouts. Edelgard still wondered why Dedue was so hell-bent on hiding the truth about Rodrigue from his liege. Perhaps, she theorized, it was not some nefarious purpose after all, but rather an attempt to protect him—Rodrigue was a savior to Dimitri, like a surrogate father, and the truth might devastate him. Nor could he reveal that Edelgard had been ‘replaced.’

“Vual has little to say about Solon’s particular brand of filth,” Dimitri huffed, returning to the rest of the class with a stormy look on his face.

“Then maybe you should ask him something else, boar,” Felix said. “Maybe something about Ashe.”

A quizzical expression knitted Dimitri’s snowy eyebrows. “Ashe? What do you mean?”

Vual followed in his wake and placed a hand on his shoulder. “So you’ve figured it out,” he said to Felix. “Well done. Ashe had always said that you and Sylvain were especially perceptive.”

Ingrid sat down, as though she’d suddenly lost the strength to stand. “So it’s true that you knew him?” she asked.

 _“Knew_ him? I owe him my life,” Vual answered, smiling for the first time since dawn. “He was my first and best friend. I wish he could be here today to see all of you, but I suppose you’ll have to make do with me in his stead.”

The mood in the room softened considerably as he told the Blue Lions of his history with Ashe over breakfast.

“Are all terms at Garreg Mach this exciting now?” Balthus asked between bites of a slice of toast. “Man, when I was in the Golden Deer the most exciting thing we did was sink a pirate ship off the coast of Derdriu. Not that that wasn’t awesome, but _damn.”_

“I think it’s just our house’s misfortune,” Ignatz said.

“Yes,” Hubert said. “By comparison to the other houses, the Blue Lions are especially cursed.”

After the class had gotten to know Vual, Seteth returned from the inn’s washroom refreshed and rejuvenated, his hair freshly washed and trimmed to an acceptable length and beard neatly manicured. Another few passes of healing spells across his body courtesy of Manuela and Flayn’s white magic had faded the bruises and scars still marring his skin. And since his own clothes had been reduced to rags, he had taken a spare uniform from Vual’s supplies. He looked like his old self, albeit thinner, paler, perhaps fifty pounds lighter and still unsteady on his feet.

“We should set out for Garreg Mach now,” he said, observing the class. There was renewed strength in his voice, though it was still hoarse and weak and at times he struggled to catch his breath. “We have no further business here. I do hope you have been keeping diligent records of your work in my stead, Vual. I would hate to find myself with a backlog, given my current constitution. I also hope you have another disguise you can wear; it would hardly be proper to wear my face, and of course, if you come as you are, Lady Rhea will have you executed on the spot.”

Vual was shocked, like most students, surprised by the very suggestion that he might accompany the class to Garreg Mach.

Flayn stared at Seteth, aghast, perhaps wondering if he was yet _another_ impostor. “Brother… you are not inviting him _back_ to the monastery!”

“I am, Flayn,” he said, “if only to properly repay him for his kindness.”

“I must say, I’ve grown accustomed to your face,” Vual quipped, stroking his chin. “It’s quite a handsome face. Isn’t that right, Professor Manuela?”

Manuela looked away from him, as though intensely embarrassed by the thought that the man she’d been hitting on hadn’t been Seteth at all.

“But, of course, you’re right; we can’t have two of you running around. I’ve discovered that most of the student body thinks one is far more than enough.” He snapped his fingers, and in an instant his body changed yet again. The feathery mane of icy bluish hair retracted into a short, swept-back blonde haircut; a warm and lively complexion spread across his corpse-pale skin and the arcane markings on his face faded away; the bare metal of his false arm and leg was replaced with flesh, however illusory it might have been, and a blue iris appeared ringing a black pupil in his undamaged eye.

Seteth nodded. “That, I suppose, will do.”

Nevertheless, Flayn continued to glare surprisingly venomously at Vual.

“Well,” Balthus said, stretching, “I guess this is where we part ways, old buddy. It’s been a wild ride. Treat yourself to the biggest dinner you’ve ever had tonight. Goddess knows you need it.”

“You are welcome to accompany us as well,” Seteth told him. “I owe you a debt of gratitude as well. And it does pain me to see an alumnus living like a vagrant. You do not even have a horse, let alone a single gold coin to your name.”

“Rub it in, why don’t ya?” Balthus sighed. “Got a bit of a debt to the church, actually. Not of gratitude, of money. You give me room and board, and that just means more debt. I’ll take the vagrant life, thanks. Fresh air, no rent…”

Seteth gave him a scandalized look, as though shocked he had somehow made it through an entire term at the Officer’s Academy. “Absolutely not. Consider your room and board paid for, at least until you are back on your feet. It is shameful to see a man of your pedigree half-starved and pawning the shirt off his back for beer.”

“Ugh. I thought you were asleep when that happened. Well, I can’t say no to a guy I dragged through the mountains. Fine. You win, Seteth. But in return, I’ll sit in on a few of these professors’ classes.”

“For what it is worth. Professor Manuela, how many weeks are left in this term?”

“About three or so,” Manuela said.

“Alright,” Byleth said, “let’s head off. I’ll settle the bill with Anna. Edelgard, Ingrid, check up on the horses and et cetera.”

“On it, Professor,” Ingrid said, and she and Edelgard headed for the stables adjacent to the inn. The two wyverns penned in there were curled up to conserve body heat; the pegasi had their wings tucked to their sides to do the same. The horses stood by, the twitching of their ears and flicking of their tails making them seem almost impatient and eager to get back onto the road.

Ingrid sighed. “I’m hardly one to complain, but… what a morning.”

“Might I ask what you think of Vual?” Edelgard asked her. “Your opinion of him seems to have changed several times in the past hour.”

“I might have killed him when he first showed his face,” she admitted. “When I saw him like that, that corpselike complexion, so much like Solon, I… thought about Ashe, and I felt the same way I feel when I see someone from Duscur and think about Glenn and Dimitri. I felt such hatred… but I’m glad Professor Byleth was there to defuse the tension.” She rifled in her satchel for a curry comb and set to work grooming her mount. “Edelgard, you were one of the first people to criticize me for my prejudice against Duscur. I’ve realized that no matter what they did, there are still good men among them like Dedue who don’t deserve to be tarred with the same brush. I suppose the same must be true of Vual and his people, whatever they are.”

Edelgard smiled as she joined Ingrid in tending to the horses. “It sounds to me as though you’ve admitted you were wrong about something. I suppose I shouldn’t let Sylvain know, or you’ll never live it down.”

Ingrid laughed in spite of herself. “I’d rather admit I’m wrong to you than to anyone else,” she said. “The other day, before we set out for Gaspard, I had a lively conversation with Felix. You remember that one tactics lecture we had, where he suggested clear-cutting a forest and stealing an enemy base’s horses?”

“I’d never been prouder of him. Those were genius tactics.”

“Once again you demonstrate that you don’t see much difference between genius and insanity. But it did get me thinking about unconventional warfare. I was reading an essay about ethically challenging battle scenarios when he ran into me, and I decided to discuss it with him whether he liked it or not.”

“I assume he didn’t like it.”

“No, he didn’t. Anyway, there was a passage in the essay proposing that your commander gives you orders to put your hometown in extreme danger. Would it be proper to carry out the orders, or protect your hometown?”

“I’m aware of the essay you speak of,” Edelgard said. “It’s a difficult question, to say the least.” Many of her close friends, especially the transplants from the other houses, had found themselves struggling to answer it as the war swept deeper into Kingdom and Alliance territory. “I believe it depends more on the purpose of the commander’s orders. There’s nothing salvageable about committing unpleasant deeds for the sake of indefensible goals.”

“The proper thing for a knight to do, of course, would be to follow orders without question,” Ingrid said. “But if there was ever a war, and Prince Dimitri asked me to route an invading army through Galatea for whatever reason, or Ashe’s hometown, or cut down someone I knew from the academy… I’m not sure I could commit myself to following that order. If someone else tried to carry it out, I might even try to stop them. At least, I’d like to imagine so.”

“I see,” Edelgard said. Perhaps Ingrid would have chafed under her command, if in her world the two of them had joined forces. But she had expected the same from many of her fellow Black Eagles only to find them committed to her ideals and her vision for a better Fódlan, so who was to say?

“The essay concluded that the true virtue of being a knight is to be true to one’s heart and do what one believes is right, not necessarily to hew to fealty at all costs. I’d never read anything that said such a thing about chivalry. In fact, the first place I’d heard such an idea had been from you.”

“Perhaps I’m a time traveler myself,” Edelgard coyly suggested, “and I wrote that essay precisely so you would one day read it and realize my righteousness.”

Ingrid laughed. “I suppose I can’t exactly say something like that is impossible. But more to the point, that’s what I think Vual did—he followed his heart, no matter the consequences. Whatever plot he was a part of that made him impersonate Seteth, revealing his true face has probably ruined it. Knowing Solon and Cornelia’s wickedness, I wouldn’t be surprised if his life is forfeit now. To think that someone who once worked for Solon could have become so chivalrous…” She trailed off.

“…Perhaps there’s hope for us all?” Edelgard suggested.

Ingrid chuckled.

Flayn and Seteth drew closer to the stables. Edelgard could hear them coming—not by their footsteps, but by their arguing.

 _“I still do not understand,”_ Flayn said, _“why he must come with us! You have seen what he is just as I have. You, who have told me time and time again to be wary of the world’s dangers… I do not believe I am endangered by many things, but_ this…”

 _“True as that may be, Flayn,”_ Seteth said, pausing to let out a dry and chest-rattling cough. _“Vual, at least, has looked after you as diligently as I myself would have, and he has clearly been kind to you in my stead. I have worried for you every day and feared the worst every night. I must thank him for making my greatest fears unfounded.”_

_“Brother, please. I see faces such as his in my nightmares still. It is because of their lust for our blood and bones that I left you alone for so long, that we have lost Mother, that merely five of us remain when once we filled Zanado!”_

_“Mind your voice, Flayn. We mustn’t speak freely. Well, if it will assuage your fears, then I will have him stay far away from you. But I feel it is entirely appropriate to reward his good deeds, especially when such deeds have not endeared him to his kind—”_

The two of them rounded the corner, caught sight of Edelgard and Ingrid, and immediately ceased their conversation. Flayn’s face was flushed red with embarrassment.

“Ah. Edelgard, Ingrid,” Seteth said, leaning on his walking stick and hobbling forward. “Flayn and I were going to see to our mounts. I fear I am in no condition to fly on my own, and so I shall ride home with Flayn on her pegasus.” He paused to cough again into his sleeve. “If Vual may ride with one of you, I can ask his wyvern to fly back to its roost on its own.”

“I’d be happy to offer him a ride,” Ingrid said. She offered him a polite bow. “I’m sorry for these difficult times. If there is anything Edelgard and I can do for you, just say the word.”

Seteth nodded. “You have my thanks. I have nothing to ask of you at this time.”

* * *

Later that morning, the Blue Lions departed from the ruins of Remire and made for the spires of Garreg Mach emerging from within the mountains ahead. Flayn and Seteth, Ingrid and Vual, and Dimitri flew on ahead of the ground convoy as Byleth and Manuela led the class up the winding, hilly path that stretched up the slopes of the wooded foothills homeward, the sun in their eyes.

As they rode, Dedue positioned his horse adjacent to Edelgard and drew as close to her as he could. She slowed her mount to match the gait of his and allowed the two of them to fall to the back of the group.

“Vual can no longer complete his mission to spy on Lady Rhea and undermine the Knights of Seiros,” he said to her, his voice low. The tiniest hint of a smile tugged at the corners of his lips. “But Thales does not need to know that.”

“What he doesn’t know,” she agreed, nodding, “won’t hurt him.”

He returned her nod. “Until we want it to,” he added.

“Dedue,” she said, smiling, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

The sun continued to rise over the mountains as the morning ceded ground to noon, and as it approached its zenith Edelgard and her classmates could see the shadows behind their backs shrink away and dwindle to nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: [Perpetual stew](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew) is a real thing and its inclusion in this chapter was 100% because someone sent me a Wikipedia article about it.
> 
> Sometimes I do actual research for this fic! Most of the time I make shit up.


	35. The Beasts of Garreg Mach

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard goes catsitting, the Blue Lions throw a surprise party, and a shocking fact is revealed about the Hurricane King which changes everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: There is a brief description of physical torture more intense than the typical scenes of violence within this fic that lasts for several paragraphs. The scene begins with the line "Edelgard’s blood ran cold." and ends with the line "The pain slowly began to fade, and at last she took a deep, filling, and unimpeded breath of cold night air."

With no further sightings of the Hurricane King in weeks and the Death Knight last seen in Gaspard territory, the curfew over Garreg Mach was lifted, which came as a relief to all of the students who had been counting on access to the library or other facilities past sunset to prepare for their final certification exams.

It also made it easier for certain conspiracy-minded students to further advance their secret treaties under cover of darkness, and so the very same night the Blue Lions had returned to the monastery, after Edelgard had made certain Volkhard, Pascal, and Hedwig knew she was safe and sound, she was free to pay Hapi a visit without anyone bothering her.

“Where’ve you been?” Hapi muttered, staring at her in the disinterested, aloof way cats did from an alcove she’d made into a little nest of spare blankets and pillows as Edelgard took a conjured flame and set it to the torches mounted in the wall sconces around this stretch of bony corridor.

At first glance, especially wreathed in the shadows of the catacombs, she looked perfectly human, like a beggar sitting on the side of a city street. But with each successive torch lighted and each shadow chased away her monstrous nature became clearer: first the curled ram’s horns, gleaming like polished onyx, sprouting from her brow; next the pointed ears, long, sharp, and red-furred with black tufts on the tips, poking out from her tangled mane of scarlet hair; then the paws that stuck out from the cuffs of her tunic’s too-short sleeves, black-furred and capped with gleaming black claws, with fingers and thumbs as long and dexterous as a human’s but nowhere near as nimble; last, the long and bushy tail curled around her side, its tip occasionally twitching and flicking. Only her face was entirely human, save for the reflected discs of light in her eyes and the faint bulge her fangs made behind her lips.

“Please pardon my absence,” Edelgard said, slowly creeping closer down the catacomb’s winding corridor so as not to startle her. “We had a few days’ setback during our mission.” She knelt at her side and offered her hand to her. Even huddled in a corner, Hapi loomed over her.

Hapi sniffed it skeptically, then rubbed her cheek against it and lowered her head, allowing Edelgard to rake her fingernails across her scalp and scratch behind her ear. “You’re pardoned,” she said.

“I hope Catherine and Alois have been treating you well in my absence.”

“Meh.” Her neutral tone belied her purring. “They gave me some pillows and stuff and throw some food down here every day, at least.” Her stomach growled, competing with the satisfied rumble in her throat.

“Not enough?”

“Not nearly. And I think I’ve nearly cleared this place out of rats.”

“Rats?” Edelgard felt a chill run up her spine. She knew there were rats down here, but she didn’t like being reminded of it. “You’ve been… eating rats? Raw?” That, she supposed, explained the crusty little bits of what on closer inspection looked to be dried blood around her mouth… and her rank breath.

“No, I roast ‘em over a fire and season ‘em with exotic spices.” Hapi rolled her eyes. She seemed to be much more lucid now than the day she’d transformed, more like her old self. “Yeah, raw. It’s not like they taste _bad_ or anything. Just nothing to write home about.”

Edelgard supposed she should have counted herself lucky Hapi had never left a dead rat in front of her door as a ‘gift.’ “I’ll bring you what I can from now on.”

“I miss chocolate. Bring me some.”

“As I recall, it’s poisonous to cats and dogs.”

“I’m…” Hapi sat up and lifted her leg and, with a stunning display of animal flexibility, used her paw to scratch behind one ear. “Human. Mostly.”

Edelgard would not have called her ‘mostly’ human in her current state. Mentally, perhaps, she was human save for a patina of animal instinct, but physically she still had far too much fur under her clothes and too many claws and scales to be _mostly_ human… and too much of a taste for raw meat. “I’d rather not risk making you sick.”

With a sharp and squealing mewl, a ball of orange and white fluff crawled out from the nest of pillows and blankets and laid its tiny paws on Edelgard’s thigh. It looked up at her with bulbous green eyes filling its tiny face.

She smiled. “I see Alois gave you your babies back,” she said, putting her hand to the kitten’s head and ruffling its fur. Its head was so small that she could wrap her hand around it. “Would you mind if I pick this one up?”

“Go ahead, but be careful.”

She took her other hand and slipped it under the kitten, lifting it up off the ground and cradling it. It purred, its entire body vibrating in her hands. “Have you named any of them yet?”

Hapi shrugged. “I mean, do cats name their babies?”

Edelgard examined it. It was, like three of the other kittens, a Riegan tabby and seemed to be a male. “If I might make a suggestion, you could call this one Ferdinand.”

Hapi laughed. “Alright. If you say so.”

Jealous of the attention Ferdinand the Riegan tabby was getting, the rest of the litter left the nest and crowded around Edelgard, squealing and pawing needily at her lap.

Edelgard set Ferdinand on her lap and picked up another kitten, one of two snow-white Ordelions. “This one, you could call Lysithea.”

“I could,” Hapi said, “but I don’t really need to call them by name. I just sorta make a little rumble in my throat and they come running.”

Edelgard supposed that she couldn’t be surprised Hapi spoke fluent cat now.

She tended to the rest of the kittens as they piled in her lap for a few minutes until Ferdinand (much like his namesake) let out a long, loud, plaintive squeal, begging to be given the attention his siblings were getting.

Hapi brushed a few of the kittens aside, stretched, and laid her paws and her head on Edelgard’s lap. “Don’t hog your Auntie Edelgard,” she told the protesting kittens. “Mommy wants attention, too.”

Edelgard felt the tip of one of Hapi’s curled horns press into her stomach. “‘Auntie’ Edelgard?”

“Yeah. You got a problem with that?”

“It’s just that when you were a beast, you treated me like a helpless kitten,” she said, setting down the tentatively-named Lysithea atop Hapi’s head and letting it knead her mane in its tiny paws.

Hapi laughed. “Really? So that makes you these kittens’ step-sister?”

Prompted by Hapi’s joke, Edelgard recalled that, technically, Cornelia was her step-sister now, which made Hapi her niece by adoption. And Mercedes as well, if one were to go down that rabbit hole. “You really don’t remember?”

“Sort of? It’s like… right now, everything from when I was fully a beast or fully human just feels like a dream I’ve woken up from. You know how the details just leak out faster the harder you try to hold onto them…”

“But you remember me, and Byleth, and Jeralt.”

“Sometimes dreams stick with you.”

“Do you remember Mercedes?”

Hapi blinked. “Hmm. Mercedes… Gimme a hint.”

“Your adopted sister.”

“Oh.” She thought for a moment, slowly closing her eyes and sinking deeper into Edelgard’s lap, the tips of her claws very gently curling inward and pressing into her thigh. Her paw pads were as icy as the stone floor and the cold bled through Edelgard’s skirt.

With one hand Edelgard scratched behind Hapi’s ear; with the other, she pulled up the hem of her tunic to reveal the row of gleaming black scales running down her spine to the base of her tail and the swath of scarlet fur that spread across her back, and out of idle curiosity she let her fingertip trace the patterns of black rings and rosettes marking her pelt.

“You still don’t remember, do you?” she asked her. Hapi could no more recall her life under Cornelia’s thumb, it seemed, than she herself could recall her own distant past. In the liminal state between human and beast, Hapi’s memories of both lives were like the liminal state between waking and dreaming—just as Edelgard could almost never clearly remember either her carefree childhood days when everything had been rosy and idyllic or the depths of the dungeon where everything that had made her human had been torn away from her.

“Nah, I think I got something. Mercedes… She was nice, I guess,” Hapi answered. “Wasn’t allowed to talk to me. I wasn’t allowed to talk to her, either, or anyone else. But she’d sneak me a pastry or candy every once in a while, though.”

“Do you think she knew how Cornelia treated you?”

“Probably not.” Hapi yawned and then rolled over onto her back, curling her paws over her chest. She stared up from Edelgard’s lap, her scarlet eyes looking past Edelgard’s. “Details are kinda hazy. And I don’t wanna think about Cornelia right now, anyway.”

“I understand.” Edelgard curled her finger under Hapi’s chin; Hapi closed her eyes and tilted her head back, purring louder. Edelgard could feel the resonant vibrations under the skin of her throat, traveling up her arm the way the reverberations of clashing swords rattled one’s bones. It was nice. She just wished Hapi smelled better instead of like… well, a _beast._

“You need a bath,” she told Hapi.

“Nah. I got that covered,” Hapi said flippantly.

“How?”

“Oh, you know. I lick the back of my paw and rub it all over the places I can’t reach otherwise.”

“That is _not_ sufficient,” Edelgard told her, trying as hard as she could to push a very unwelcome mental image from her mind.

“It is for cats.”

“I am going to have Catherine and Alois bring a big basin of water down here and a bucket of soap.”

“The two of them by themselves?” Hapi laughed. “I’d like to see ‘em try.”

Edelgard kept running the tips of her fingernails up Hapi’s throat and chin, lightly scratching the skin. She had to admit she had never done this before to someone who was, well, roughly humanoid at least, but since Hapi seemed to enjoy it, she wondered how good it might feel to a human… such as herself. Or Byleth. Whenever she could sleep with her again, what would she have to do to convince Byleth to let her do this to her?

Hapi pulled away from her and the next thing Edelgard knew, a set of sharp fangs were digging into the flesh of her hand—enough to hurt, but not enough to do anything more than leave dimples in her skin.

Edelgard tried to pull her hand free of Hapi’s mouth. Hapi let go, but only for an instant before biting down again. “If you want me to stop,” she said, “you need only ask—”

The next thing she knew, she was lying on the floor, the kittens had scattered, and Hapi was on top of her, staring at her with dilated eyes like pools of ink. Edelgard lifted her hand and Hapi all but attacked it, clapping her paws over it and biting down on her finger. It was only when Hapi was looming over her did Edelgard fully realize just how much bigger she was than herself. She wasn’t moose-sized anymore, but in her half-beast form she was easily seven feet tall.

A moment later, Hapi let go of her and scampered back into the alcove, her cheeks flushed almost as red as her fur and her tail lashing back and forth.

“Sorry,” she said, huddling in her makeshift nest of blankets and pillows. “I guess I got bored.”

Edelgard looked down at the little pockmarks Hapi’s teeth had made on her hand and the sharp gashes and faint red scars that now crisscrossed her sleeve and her forearm. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can play with you. If you leave too many marks, certain people who are scrutinizing me very closely might get suspicious. You are supposed to be dead, after all. And I’m supposed to be responsible for it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hapi said, bowing her head dejectedly. “Not much to do down here, though. Except hunt rats.”

One of the orange kittens (probably Ferdinand, but there were several) squeaked at her.

“Yeah, and make sure you and the rest of the moron brigade don’t get into trouble, too,” Hapi said, patting it on the head.

Edelgard picked herself up and returned to her side, resting her head on her arm. She could feel the fur under the sleeve of Hapi’s just-barely-fitting tunic. “I’m sorry. I’d stay down here all night if I could.”

“What’s stopping you?”

“If my fiance comes over to wake me up in the morning and my bedroom is empty, the worrying might be enough to strike him dead on the spot.”

She felt Hapi’s fluffy tail curl around her and rest in her lap. “So what,” Hapi said.

“You drive a hard bargain,” Edelgard said, stifling a yawn. “Unfortunately, I can’t sleep down here. But you remember that my mother taught you to read, don’t you?”

“Uh… hmm… kinda. Yeah. A bit. I think I can still read. Haven’t done it, but… yeah.”

“Perhaps I can bring a few books from the library down here… provided you take good care of them.”

“Just make sure they’re exciting ones.” Hapi closed her eyes and curled up in her nest. “And easy ones. I don’t remember how much your mom taught me. G’night, Edelgard.”

“Good night, Hapi,” Edelgard said. At least, if there was one thing cats were good at, it was sleeping.

Still, the sight of her curled up against a wall deep underground in such a dark and rat-infested place broke Edelgard’s heart. Nobody deserved to live without sunlight, least of all her.

Hapi cracked one eye open. “Something wrong?”

Edelgard realized that her eyes had been stinging and wiped them on her sleeve. “I just wish you hadn’t been forced into this place.”

“Yeah. But it’s for the best, I guess. I liked Jeralt and, uh… um… what’s his name… that one guy Claudester set me up with. It’d be nice to be with one of them. But it’s not so bad here. No one comes down here,” Hapi said, “so I don’t need to worry about endangering anyone. If I sigh and a monster breaks in, it’s just survival of the fittest, and I can just kill it and eat it.”

“Have you done that?” Edelgard asked, perturbed.

“Once by accident,” Hapi answered, closing her eyes again and pulling Byleth’s old gray coat over one shoulder. “Once when I was really hungry. It’s kinda funny, though—the monsters that show up don’t seem so big and tough now.”

“Well, all the same, I’m going to see to it you are brought more food,” Edelgard told her.

Hapi sank deeper into her nest. “Okay,” she murmured drowsily.

Edelgard left the catacombs. How wonderful it would be, she mused, if she could sleep as easily as a cat as well.

* * *

Due to the few days’ setback during the mission to Castle Gaspard, the week was a wash; when Edelgard woke up the next morning, it was already Friday. After several months that seemed to have crawled by with agonizing slowness, it seemed the Pegasus Moon was eager to wrap itself up as swiftly as possible. There were only a few weeks left in the term; the final certification exams would be held in the first week of the Lone Moon, and the graduation ceremony the next week.

There was a loud, frantic knocking at her door that roused her from her bed, though she usually didn’t need much help doing that. She pulled the bedsheets off of herself and slipped her feet into a pair of slippers resting on the rug, draping her cloak over her shoulders to hold in the warmth. “Who’s there?” she called out.

 _“It is I, Ferdinand,”_ Ferdinand answered from the other side of the door. _“And your brother.”_

Edelgard had hardly cracked open the door before Ferdinand, followed by Anselm, winnowed their way inside.

“Edelgard, dear, darling, oh Goddess,” Ferdinand breathed, wrapping his arms around her and pressing her to his chest. He looked as though he hadn’t slept, or at least hadn’t slept well—his carrot-red hair was mussed and unkempt, his eyes bloodshot, his cheeks and chin dusted with a day’s stubble, and he was still in his pajamas. “Forgive my impropriety. Hubert told me what happened in Gaspard last night. No wonder you were delayed a few days! I wished to rush to your side immediately, but I knew you would need a good night’s rest. Were you seriously hurt? Is anything sore?”

Edelgard extricated herself from his grip. “I appreciate your concern. I was struck in the shoulder, but the wound is healed. It only aches a little.” She looked to Anselm. “I assume you’ve been informed as well?”

“Of course. It is my business to know what threats there are to my favorite little sister’s life,” Anselm said with a smile that did not offset the concerned warmth in his eyes. He was much more well put-together than Ferdinand, though of course he wasn’t staying right down the hall and thus had to make himself look presentable.

“I’ll tell Hedwig she isn’t your favorite.”

“You wouldn’t dare. Anyway, it does my heart good to see that your fiance is so attentive.”

“Well, what kind of a husband must a noble be, and a scion of House Aegir no less?” Ferdinand boasted. “I must show the world how a wife should properly be treated. We nobles must set the standards by which the world abides.”

“Your commitment to noble ideals is quite admirable,” Anselm said. “I would be honored to work alongside you in some capacity when you become prime minister, whether I become emperor or not.”

Ferdinand smiled. Anselm’s flattery worked far too well on him. “I do believe I may have misjudged you, Anselm. Though your bid for the throne is most uncouth and far from the righteous path of a proper noble, I cannot feel _entirely_ uncharitable to a man such as yourself. You are, perhaps, not so bad. Although if I may offer a suggestion—”

“Ferdinand, why don’t you go to the dining hall and bring my dear sister breakfast and a kettle of fresh tea? She has been through so much; why not give her a more leisurely morning before classes begin?”

“An excellent idea, Prince Anselm,” Ferdinand said, and with a quick and polite bow, he darted out of the room.

Without Ferdinand to impress, Anselm’s demeanor instantly changed. He was in some ways as mercurial in his ways as Vual. “Over a week buttering him up and the best he can be is ‘not entirely charitable,’” he scoffed, rolling his eyes dismissively at the door.

“It seems your charm can only take you so far,” Edelgard said. “My future husband can be quite foolish at times, but he’s no fool.”

Anselm smiled. “I see your point. Anyway, getting to business, I must once again ask if you can write a letter to Burkhart testifying to Cornelia’s wickedness. While you were gone, I finally persuaded Uncle Volkhard to pen a letter urging caution and for Professor Hanneman to write a sworn affidavit regarding his regarding his experiences with her. Captain Catherine has also pledged to provide testimony of her own. You, and perhaps Professor Manuela as well, _must_ contribute. He may pass off a letter from one relative, especially me of all people, but he cannot discount the word of half a dozen of us.”

“Are you that keen on convincing him to annul his marriage to her?” Edelgard asked. “If the great houses of Adrestia balk at their union, it sounds like that would be best for your ambitions.”

“News of this is already spreading through the Empire,” Anselm said, and if he was speaking truthfully, then Edelgard figured it was likely him and his allies doing the spreading. “The damage to his prospects has been done. I feel confident that nobles who had previously been ambivalent will now flock to me. But if we can persuade him to annul the marriage on his own terms, he can pass it off as ignorance on his part and salvage some small part of his reputation. I do not _like_ Burkhart, but I do not want him to die in disgrace.”

“I see,” Edelgard said. She stroked her chin thoughtfully. “I wonder, wouldn’t you prefer if we all participated in this effort to change his mind and nothing happened? If he is too enchanted by her wiles to see reason, then even some of his die-hard supporters might deign to endorse you.”

“True,” Anselm said, shrugging. “But this is about more than a crown. What emperor would I be if I refused to save my brother’s soul out of political expediency? Most certainly not a virtuous one. How can I champion the cause of the Goddess if I condemn my brother to infamy?”

“I’ll see about writing a letter,” Edelgard said, relenting. She let out a put-upon sigh and tried to will tears to her eyes. “But… oh, Ansy. I—I just… Mercedes was a dear friend to me and to many of the Blue Lions, and I’m afraid I… I’ve just—such _evil_ is… is…”

With a frown and furrowed brow, Anselm swept her up in his arms and held her close. “Oh, El. I am sorry. I hadn’t realized how personal this matter is for you. It’s all the more reason that the truth _needs_ to reach our eldest brother, but I see you are in no position to help.” He cupped her chin in his hand and lifted her face so that her eyes would meet his. “I will pen _our_ letter myself and tell him how terribly traumatized you have been by Cornelia’s wickedness. If _that_ does not move him, then he is lost.”

He spent the next few minutes stroking her hair until Ferdinand came back with a plate of (rapidly cooling) breakfast in one hand and a steaming kettle of tea in the other.

Edelgard took her breakfast in bed on her brother and fiance’s insistence, but had no interest in sitting out the morning’s lecture from Byleth. Ferdinand left to prepare for Hanneman’s morning lecture with the Black Eagles, Anselm left the room to give her sister some privacy, and Edelgard dressed herself in a fresh uniform and took her bag and her notebooks.

The bag felt heavier than usual, even before she’d put anything in it—and then she remembered the brick of semtex she had stolen. Her throat grew dry at the memory flashing past her mind’s eye of Castle Gaspard crumbling to the bowels of the earth. This, more than anything, was something to use wisely.

She left her bedroom only to find Anselm waiting for her. He offered her his hand and a brotherly smile. “May I walk you to class?” he asked.

“I don’t see the harm in it,” she said, taking his hand. The two of them left the dormitories.

“I hope your professor won’t mind if I sit in on her lecture,” he said. “Everybody speaks so highly of the enigmatic Professor Byleth Eisner. I’d like to know what all the fuss is about.”

“I’m sure she won’t mind, as long as you behave yourself.”

“I am nothing if not housebroken.”

In no time, they reached the Blue Lions’ common room. Most of the class was there, save for a few of the students, but Byleth was yet to arrive.

Bernadetta stood in front of them, oblivious to their arrival. “Oh, great, Bernie’s not late,” she muttered to herself as she ambled to a free desk. “Plenty of seats in the back row… just how Bernie likes it! No one to bother, no one to do the bothering…”

“I think I’ll take a seat in the back row,” Anselm said, smiling coyly as he stepped over the threshold, “just to make sure I don’t disrupt the class. Hello, Bernadetta.”

Bernadetta let out a yelp and shot out of her seat, hastily scrabbling at her books and scooping them up in her arms. “O-On s-s-second thought, I learn much better up front!” She noticed Felix and Sylvain in the front row and realized she was trapped. “On… third thought…”

“Don’t mind me, dear,” Anselm said, sitting with one empty seat between himself and her. “Daydream to your heart’s content if you like; I’m not here to judge you. El, I’m assuming the new and improved Edelgard sits up front?”

“She does, usually,” Edelgard said, surveying the class. There was still time left before class started, but not much. She’d have expected Annette to be sitting up front by now, but Ingrid was currently where she usually sat. Dimitri and Dedue hadn’t arrived yet either, though they were usually punctual.

As she drew closer, she could hear Sylvain and Felix talking among themselves.

 _“…crazy idea,”_ Sylvain was whispering, _“but hear me out. Ever since we unmasked Mercedes, I’ve been thinking about the Hurricane King. The_ real _one, not the fake one. What if he’s…”_

 _“If we ever run into that beast and you start_ flirting _with it, Sylvain, I swear to the Goddess…”_

 _“No, I’m serious. What if he’s…”_ His voice dropped out of earshot as he leaned closer and lowered his voice, putting a hand in front of his mouth to dampen the sound and foil any would-be lip readers.

Felix laughed. “You think _he_ could pull off a disguise like that? He’s strong enough to be the Hurricane King, but the boar doesn’t have the wits to pull off a secret identity.”

Sylvain frantically held a finger to his lips, panic-stricken, but it was too late.

Ingrid stood up and slammed her palms on the surface of her desk like a thunderclap. “You two can’t be serious! How can you even entertain the thought of that vile, murderous _monster_ being Prince Dimitri?”

“What vile, murderous monster?” Edelgard asked, pretending not to have overheard.

“Nothing,” Ingrid said, glaring at Sylvain.

“It was just a theory, Ingrid,” Sylvain said, trying to deflect her anger. “Theories can be wrong. It’s just that we can’t really rule anyone out… except the people who were there the first time we met the Hurricane King. Dimitri wasn’t with us. He was with _Mercedes.”_

“You can’t say that about him! It’s slander, it’s—” Ingrid bit her lip and balled her hands into fists.

“I’m with you, Ingrid,” Felix said, crossing his arms. “It’s a stupid idea.”

“Who’s to say our first encounter with the Hurricane King was the _real_ Hurricane King to begin with?” Edelgard posited. “Who’s to say there _is_ a real one to begin with, for that matter? We can’t just start wantonly accusing classmates. For all we know, he could simply be a gang of complete unknowns, random men like the one we fought in the Sealed Forest who take turns wearing the costume.”

Ingrid sighed and unclenched her fists. “Thank you, Edelgard. See, Sylvain?”

“Forget it,” Sylvain said, slumping over in his seat and resting his head on the desk. “I said it was a crazy idea.”

“If we carry on like this and start doubting everyone simply because of Mercedes,” Edelgard added, “we’ll all eat each other alive. We need to trust each other now more than ever.”

Byleth entered the class with Dimitri and Dedue in her wake. Edelgard was glad the situation had been defused before any of them could have overheard it. Who knew what consequences could stem from Dedue worrying that his liege’s cover had been blown?

Annette slipped into the classroom as Byleth took her position up in front of the well-worn chalkboard, and much unlike herself, slipped into the empty seat between Bernadetta and Anselm.

“Everyone here?” Byleth asked, surveying the class as everyone took their seats, took out their notebooks, and inked their pens. “Okay, good. I know it’s been a hard week for us all. But there’s not much time left and we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. Anyway, today we’ll finish up last Friday’s analysis of…” She trailed off. It sounded like her heart wasn’t in it. “You in the back. Are you new to this class?”

Anselm stood up and bowed. “Pardon my intrusion, Professor Byleth. I’d heard such great things about you and wanted to sit in on one of your lectures. Anselm von Hresvelg, eighth prince of Adrestia.”

“Oh.” Byleth raised her eyebrows. “Nice to meet you, Anselm. Anyway, last Friday we were talking about the Almyran invasion of 961. Today we’ll look at Fódlan’s Locket and how it countered the Almyran military’s tactics. After that, we’ll have a mock battle in place of our usual battalion drills to get a firsthand feel of the tactics employed by both sides…”

* * *

As glum and demoralized as the Blue Lions had been, at the very least the morning’s mock battle got their blood flowing and their hearts racing. In the heat of battle, with half of the Blue Lions on the defenders’ side and half on the attackers’ side and one of the battalions available for rent split between each side, they could forget their troubles for a moment. Felix and Dedue were placed on the side of the attackers, both taking to the Almyrans’ hit-and-run attacks like a duck to water, and as expected, Dedue only became a more formidable foe when his allies had fallen and the forces under his command had been whittled down. If Edelgard and Sylvain hadn’t been on the defenders’ side to counter the attackers’ tactical edge, they might not have stood a chance, even with Dimitri’s strength and Ignatz’s swiftness and accuracy on their side.

Edelgard’s shoulder, which still throbbed on occasion in the spot where Mercedes had stabbed her, ached particularly fiercely as she and the rest of the class marched with the battalion they’d rented from the guild and the horses they’d taken from the stables back to the monastery.

“Allow me to take a look at that,” Anselm said, laying his hand atop hers as she pressed against the aching spot and channeling a wave of healing magic through it. His skill with faith magic spoke for itself; if he weren’t a prince with a cutthroat sense of ambition, he would have made a great physician. While he’d sat out and watched the battle from the sidelines along with Byleth, Edelgard had sworn he had cast a physic spell on Bernadetta to keep her from being ‘killed’ at least once.

The ache faded away. “Thanks, Ansy,” Edelgard said.

“It’s nothing. You were amazing out there, El. You even improved from your performance at Gronder Field.”

“I would hope I’d improved since then.”

“You did well today, Bernadetta,” Dedue said. “Your endurance has improved.”

“Yeah,” Raphael chimed in. “You got a second, maybe even a _third_ wind out there!”

Embarrassed, Bernadetta shrank away from them and glanced over to Anselm with a look on her face that suggested she knew exactly what he had done.

The only person who didn’t seem exhilarated was Annette, for whom the thrill of battle and sport seemed to have subsided much more quickly. She plodded along near the back of the group, her head bowed and eyes downcast, her training gauntlets dangled from a leather strap over her shoulder swaying with every lethargic step. Her mage’s robes seemed as heavy on her as a full suit of plate armor.

While Edelgard slowed down to match Annette’s pace, Anselm sped up to catch up with Byleth. “So, Professor,” he said to her, “I can see that your reputation doesn’t do you justice. At which school did you study tactics and strategy? You’re too young to have attended here as a student—not without running into me or one of my elder siblings, that is. One of the other officer’s academies, perhaps?”

Byleth shrugged. “I’ve been taking point on strategy for my dad’s mercenary company since I was fourteen. We’d play a lot of board games in our downtime.”

“Board games…” Anselm muttered, shaking his head in disbelief.

Edelgard took Annette by the hand. “Annette. Are you alright?”

Annette looked up at her, then down at her hand, as though she hadn’t noticed until that instant that it was being held. “Oh! I’m, um… I’m fine,” she said, slipping her hand out of Edelgard’s grip. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind. I want to write to Constance and let her know about Mercie. I had all the words ready last night, but as soon as I put my pen to paper, I just couldn’t do it.”

“Is there anything I can do to help? Perhaps I could dictate the letter for you.”

Annette’s cheeks, already rosy from exertion, turned redder. “O-Oh, no, that’s—you do so much for me already, Edelgard. Besides, you have enough on your plate without piling my problems on top.” She sighed. “It’s just… with so little time left, I’ve got to work harder than ever, but it’s hard enough to focus as it is. I already felt like my schedule was slipping away from me _before_ we went to Gaspard. I feel like I let everyone down here.”

“You’re doing fine. Things can be better,” Edelgard said, patting her on the back.

 _“Can_ be?”

“Everyone says, ‘things are going to be fine,’” she explained to a doubtful Annette, “or ‘everything’s going to be okay,’ or ‘the best is yet to come,’ but I’ve always found those to ring hollow. No one knows what the future will bring, for good or for ill. To speak with such certainty smacks of false confidence and naivete. What matters is knowing that the _possibility_ exists for things to be better. There is _always_ a possibility. No matter how slim of a chance, there _is_ a chance, and you can be as sure of that as you can that the sun will set in the west and rise in the east.”

Annette smiled. It was short-lived, but it was a smile nonetheless. “Thanks, Edelgard. It’s just that Mercie… It’s hard to think about anything or anyone else. I feel obsessed. I just can’t take my mind off of how much it hurt to see her face.” She paused for a while to chew her lip, wringing her hands. “I wish I’d just ran away that day. There are so many things I could’ve done differently that wouldn’t have ended in unmasking her. I didn’t have to find out.”

“What’s done is done, Annette,” Edelgard said. “Our actions are final. The past can’t be changed. The only thing we can alter is our future.” Even Byleth had limits.

Annette nodded.

“You can depend on me for anything,” Edelgard assured her.

The class returned to the academy grounds, stabled their mounts, and returned their weapons and armor to the armory while the battalion they’d rented returned to their barracks. The students would go their separate ways after lunch to study their own subjects in accordance with the paths they’d chosen—some would attend afternoon seminars taught by the faculty and off-duty knights, while others would spend their time in the training hall or the library.

While the class took their lunch, Ingrid took a seat next to Edelgard in the dining hall. “Edelgard. I hope you don’t mind?”

“Not at all, Ingrid,” Edelgard said, setting her spoon down into her bowl of soup. “Do you need something?”

“Well, I was wondering if you’d like to join me in the training hall after this. I’d love to practice my lancefaire against someone as good with axes as you.”

“Sorry, but I need to focus on magic. Anselm insists on tutoring me.”

“I know how pushy older brothers can be.” Ingrid paused to have some of her soup. “But actually, there’s something _else_ I want to ask you about. It’s about Annette.”

“With whom I hold hands is nobody’s business but mine and the whom in question,” Edelgard said, giving her a coy smirk.

“That’s not what I mean. I just think we should do something for her.”

“What did you have in mind?”

While Ingrid silently pondered her response, Edelgard blew on her spoon to cool the broth.

“Okay, this sounds silly—but a part of me is thinking about that party we threw for Mercedes the night before she left. Annette’s so… social. If we could organize something like that for her, maybe it would help her deal with the grief.”

Edelgard almost snickered, which would have made her choke on her spoonful of soup. Instead, she kept herself composed as she swallowed her food. “You want to throw a party for Annette?”

“It’s all I can really think of. But I know I’m not much of a frivolous person, so I’m not really sure where to begin.”

“And you ask me? The second most uptight girl in the academy?”

Ingrid’s brow furrowed. “Who’s the fir—Excuse you! Anyway, since you used to be so laid-back, I thought you might know how to… have fun. I really can’t think of any other person here who’s as much of a ray of sunshine as Annette, though. Maybe Hilda?”

“You want me to go to _Hilda_ for help?”

“Why? Have you had a falling-out or something?” She looked glumly into her bowl. “Oh. It’s because she saw you dancing with me, isn’t it?”

“Oh, no, no, nothing like that. It’s just that Hilda doesn’t _plan_ things. She’s the laziest girl in all of Leicester, and her only ambition is to be the laziest woman in all of Leicester.”

Ingrid chuckled. “Well… maybe with her sense of fun and our organizational skills combined, we could set something up.”

The two of them turned their attention to their meals, both ruminating on the plan they had been discussing.

“You think Hilda’s fun?” Edelgard asked as she used her bread roll to sop up the rest of the broth in her bowl.

“Well, objectively speaking, more so than the two of us,” Ingrid said, doing the same. “She makes charms and necklaces, is good with fashion, and is always doing things with nail polish and makeup. It’s not _my_ idea of fun…”

“But your idea of fun is hitting people with swords. Alright—I’ll ask Hilda the next time I see her. I must warn you, though, she will pawn off as much of the labor involved as possible on us.”

“I’d like to see her try.” Ingrid took a defiant bite of her broth-dampened roll.

“You will,” Edelgard said.

The two of them finished their meal, returned their bowls and plates, and left the dining hall. Before they could go their separate ways, though—Edelgard to meet Anselm in the library, Ingrid to find a sparring partner in the training hall—they ran into a familiar face.

Vual met them in the great hall wearing his new human disguise. Tall, thin, and pale—but no longer inhumanly so—with swept back blonde hair, he towered over them. He wore an azure velvet cloak over a set of formal clothes that must have been recently acquired, considering Seteth had taken back all of his clothes (Vual’s new disguise was taller and thinner than Seteth anyway, so none of them would have fit). The eye he’d hidden with a patch while disguised as Seteth was uncovered, but unlike his other eye, which was an icy blue, it was a pale amber.

“Oh,” Ingrid said, surprised to see him. “Vu—”

“I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced,” Vual said, cutting her off. He bowed to her and Edelgard. “Lady Ingrid Galatea, Lady Edelgard von Hresvelg, it is an honor to make your acquaintance. My name is Albus Duerr.”

“Of course,” Ingrid said. “Of… course we know your name, Albus.”

“What are you doing in the monastery, Albus?” Edelgard asked him. “I’d have thought you would have settled in town.”

“Well, I can hardly do my job from over there, can I?” Vual smiled. “Seteth has brought me on as his assistant in clerical matters. Until he’s recovered, he can’t keep up with the routine paperwork and administration associated with the church and academy. There are mountains of it. Speaking of paperwork, Edelgard, I need to discuss some documents pertaining to your enrollment with you.”

“Enrollment?” Edelgard feigned worry. “There isn’t something wrong, is there?”

“I’m sure it’s nothing—just a transcription error. But I might as well straighten it out while you’re here. If you’ll just come upstairs with me to my office…”

“I was headed upstairs anyway,” she said, “so I don’t mind taking a detour.”

“Excellent. Right this way, Your Highness,” he said, leading her away. She followed him upstairs to a small office that was little more than a cubbyhole with a chair and desk in it. “They couldn’t give me the best accommodations,” he said, sloughing off his cloak and hanging it on the rack next to the door, “but it’ll do. Watch your head.”

Edelgard was in no danger of bumping her head against the ceiling, nor was Vual, but the office was so cramped and stuffed with books and loose pages that it felt much smaller and more claustrophobic than it was.

“Shut the door,” he told her. “These documents are confidential; you might have embarrassing secrets in them. Privacy is paramount.”

Edelgard closed the door behind her. “So, what’s this about?”

“Well, I was going through the application your uncle submitted on your behalf before the start of this term and noticed that your admission fee has yet to be paid.”

She laughed. “Are you serious?”

“No. Actually, I need to tell you that Thales wants us to call him again tomorrow night. Dedue will be coming along.”

She eyed the documents spilling over the desk. “It seems you’ll have quite a lot to tell him.”

“Yes, these documents are quite helpful.” Vual tapped on one of the books. “Now I know exactly what _not_ to tell him.”

“Is that why Seteth agreed to let you act as his assistant? To run interference on Thales?”

“For the most part, yes. But it’s also so that he can extract information from me. The Agarthans are an enemy the church has presumed to be extinct for nearly a thousand years. He wants to know everything about us.”

Edelgard felt the soup she’d eaten curdle in her stomach. “Aren’t you worried about what Rhea might do when she finds out?”

“Yes. Like all of my people, I share a healthy fear of the Immaculate One,” Vual said. “That is why, in most matters, I am feigning ignorance. The only information I care to give Seteth is whatever concerns Operation Antediluvia.”

“What exactly do you have against Thales?” Edelgard asked. “Is it only because of this… time-travel plot?”

“No, there’s more to it than that.” Vual sat down at his desk and ran a hand through his hair. “I have told you what a replicant is, correct?”

“I think you’ve made it clear the term refers to people like you and Kronya.”

“As far as Agartha is concerned, we are not people. We are artificial constructs—you might consider us golems or homunculi. Our bodies are the only thing Shambhala has any real manufacturing infrastructure for, if you can call the arcane rituals which produce polymimetic quantum matter ‘manufacturing.’ We’re weapons. Tools. But one tool has risen above the rest,” Vual said.

“Thales is a replicant as well? Does that mean he’s just a pawn of Agartha’s human leaders?” Edelgard asked him.

“No,” he said. “Agartha _has_ no human leaders. We did for some period after the Fell Star flooded the world and drove us underground, but at some point there was a coup within the city and its government was deposed. The replicant military took control of all internal operations. Thales is one in a long line of tyrants which have presided over the Council for Agarthan Restoration. You could call it the equivalent to your Hresvelg or Blaiddyd dynasties—except instead of rule by monarchical or imperial bloodline, it is rule by military oppression. Think of it as though your land has been conquered by an invading army, except it is _your own_ army doing the invading—forever.”

“I had no idea,” Edelgard said. Her mind started to race as she thought about Shamir’s report from the assault on Shambhala in her world: that tens of thousands of humans, pale-faced and gaunt, had lived in that underground city far from the light of the sun; that a large proportion of them had happily killed themselves on Thales’ orders as the citadel had been breached; that they were so deeply brainwashed that many chose death before liberation. That was the order Thales wanted to create across all of Fódlan—a world where human life had as much value as that of his ‘tools.’

“And what, may I ask, do _you_ have against him?” Vual asked her, leaning forward, a curious gleam in his blue eye.

Edelgard remembered the blood, the pain, the screams. “It’s personal,” she said to him coolly, forcing down the rising tide of memories. “And a very private matter.”

He arched his eyebrows. “Forgive my curiosity,” he said, and he stood up and left his desk, making for the door.

“What is so desirable, though,” she asked him, “about Agartha’s human government? By your account, under their reign your kind were nothing more than objects. Is that any different than how you’re treated now?”

Vual stopped, his hand hovering just above the doorknob.

“I suppose not,” he admitted. “But that doesn’t matter much to me. Humanity deserves its freedom. Defeating the Immaculate One is immaterial if humankind simply trades one oppressor for a far worse one.”

“I suppose we are in agreement there,” Edelgard said.

Vual opened the door and escorted her out. “Well then, Lady Edelgard, it seems all your documents were indeed in order. Thank you ever so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to correct this oversight.”

“So I won’t have any trouble graduating now, will I?” she asked, stepping into the hall.

“Well, you _do_ still have to pass your final certification exam. Which one are you working toward? Valkyrie?”

The two of them found Flayn waiting for them in the hall. Or rather, not quite _waiting,_ but more standing in place with a bit of a confused, lost look on her face.

That confused, lost look on her face vanished when she caught sight of Vual.

“Oh,” she said, scowling. “You.”

“Hello, Flayn,” Vual said, taking a step toward her and baring his teeth in an awkward smile.

She took a step back to match his step forward. “Keep your distance… Mister _Albus.”_

His smile shrank and dwindled away to nothing.

“Flayn,” Edelgard said, “is there something I can help you with?”

“Oh, Edelgard. I was just looking for my brother. Have you seen him? He is not in his office,” Flayn said with strained pleasantness.

“I believe Seteth is in the infirmary with Professor Manuela,” Vual said. “I’m sure he will be glad to see you.”

“I suppose you must be sure,” Flayn replied frostily. She spun on her heel and took off down the hall.

There was a crestfallen look on Vual’s face as he watched her go. Edelgard wondered if he had actually developed an attachment to the girl while he’d been pretending to be Seteth. She also wondered whether Flayn still hated and feared him, if she were projecting her own self-loathing over being misled onto him, or some combination of both.

She patted him on the shoulder. “There, there,” she said.

Just as Flayn turned the corner into the infirmary, another visitor came down the opposite side of the hallway. “Edelgard, _there_ you are,” Anselm said, striding up to meet her and Vual as they turned around to face him. “You’re late.”

“I’m sorry for her tardiness,” Vual said, bowing to him. “I needed her help to correct a mislabeled document. You are Prince Anselm von Hresvelg, correct? Lady Edelgard’s older brother?”

“One of many, I’m afraid,” Anselm said. “And who are you? I haven’t seen you around here.”

“My name is Albus Duerr,” Vual said. He said the name as though he were very proud to have come up with it. “I was just recently hired as a clerical assistant to Seteth.”

“I see,” Anselm said. “So, church matters, or administrative matters?”

“Yes.”

“By the way, where is he? I know he returned with the Blue Lions yesterday, but nobody’s caught more than a glimpse of him.”

“He is under Professor Manuela’s care, I’m afraid,” Vual said. “The Death Knight struck him with a poisoned blade that made him very ill. Nobody has ever seen anything like it—in a span of days he must have lost nearly fifty pounds.”

“He’ll live,” Edelgard assured Anselm, noting the aghast look on his face, “but it’ll be a long and hard recovery. Anyway, I’m sorry to keep you waiting.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Anselm said, taking her by the arm and gently tugging her away from Vual’s side. “But you really cannot dawdle. You need to reach basic proficiency with this spell soon if you’ll have any hope of impressing your exam’s proctor. Come along. Let’s see more of that incredible work ethic you’ve developed.”

* * *

Hilda, as Edelgard had suspected, still wasn’t talking to her. Edelgard would have to find some other way of convincing her to help set up a surprise party for Annette. And so Saturday morning, when she was assigned to laundry duty with Dimitri, she decided on an indirect approach.

“Dima,” Edelgard said as she helped him hang freshly soaked and scrubbed bedsheets on the clotheslines, “I have a question for you.”

“Ask away, El.”

“Ingrid and I have been talking about doing something nice for Annette.”

“Oh?”

“She thinks Annette might appreciate a surprise party—something fun, lighthearted, that will lift her spirits.”

“That sounds like an excellent idea! If you need my approval as house leader, you shall have it. I will inform the rest right away.”

“There’s just one problem,” Edelgard said, heartened to hear Dimitri’s enthusiasm. “Ingrid and I, well… both of us admit that we aren’t the most _fun_ hosts.”

“You two are fun,” Dimitri countered.

“Thank you, but I think our idea of fun doesn’t quite involve parties. I’m not sure I even know where to start.”

“Well, I doubt I would be much better.”

“But there _is_ something you can do to help. Hilda, I think, would be very good at setting up the event. But she and I are not quite on speaking terms anymore. Could you ask her to help? Let her know Ingrid came up with the idea.”

“I see.” Dimitri laughed. “You can be very duplicitous sometimes, El.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, you can certainly count on me. I will even go and see if anybody else from other houses might wish to help.”

“Feel free to invite anyone you see fit,” Edelgard said, smiling. “For example, a certain blue-haired girl…”

Dimitri’s face turned bright red. “El… I… um… er… I mean… Certainly, you understand that—”

“Perhaps I could invite her for you?”

He stopped babbling. “Y-Ye—I couldn’t ask you to—Perhaps… Yes, perhaps that is for the best…”

“Oh, come on, Dimitri,” Edelgard said, playfully nudging him in the side. “Asking her to a party is much less daunting than kissing her, and you’ve already done _that.”_

Dimitri dropped the wet bedsheets he’d been trying to pin to the clothesline. “You said you hadn’t seen anything!” he gasped, the color draining from his face.

“I’m sorry. I may have seen a little bit. I won’t tell anyone.”

“Please do not.” Dimitri picked up the sheet and hung it. “There. I shall tell her myself the next time I see her. And I shall tell Hilda I need her help the next time I see _her.”_

“Thank you, Dima,” Edelgard said. “You don’t know how much this means to me. I just hope it’ll lift Annette’s spirits.”

The two of them finished their work and left the sheets and linens to dry. When their task was done, they headed out. The rest of the day, like most Saturdays, would be free time to do whatever one pleased, just as Sundays typically were, but most students were finding time to study.

Edelgard and Dimitri passed by the archery range and saw Dedue outside with Bernadetta and Ignatz, and to their surprise, Gilbert was there as well, and on bended knee with his head bowed. A sullen knight stood at his side, arms crossed and head bowed. As they drew closer, they could see that Dedue bore a black and purplish bruise blossoming around his left eye.

“I take full responsibility for this, Dedue,” Gilbert said. “I will see to it that he is disciplined appropriately for his behavior.”

“Dedue! What happened?” Dimitri asked, picking up the pace and trotting toward them. “Are you alright?”

“I am fine, Your Highness,” Dedue told him. “You need not worry about me.” He looked down at Gilbert. “Sir, perhaps you should stand. It would not do to see your men prostrating yourself before the likes of me.”

“What happened?” Edelgard asked.

“It was one of my men, Your Highness,” Gilbert said, rising to his feet and turning to face her and Dimitri. He gestured to the sullen knight standing off to his side. “He lost his temper when he saw your retainer in the archery range. I know that it is reprehensible behavior for a Knight of Seiros. I bear full responsibility for failing to impart to him this lesson.”

Dimitri looked at the knight, his eyes narrowing and lip curling in disgust. “You are from the Kingdom, are you not?” he asked.

The knight lifted his eyes to meet Dimitri’s icy gaze. His face had gone pale. “I… Y-Yes, sir. I was a squire to Sir Richter of the Fraldarius knights before enlisting in the Knights of Seiros.” Whatever bravado he may have possessed that had made him feel free to assault Dedue had fled from him. Edelgard could see his hands starting to tremble.

“What is your name?”

“E-Elric Reiner Gideon, s-sir, of H-House Gideon—”

“To lay hands on my retainer, Sir Elric, is akin to laying hands on me,” Dimitri said to him.

“Your Highness,” Gilbert interjected, “the burden of his discipline is my own to bear. I am sure you have better things to do—”

“Gilbert, go tend to your daughter; I will deal with this man. To lay hands on my retainer,” Dimitri repeated, his voice rising with his temper, “is akin to laying hands on me. Would you do such a thing?”

“N-No, no, sir. But—” The knight glanced at Dedue. “But he’s—”

“He is _what?”_

He paused, his jaw agape. “N-Nothing, Your Highness.”

“He is _nothing?”_

“That’s not what I meant—”

Dimitri’s gloved hand shot out and clamped down on the knight’s throat, lifting him off the ground. The knight’s feet dangled, the tips of his boots barely brushing against the snow; he gasped for breath and gagged as Dimitri’s fingers dug into his throat and sealed his windpipe shut.

Ignatz and Bernadetta shouted out in surprise. “Your Highness!” Gilbert exclaimed.

Edelgard laid a hand on Dimitri’s shoulder. “Careful,” she cautioned him.

“The next time you so much as speak a harsh word to Dedue,” Dimitri hissed at the knight, “know that you will be spitting in the face of your king. I will see you expelled from your house and exiled from my kingdom, provided I allow you to live at all. Do you understand?”

The knight let out a pitiful gurgle, his face turning red and lips turning blue, and frantically nodded.

Dimitri dropped him to the ground. He fell in a crumpled heap, coughing out stale air and panting for breath. “You aspire to be a knight of Seiros… then be careful not to choke on your aspirations. Get out of my sight. Sir Gilbert, you may do as you please with him now.”

Gilbert nodded and pulled the sputtering knight to his feet, herding him away.

“That was unnecessary, Your Highness,” Dedue said to Dimitri.

Dimitri shook his head, as though to shake the bloodlust from his mind the way a dog would shake water off its fur. “It was wholly and entirely necessary. I cannot allow anybody under my rule to believe you can be mistreated in any way.”

“It was only a bruise. I have endured far worse.”

“Dedue is right,” Edelgard said. “You know you struggle with your strength sometimes, Dimitri. You could have snapped that man’s neck on accident.”

“And it would have been an accident well-deserved.” He took a deep breath to purge the bloodlust from his mind, then another, then another, as the angry red that tinged his face softened to a calmer complexion. He looked over Ignatz and Bernadetta, who were both staring at him in shock. “I—I’m sorry. Are you two alright?”

Bernadetta vehemently shook her head. “No—I-I mean, no, I’m fine!”

“We’re just glad Gilbert was passing by,” Ignatz said. “I know I should’ve done something, but it just happened so fast… Dedue, are you sure you’re alright? I don’t know how you put up with that kind of abuse—doesn’t it hurt?”

“I have learned not to mind it,” Dedue said. He brushed snow off his shoulders. “I will be in the greenhouse,” he said, looking directly at Edelgard as though to say, _and you will be, too._

“Well, if you will be alright, I have a seminar to attend,” Dimitri said, as pleasantly as though he hadn’t just came close to crushing a man’s throat with one hand. He patted Dedue on the shoulder. “Take care, my friend.”

“I shall. I do not wish for you to worry about me.”

While Dimitri and the other students went their separate ways Edelgard followed Dedue to the greenhouse, where the two of them busied themselves with tending to Ashe’s little herb garden in back. Since Ashe’s death it had continued to flourish, tended to by both Dedue and Bernadetta, and Dedue used its bounty often in his cooking.

“A shame you couldn’t have just done as you pleased to that man back there,” Edelgard said while they worked. “It would have been easy for you to dispose of him, wouldn’t it?”

“It would have. But for a knight to be so much as bruised by a belligerent Duscurite would be… bad optics. Sometimes it is best to endure in silence and bide your time until you can strike with impunity.”

“Ah, vengeance.”

“Justice.”

Edelgard watched Dedue collect a few mushrooms and a couple stalks of lemongrass, setting them aside, and recalled his talk of fungus. Of invisible networks spread out for miles under the earth, silent, waiting, impossible to eradicate no matter how many of its protrusions into the surface one rooted out.

“I can tell that Dimitri cares very deeply for you,” she said.

“Yes. And I him.”

“Then why not tell him the truth about Thales? Wouldn’t it be better to bring him into the loop? He could be a powerful asset to us if he were fully on our side.”

Dedue shook his head. “The reasons are twofold. First is for his own health. For all his strength, His Majesty is a fragile man. To him, Rodrigue Fraldarius is his hero, the man who delivered him from a life of pain and bondage. He is also the only thing akin to a father he has left. The myth of Rodrigue the savior is his guiding light. You were not here to see the fury he flew into after Remire, when for a short time he lost that light. The truth would break him.”

Edelgard recalled that fury, though Dedue couldn’t know that. The truth was that Rodrigue was indeed Dimitri’s guiding light, but he had other lights now—ones that could keep leading him onward even if one of them were extinguished. Byleth, for one, and herself. “I still think it’s unwise to hide it. If you truly care about him, you need to have faith that Dimitri will be stronger than you think.”

“That is what Edelgard would say, if she were still among us.”

She couldn’t quite place Dedue’s expression. Did he suspect her? “I do like to stay in character,” she said, hoping that would quell any suspicions he might have of her.

“The second reason is because we will need Thales until we do not, and Thales likewise needs His Majesty,” Dedue explained. “The people of Faerghus are guided by two things. First, their love and devotion to House Blaiddyd. Simply by his name alone His Majesty commands loyalty and respect among the common people. Second, their faith in the Church of Seiros and the Goddess. It was the archbishop of the time who ensured the kingdom’s freedom from the Empire. The people of Faerghus will never turn against their faith without a king to replace it.”

“I see. Thales needs Dimitri to be their surrogate Saint Seiros. If he turns against Thales, so too will the people.”

“Yes. And Thales would have no way to lead Faerghus against the Immaculate One without him. Our only option is to wait to reveal the truth to him until we are in a position of strength.”

“You mean after you’ve used us—and him—to destroy the church.”

“Yes,” he said. “But more than that.”

“Oh?”

“The nobility as well must be destroyed. Though your people may have delighted in the opportunity the Tragedy of Duscur provided them to turn His Majesty and myself into their weapons, it was not of their design. It was the greed of House Kleiman, which desired our mineral wealth, and other noble houses which feared the extent of King Lambert’s reforms and conspired to solve both of their problems at once. All through Fódlan, the nobility oppress and exploit on a foundation of divine mandates.”

“You want to destroy the aristocracy?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t care what more you do to this world, as long as you help us get rid of Thales,” she said. If only she could have been free to be herself—she knew the passion that burned in Dedue’s heart like a blacksmith’s forge, the desire to twist the wicked plots of Those Who Slither in the Dark into a hammer and anvil that would shape Fódlan into a freer, more equal world. “But I understand now. I suppose for the time being, Dimitri must remain ignorant.”

Still, though, this was a different situation, and with Operation Antediluvia looming over her head she still wondered if allying with Those Who Slither in the Dark for too long, even if only temporarily, would lead to disaster on a scale only someone like Sothis could fully conceive. She would have to consult with Vual to see if informing Dedue of Thales’ true plans might alter his priorities.

At the very least, she now understood that revealing the truth to Dimitri might foil Thales’ plans as much as blowing up a dozen research facilities would.

“I am glad you understand,” he said. He set his collected herbs into a small basket and held it in the crook of his elbow, rising to his feet. “I will use these herbs in a lentil soup for Annette. I hope it will lift her spirits.”

Edelgard followed him up. “But it still hurts to lie to him, doesn’t it, Dedue?”

“It does,” Dedue said, “but I have learned not to mind.”

“And don’t you ever feel as though you’re using him? As though he were your tool or your weapon?”

Dedue shot her a sour glare. “His Majesty has time and time again begged me for an equal partnership between us. It fills him with guilt that I serve him without complaint or question, that I allow him to use me. Nothing I do can dispel this guilt.”

“But I suppose he has nothing to feel guilty about after all,” Edelgard said, “since you’re actually using him just as much as he uses you.” As sound as Dedue’s logic was at face value, she knew what a rationalization sounded like. And she knew that he felt as guilty as his liege, as guilty as she had once felt.

* * *

That night, she, Vual, and Dedue called Thales, meeting in their usual spot at the door to the unused guard tower.

Before he began fiddling with the radio, Vual stripped away the guise of Albus Duerr and took on the form of Seteth once again—to make sure Thales still thought his cover was intact, he had to speak in Seteth’s voice. The radio squealed and squawked and then, slowly, a voice coalesced out of the hissing and buzzing morass. Thales’ voice emerged, a sharp and barking growl made sharper by the tinny and metallic edge of the radio’s speaker.

“We can hear you, Thales,” Vual said. “Can you hear us?”

_“Yes, Vual. And who is ‘us?’”_

“Myself, Vepar, and Dedue.”

_“Good. Now, what can the three of you tell me about Research Facility Tau?”_

Vual shared an almost guilty look between Edelgard and Dedue. “Little, unfortunately, sir. I believe the activation of the gate triggered a shockwave that detonated the semtex—”

 _“So you are saying the facility was_ destroyed?!”

Vual and Edelgard both flinched. Edelgard knew that tone of voice.

“Regrettably, yes,” Vual answered, “and all of Castle Gaspard along with it. It was only by sheer luck that we, the Death Knight included, escaped before the explosion.”

_“Fucking incompetents! Ignoramuses! Buffoons! Do you have any idea how long this has set us back?”_

Vual smiled enough for his lips to part and show teeth, and Edelgard feared he might sound too happy if he answered, so she interjected.

“Not long, I hope,” she said.

 _“Wait your turn, Vepar,”_ Thales snarled.

“Yes, sir,” Edelgard blurted out reflexively.

“I can only assume that there was some kind of oversight error,” Vual said. “Perhaps the explosives were kept too close to the gate.”

Thales let out a frustrated sigh.

“If it is any consolation, the three of us made certain that nobody discovered the facility’s existence… while it did exist,” Vual added. “And I think it is likely that the explosion destroyed all of the equipment within beyond recognition. Nothing in there can be traced back to us.”

 _“I… will have words with Myson for this,”_ Thales hissed through a clenched jaw and gritted teeth.

“I hope he managed to escape,” Vual said. “I am not aware of anybody within the facility who survived, though—the explosion was likely far too sudden.”

_“Hmph. I presume all data gathered since the last status report has been lost as well. Well, Vual, any more bad news to report?”_

“The Death Knight’s identity has been revealed.”

_“Hmm? I could care less. Hopefully it has given the Fell Star’s brats something to cry about.”_

“Oh, it has,” Edelgard said. “In other good news, Namtara’s pet is dead. I tricked the Knights of Seiros themselves into slaying her.”

 _“What did I say about waiting your turn?”_ Thales snapped. _“You forget yourself, Vepar. Perhaps spending too much time disguised as Edelgard von Hresvelg has made her arrogant insolence rub off on you.”_

“Certainly not, sir,” she said. “I merely thought you could use some good news.”

_“I am a patient man. Vual, discipline her.”_

Vual was taken aback. “H-Here, sir?”

_“Yes. Let me hear it.”_

“If she screams, others may hear it.”

_“Then see to it she doesn’t.”_

Edelgard’s blood ran cold. Before she could react, she felt Dedue’s hand clamp around her mouth and stuff something—a rag or a glove, perhaps—into it to gag her. At the same time, she felt Vual’s hand find the little finger on her left hand and give it a sudden, sharp, savage twist.

There was a snap, sickeningly sharp and sickeningly wet. A wave of white-hot pain sharp as knives rushed from the finger to her hand, up her arm, from shoulder to shoulder, to the top of her head and the tips of her toes. A muffled scream struggled to fight its way to no avail through the gag; tears sprang to her eyes. She stumbled as her legs gave out and her knees buckled, struggling to right herself as Dedue’s grip held her in place.

She was certain her original body had a higher pain tolerance than this one, she thought, blinking away tears and gasping for breath. She’d broken a finger before in her world and it had never hurt like _this._

Dedue pulled the gag out of her mouth and let her fall to her knees. She took a shuddering breath and tried to exhale only for a pathetic sound to escape her lips instead, halfway between a whine and a sob, as she clasped her broken finger and felt the sharp pain morph to a throbbing ache that was no less intense. Her hand shook uncontrollably.

She could hear Thales laughing at her. _“Ah, Vepar… I feel better already,”_ he purred, euphoric. _“You have no idea how pleasing it is to hear_ that _sound… in_ her _voice. It’s been so,_ so _long…”_ His cackling stung her ears. _“Vual, now that my mood is improved, do continue. What have you learned of the Church of Seiros’ operations since your last report?”_

Vual spoke to Thales and rattled off a list of false but plausible information. Edelgard could barely make sense of his words. Her ears rang and her eyes stung, the one that always bothered her in particular as though she’d had a thumb jammed into it.

Dedue knelt down at her side, remaining perfectly silent, and swept up a handful of snow from the ground, compressing it in his fist. He took her injured hand and pressed the snow against the broken finger. Through the veil of tears that made the world seem like a watercolor painting with water spilled all over it, it was difficult to see any emotion on his face, but his touch was soft and sympathetic.

Eventually, Vual finished his report. Dedue rose up to give his report next, and when he stood up, Vual lowered himself down to his knees beside Edelgard and cupped his hands over her hand. Her breath was still heavy and ragged, and she wondered if she was breathing hard enough and loudly enough that Thales could still hear her. She fought to push the pain aside, choke it all down, the way she was used to doing it. The pain slowly began to fade, and at last she took a deep, filling, and unimpeded breath of cold night air.

 _“It seems,”_ Dedue concluded, _“that some of His Majesty’s classmates are growing suspicious of him. The Death Knight’s revelation, for has much harm it has done them, has also made them question the Hurricane King’s identity.”_

 _“Then make them_ un _-suspicious. Do whatever will be necessary to remove their concern. Wear the suit and unmask yourself before their eyes if you must. We cannot allow the Hurricane King’s identity to be revealed until the time is right.”_

_“I understand, sir.”_

_“Now, I would ask Vepar to give her report, but I can tell from her whimpering that she is in no condition to deliver it. Vual, Dedue, I assume the two of you between yourselves have more than accounted for whatever she would have to say?”_

_“Yes, sir.”_ Dedue said.

“Yes, sir,” Vual said, still kneeling at Edelgard’s side.

_“Then you are all three dismissed. Vual—see to it your protege behaves herself this time.”_

“Yes, sir,” he said. He stood up and turned off the radio, letting it sit inert, and then adjusted his disguise so that he was no longer mimicking Seteth. He let out a relieved sigh, then returned to Edelgard’s side and helped her to her feet. “I’m sorry, Edelgard—Thales likes a show. You played your part beautifully.”

She dried her eyes on her sleeve. “I wasn’t acting,” she said. “But I’ll take the complement nevertheless.”

“Let me take another look at your finger,” he said, taking her left hand. He cupped his hands around it and channeled a weak spark of white magic through it, dulling what remained of the pain. Edelgard felt fractured bones realign before a prickly wave of numbness surged through the broken finger.

“I didn’t know you knew healing spells,” she said.

“Barely,” he said. “Not a bad skill to pick up—and of course, I had four hundred years to learn it… which goes to show how little aptitude I have for the subject.” He let go of her hand. “It’s still broken, but it’s a minor fracture now. You’ll need to go to Professor Manuela in the morning. Say you banged it in a drawer or fell on it wrong or something.”

She took a deep breath and exhaled, as though she could expel the last few dregs of the pain along with her breath. “I’m going to kill Thales.”

“Just because you’re a princess doesn’t entitle you to skip to the front of the line,” Vual said, a relieved smile on his face. “Now let’s get back to our beds before we all freeze.”

* * *

Over the next few days, the Blue Lions, with Hilda’s ‘help,’ planned out their surprise party for Annette. Ferdinand and Lorenz insisted on assisting, on the grounds that to entertain esteemed guests was part and parcel of a noble’s duties; it seemed that if Hilda had internalized _one_ positive lesson from her time at Garreg Mach, it had been that many hands made light work. In other words, she was the perfect manager, turning compulsive delegation from a simple character vice to something as artful and sophisticated as Felix’s swordplay.

Wednesday night was, perhaps, an unusual time for a party, but the class had decided that it would just make it even more of a surprise. Edelgard appointed herself in charge of bringing Annette to the common room when the time came, and once everyone had had their supper and retired for the night, the time had come.

She did not, though, find Annette in her room. Nor did she find her in the library, one of her common haunts. Mystified—and, if she were being honest, a little worried—she combed the monastery’s grounds, eventually hearing a tip from one of the knights that someone had seen Annette heading for the training hall after supper.

As she approached the hall, she heard an earsplitting scream from within and the sound of training gauntlets utterly pulverizing a training dummy.

_“CASPAAAAAAAAAR!!!”_

Her ears ringing, she entered the training hall. There stood Caspar, bare from the waist up save for a pair of gauntlets and glistening with sweat, looming over a pile of straw and burlap that had once been a dummy. Balthus loomed over him while Annette stood by.

“Your battle cry is your own name?” Balthus asked him, crossing his arms.

“Yeah,” Caspar said, panting. “Cool, isn’t it?”

“Cool?” Balthus furrowed his brow. _“Cool?_ I’ll tell you what it is— _it’s fucking awesome is what it is!”_

 _“Hell yeah!_ Y’know, Ferdinand and Hubert sometimes get on my case about the whole thing—they say it ‘gives away my position’ or something like that.”

“What do they know? Kid, I think you’ve got what it takes to be the Prince of Grappling!”

“Really?”

“Hell yeah! Alright, Annette, your turn! Let’s see what you got!”

Annette stepped forward, dragging a replacement dummy for the one Caspar had punched into oblivion. “Do I have to take my blouse off?” she asked, staring at Caspar.

“If it helps,” Balthus said with a shrug.

Edelgard cleared her throat. “Excuse me,” she announced.

“Oh, hi, Edelgard,” Annette said, waving at her. “Sorry—I was just finishing up a lesson with Balthus and Caspar here. I’ll be with you in a moment!”

She screamed and punched the dummy in the chest.

“No, no, no,” Balthus said, shaking his head. “That’s not a war cry! It’s gotta come from the diaphragm! Like you’re singing! See, here’s an example.”

Edelgard’s ears popped.

Balthus drew his fist out of the hole it had bored in the dummy’s torso. “There you go. Deep breath, let it out, and let ‘er rip.”

“Are you a professor here now, Balthus?” Edelgard asked him as the ringing in her ears subsided.

“Nah.” He grinned. “This is for the love of the game!”

“Well, perhaps you should consider getting paid for your work, if you love it so much. I’m sure Seteth would put in a good word for you.”

“Not interested. See, any money I make her would just go toward my debt.”

“Isn’t that all the more reason to take a job?”

He laughed. “Job? Nah, Princess, _that’s_ indentured servitude. It’s just slavery with extra steps.”

Edelgard thought about a rebuttal, but decided it wasn’t worth it. She could tell that Balthus was a very frustrating man and resolved to continue keeping her distance from him for her sanity’s sake.

“Alright, here goes!” Annette said, and with a powerful war cry she embedded her gauntleted fist in the dummy.

Balthus and Caspar both clapped.

“Alright,” Annette said, stripping off her training gauntlets, “so what’s up, Edelgard?”

“It’s getting late,” Edelgard said, “so I just thought I’d find you and escort you back to the dormitories.”

“Aww, you’re so sweet. Thanks, Edelgard,” Annette chirped, skipping to her side as best she could (Edelgard could tell, if the sweat soaking her uniform wasn’t enough, that she was exhausted). “But you don’t need to worry about me. I was actually thinking of spending another hour or so here to practice some more of Balthus’ grappling techniques.”

Caspar snickered. “Edelgard probably just wants to get you back quickly so she can head off to that party.”

“Party?” Balthus asked.

“You… knew about that?” Edelgard asked.

Caspar shrugged. “Yeah. Raphael said I could come along if I wanted. But tonight’s a training night, so I can’t make it anyway.”

“You can just go on without me,” Annette said. “I don’t want you missing the party just because you wanted to walk me home.”

“Did _any_ of you not know about the party?”

Balthus raised his hand. “Can I come? Ya got booze there?”

“Yes and no,” she said. He lost interest immediately.

“It’s okay,” Annette insisted. “I mean, no one invited me to it anyway, so I figured I’d just work through the night.”

“That’s not—” Edelgard sighed and rested her face in her palms. “Annette. You weren’t invited because it was a _surprise party_ for you.”

“Aww, that’s so sweet of you!” Annette cooed.

“What did you think when Hilda told you to come to the Blue Lions’ common room after supper?”

“When she what?”

“Didn’t she…”

“I haven’t seen her all day.”

Edelgard groaned. “One thing. We told Hilda to take point on _one thing._ Alright, Annette, let’s go.”

“Uh… maybe I should freshen up and use the bathhouse first. I’m kinda stinky. Oh, but I don’t wanna keep the class waiting… Okay, you win. Let’s go!”

The two of them set out against the twilit grounds, crossing the courtyard and the lawn to the house common rooms. Merry, warm lights glowed within the windows to the Blue Lions’ class as they approached.

“I can’t believe you put on a whole surprise party for me,” Annette said. “That’s just so nice.” She was smiling, and for more than just a few seconds, for the first time since Gaspard.

“Yes, well, do try to act shocked when we step inside,” Edelgard said.

They stepped inside. A welcome chorus greeted them, although Edelgard was sure some of the guests outside the house hadn’t been told what the party was about because she distinctly heard a few cheers of _“Happy birthday, Annette!”_ mingled with _“Surprise!”_

The desks and benches had all been pushed off to the side, the blackboard and professors’ podium stowed in the back, leaving a wide-open space for the guests to mingle. An assortment of teacups, tea bags, and a tea kettle stood on one of the desks; platters of candies, pastries, other tiny dessert foods, and a few casks of cider and wine occupied a few others. Colorful banners arced under the ceiling.

All of the Blue Lions, Byleth included, were there, along with Ferdinand and Hubert, Lorenz, Hilda, Marianne, Dorothea and Petra, and Edelgard’s siblings. It was, to say the least, a bit cramped.

Annette clapped her hands to her cheeks. “Oh my gosh! You guys… You’re the best! I can’t believe you’d do all this for me! I’m so, so, so surprised! I had no idea you were doing all of this for me!”

Felix laughed. “Come on. You didn’t really think we were having a party and wouldn’t invite _you_ to it, did you?”

She giggled sheepishly as Edelgard herded her inside and closed the door behind the two of them. “Yeah, I… I kinda did, actually.”

Bernadetta approached the two of them, winding through the crowd and taking one of the platters of sweets from the desks on her way to present it to them. Pascal stood beside her, anxiously teetering in place.

“Um… Ferdinand, Pascal, and I made treats,” she squeaked, thrusting the platter in front of Annette. There were at least three different kinds of cookies there, and a few jelly-filled pastries bought from the town baker as well. “Y-You can, um, try one if you’d like?”

Annette took one of the cookies, studied it like a jeweler appraising a diamond, and took a bite. Bernadetta waited with bated breath for her response. “Mmm! Is that nutmeg?”

“It’s Bernie’s special secret baking ingredient,” Bernadetta said coyly, relaxing a bit.

“It’s nutmeg,” Pascal said. He looked to Bernadetta’s forlorn face. “Oh… sorry. I was taught it’s not proper to lie to a girl.”

Sylvain patted him on the shoulder. “Poor Prince Pascal. You’ve got a lot to learn about girls.”

“Yes, Sylvain,” Ingrid said, pulling him back into the crowd, “but not from you.”

The students’ revelry lasted well into the night. Though the room was a bit cramped, there was room enough for dancing (never more than one pair at a time, though) and eventually, once again Annette managed to coax Felix onto the dance floor. All night, the warm and genuine smile never left her face. Edelgard wondered if she’d ever enjoyed a party she hadn’t had a hand in organizing before.

As she watched Dimitri take to the dance floor with Marianne after some very forceful goading by Sylvain, Edelgard stood next to Ingrid, both of them sipping on glasses of wine. “Would you like the next dance?” she asked her.

Ingrid smiled, but sucked air through her teeth. “I… think I’ll pass for now. If you don’t mind. It’s not that I don’t think you can behave yourself, but… I just don’t think I’m ready for it. Maybe you could ask Hilda? She seems to be in a good mood.” She nibbled on one of the last few remaining cookies Bernadetta had made. They went faster than any of the other treats. “Mmm. These are good. Bernadetta never told me she could bake. All those hobbies she picked up while hiding from her father…”

“Well, I suppose we can forego the dance,” Edelgard said. Deep down, she couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. She took a sip of wine.

“Why don’t you ask Professor Byleth? Don’t you like her?”

She spat the wine out. It stained the front of her blouse. She didn’t look forward to having to clean that stain—wine was almost as hard to get out as blood. “I… What gave you the idea?”

“What _didn’t?_ Ever since I found out you… preferred women, I could see the way you looked at her.”

“Are you drunk, Ingrid?”

“No more so than you, Edelgard.”

Hilda slipped past them on her way to get more wine from the nearest unemptied cask. “And yet she still won’t dance with you. Ouch.”

Ingrid took a sip of her wine. “This is really nice. I’m glad we could put this whole thing together,” she said, surveying the festivities. “Annette looks great. And really, I think we all needed this.”

“It’s certainly a welcome change of pace from either pressing our noses to the grindstone or running from one end of Fódlan to another, encountering trauma after trauma.” Edelgard giggled, probably from the wine. “Even straitlaced, uptight sticks-in-the-mud like us still need a day from time to time when we can gorge ourselves on sweets.”

Ingrid laughed. “That’s true. I usually prefer to gorge myself on more nutritious food, but this isn’t so bad. Really, though, I’ve been worried these past few days. I got a letter from my brothers last weekend. They say Father still hasn’t arrived back home yet. I suppose it’s too early to start worrying, but I can’t help myself. If he’d been summoned elsewhere for some unexpected business, he’d have sent a letter ahead. If he’d been captured by bandits, they’d have sent out a ransom letter by now.”

Edelgard put an arm around her waist to comfort her. “Perhaps you think, given our class’ track record, it might be easier to assume the worst right away?”

“I… I suppose so,” Ingrid said, not objecting to the weight of Edelgard’s arm curling around her back. She shook her head. “But when have I ever done things the easy way? That’s probably what you were just about to say, wasn’t it?” she asked with an uneasy smile.

Edelgard took a deep, nervous breath. “You’re right, Ingrid,” she said, feeling absolutely wretched. “Don’t lose hope just yet.”

Eventually, the party wound down and guests started to trickle out, and likewise one by one Ferdinand and Lorenz’s precious stockpiles of fine tea vanished, the mountains of sweets laden on the platters dwindled away to molehills, and the casks of wine and cider grew empty.

It must have been past midnight when the party came to the end—the proverbial witching hour—and the guests filtered out of the room, leaving the Blue Lions to collect the casks and plates and other bric-a-brac and reorganize the room. The euphoric, electric atmosphere that had pervaded the room was fading fast and welcoming in its place a lonely and tired sense of melancholy that crept in like cold working its way into a drafty room; soon the magic would wear off and the Blue Lions’ classroom would be a place of learning once more. Despite clear signs of fatigue, Annette insisted on helping and had to be held back by Felix and made to watch while the rest of the students and Byleth did all the work.

Eventually, the last of the lamps were snuffed out and the room became as dark as it was cold, lively now as a tomb as the students left it. In the morning they would return, not for revelry but for Byleth’s next lecture.

Bernadetta let out a long, weary sigh. “Phew… that was exhausting. So many people…”

“You did well, dear,” Anselm said, offering her a pat on the shoulder. He’d left the party early when Hedwig had gotten tired to take her and Pascal to their room, but had returned to help with cleanup.

A blood-curdling scream split the night air, flying above them like the terrible cry of a winged demonic beast, before it was suddenly cut short.

“What was that?” Dimitri gasped.

“Not our problem,” Sylvain said.

Byleth shook her head. “We should see what it is. I think it came from the other side of the courtyard.”

Under her command, the Blue Lions crossed the courtyard. On the other side was a wrought-iron fence, beyond which were the knights’ quarters. And impaled on the fence, the sharp black spikes bursting from his throat, mouth, and chest, was a man.

The cold white light Byleth had conjured to see by captured in stark relief every detail of the man’s face, bloodied and mangled, frozen in a mask of horror and anguish. There was a deep gash in his chest that could not have been caused by a simple fall. “This man was thrown onto the fence,” she murmured.

Ignatz gasped. “Oh, Goddess… That’s—That’s the man who attacked Dedue last Saturday…”

 _“That the Knights of Seiros,”_ a familiar, deep, artificially modulated voice called out, _“allow this kind of filth to act as defenders of the Archbishop’s so-called virtue… is proof of the wickedness of the church!”_

 _“Everybody, get back!”_ Byleth called out, ushering her students backward as a caped figure swooped down and planted itself on the ground before them. It rose to its feet and stood over the Blue Lions.

The Hurricane King’s long midnight-blue cloak and silver wolf’s pelt fluttered in the frigid winds of witching hour in the middle of the Pegasus Moon. His helmet, a snarling wolf’s-head with jaws gaping wide to reveal an iron mask with a human face, gleamed in the light—as did the glaive he wielded, its curved blade stained with blood.

Edelgard felt Anselm throw an arm over her chest and step forward. “You monster! The Hurricane King, I presume? You who seek out and murder the pious and faithful—if Saint Seiros has an opposite number, then you, devil among demons, must be him!”

The Hurricane King laughed. “Prince Anselm… handmaiden of the church. Run along before you taste my steel.”

“Everyone who can’t use magic,” Byleth ordered, “go and find the knights on patrol! We’ll hold him down!”

“We’ll _what?”_ Sylvain asked as Anselm summoned a beam of searing white light to strike at the Hurricane King.

“You, too, Annette!” Byleth added, prompting Ingrid and Raphael to grab Annette by the shoulders and carry her away as they fled with Ignatz and Bernadetta.

Edelgard readied herself for magic combat. Her little finger on her left hand still ached even though the splint had been removed just the other day, but fortunately for her she could get along well enough without it as very few spells required two hands. She and Sylvain struck the Hurricane King with lashing tongues of flame as Felix conjured crackling bolts of lightning and Anselm and Byleth attacked with black and white magic in equal amounts. Some spells hit; others glanced off the Hurricane King’s armor or were parried by his glaive.

“Pin him down!” Byleth ordered. “Until the knights arrive!”

Dimitri and Dedue, though unarmed, had stayed behind—probably, Edelgard supposed, so that everyone could see that neither of them could be the Hurricane King’s true identity. When the enemy drew too close and the swinging of his glaive came too near, the two of them forced him back with bare fists; the familiar resonance of Dimitri’s Crest of Flames could be felt in every punch he landed. Some of them even connected, throwing the Hurricane King against the fence with enough force to bend the wrought-iron bars.

The Hurricane King was probably toying with them—Dedue had probably organized all of this under Thales’ orders. His movements even felt oddly playful, like a cat toying with a mouse. But the cold wind that whipped around his blade as it swung to and fro felt earnestly and honestly furious and bloodthirsty, and there was no mistaking when it bit into Felix’s side and cut a gash in Sylvain’s shoulder.

At last, one of Edelgard’s attacks managed to set alight the furred pelt the Hurricane King wore, forcing him to hurriedly pull it away and throw it off. The distraction was enough for one of Felix’s lightning strikes to hit him in the chest, arcs of blue lightning coursing across the metal plates of his armor. The Hurricane King stumbled backward and dropped to one knee. Within the yawning wolf’s-maw of his helmet, the metal facemask was askew; behind it, Edelgard thought she could see a sliver of pale skin and indigo hair.

Byleth approached the defeated villain, but took a hurried step back as the sound of an approaching projectile cut through the air—like an arrow, but a thousand times larger and heavier. Where she had stood a second earlier, a javelin protruded from the cobblestones, its haft quivering from the force of the impact.

A second Hurricane King swooped down in front of the first, grabbing the javelin and yanking it out of the ground with an artful flourish while the first adjusted his mask.

“This is getting out of hand,” Sylvain grunted, gritting his teeth. “Now there are _two_ of them?!”

“It is time to leave,” the second Hurricane King told the first.

“Oh, but the night is still young,” the first said.

A blazing blade cut through the icy air. For a moment, there was a second dawn as Thunderbrand’s blade wreathed itself in flame.

 _“Repent from the grave, Hurricane King! In the name of Lady Rhea!”_ Catherine howled, charging at both Hurricane Kings. The first Hurricane King parried the blow with the haft of his glaive, allowing the second to thrust over his shoulder at their common enemy with the javelin.

The second Hurricane King laughed. _“Do you know if that is_ even _her name? Follow her like a lost dog—you will meet the same fate!”_

Catherine grabbed the javelin as it buried itself in the gap between her armored shoulder and breastplate and snapped its tip off, wrenching the haft from the Hurricane King’s grasp. _“Professor! Get the students to safety! We’ve got this!”_

As Byleth led the students away, Edelgard could feel an oddly familiar resonance, a tingle in the air that tickled the back of her neck and ran up and down her spine. She had only ever felt this strange eldritch sensation within two people in this world—Byleth and Dimitri, the only living bearers of the Crest of Flames.

But Byleth and Dimitri were both _here,_ and the resonance of the Crest of Flames wasn’t coming from either of them.

The second Hurricane King drove his boot into Catherine’s knee with enough force to shatter the armored greave protecting it and bend the joint backward; as she fell, he swatted Thunderbrand from her hand. She drew a dagger from her side and drove it into his thigh up to its hilt.

Anselm grabbed Edelgard and pulled her back. “El! More knights are on their way!”

“Wait,” Edelgard said, shrugging him off. It was clear from how many of her fellow students’ spells both Hurricane Kings were that they were either extremely strong in the art of magic themselves or possessed especially magic-resistant armor. A skilled spellcaster could hone their defenses, dispelling the brunt of a magical attack through sheer force of will; during the war she had seen Hubert take fireballs to the face at point-blank range without so much as flinching. But there was one spell that cut through such defenses.

It just so happened that Anselm had been helping Edelgard learn it.

She flung out her hand, concentrated, and felt the magical power well up within her. She felt tendrils of dark magic sprout from her skin, seeping through her sleeve and coiling around her forearm in the twisting bands of a double helix. She felt moonlight burn against her palm, and a beam of silvery light cut through the night. It struck the second Hurricane King before he could bring his gauntleted fists down against Catherine’s skull. The beam passed through his armor as though it wasn’t even there and struck the first Hurricane King, felling them both.

As Gilbert, Alois, and a platoon of other knights converged on the two Hurricane Kings, Edelgard saw both retreat and slip away into the shadows over her shoulder as Anselm pulled her along. The Blue Lions regrouped in front of the dormitories, all so worn that they could hardly keep themselves upright.

“Is your hand alright, El?” Anselm asked her as he rushed to heal Felix’s injury.

“Two Hurricane Kings,” Sylvain gasped, panting for breath as Byleth tended to the gash the Hurricane King’s glaive had made in his arm. “Saint fucking Indech. How do we know which one is the real one? If either of them even _are?”_

“The second one,” Byleth answered.

“Why, Professor?” Dimitri asked.

“Because…” She took a deep, pained breath and asked the same question that had been on Edelgard’s mind. “Why would the _decoy_ be the only other person in the world with the Crest of Flames?”

Dimitri stared at her as though he had just seen a ghost.


	36. A Parting of the Ways

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard spends some quality time with Hedwig, ponders the mystery of the second (third?) Hurricane King, and makes two new friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Half this chapter is about Edelgard and Hedwig bonding. You're welcome.
> 
> Also, here's a chart I put together for all my Hresvelg sibling OCs so I wouldn't forget how old they are or when they attended the academy:  
> [](https://i.gyazo.com/7d5361ddd9a7da7c8a303529232c7f08.png)  
> Lmao we're like 480,000 words into this fic and Immanuel and Dagmar haven't even shown up yet. Expect them to show up 15 minutes late to the Adrestian civil war like  
> 

“Two of them,” Sylvain muttered. “Two of them. How are there _two_ Hurricane Kings? Do they multiply or something?”

It was dawn; the sky had brightened to a dim violet and the stars had faded against its backdrop as the orange glow of the sun spilled over the horizon. The Blue Lions were gathered in the common room with their professor, not to celebrate, not to learn, but to wait.

After the battle, Byleth and Anselm had tended to Felix and Sylvain, closing the wounds they’d suffered during the Hurricane Kings’ assault. Catherine was in the infirmary (Manuela did not appreciate being woken up in the middle of the night on a Wednesday, but such was the life of a physician). The Knights of Seiros, while searching for the Hurricane Kings, had detained the Blue Lions in the common room for the night for their own protection, where some of the students at least tried to sleep. When morning came, they were told that Archbishop Rhea was on her way and those who had managed to catch some shuteye were roused from fraught sleep.

Edelgard observed Dimitri and Dedue as the class discussed the past night’s events. Dimitri still seemed shaken; his eyes stared sightlessly into the distance, as though blinded. Dedue hid his emotions behind an inscrutable stoicism. She wondered—he had to know who those two fake Hurricane Kings were, since he had set this whole thing up, but had he known that one of them bore the Crest of Flames? Did that mean someone besides Dimitri and Mercedes had survived the blood reconstruction experiments—and had the Agarthans hidden it from Dimitri on purpose?

“It’s like the legend of the werewolf,” Felix said, his voice low and tone grim.

“Um… werewolf?” Ignatz asked, a pang of concern on his face.

“It’s an old story up north. Men becoming beasts by the light of the moon. They lose all sense of reason and become savage murderers.” Felix glanced at Dimitri, as though to accuse him. “They say those bitten by werewolves become werewolves themselves.”

Sylvain mustered a weak laugh. “So,” he said, gingerly pressing a hand to his torn sleeve and the gauze wrapped around his arm beneath it, “you think we’re gonna start feeling the uncontrollable urge to dress up in furs and put on wolf’s-head helmets at night? Hey, wasn’t it a full moon last night?”

Felix was oddly silent, but his hand drifted to his side, where beneath the ragged slit in his shirt and waistcoat were bandages encircling his midsection. There was a swath of faint dried bloodstains that cut an arc across the lowest layers of gauze. His fingertips grazed it thoughtfully, as though he might have been considering the idea.

“It’s just a story,” Sylvain said. “I mean, if werewolves were real, think about it. One bites a person, then you’ve got two werewolves. Both bite one other person each, and you’ve got four. Four become eight, eight become sixteen, sixteen becomes—you get the idea. And that’s if each werewolf only bites one person. It’s a geometric rate—it keeps doubling. You’d have the whole continent turned in a matter of months. It’s the same thing with vampires. If these things were real, we’d all _be_ them already.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up,” Felix said.

“O—Oh, right, weren’t you scared of werewolves and vampires once? Yeah! Ingrid, remember the time I made little fangs out of wax and stuck them in my mouth? You were there too, Dimitri. He just lost his shit—”

“That never happened,” he said loudly, raising his voice over Sylvain’s.

“—and ran crying back to… Gle… nn…” Sylvain trailed off as his eyes met the icy glare Ingrid was giving him. He shrugged. “Just, uh, trying to lighten the mood.”

“Fuck off,” Felix said.

“Felix,” Annette said to him, “I used to be scared of werewolves, too…”

“I’m _not,”_ he insisted.

“I—I think I know how we can figure out who this Crest of Flames guy is,” Bernadetta piped up.

All eyes turned to her.

“Actually, it’s a stupid idea,” she mumbled, pulling her hood over her head and drawing the drawstrings tight. “N-Never mind.”

“Bernadetta,” Byleth said, “if you’ve learned one thing from my class, there are no stupid ideas. Only ideas that don’t work.”

“Well, um… I guess… h-here’s what Bernie’s thinking,” Bernadetta said, emboldened. “Professor, you said it was the second Hurricane King who had the Crest, right?”

“That’s what I felt,” Byleth said.

Dimitri slowly nodded, but tried to hide it. No one else in the class but him, Dedue, Byleth, and Edelgard knew that he bore the Crest of Flames as well and could likewise sense the presence of another.

“That’s what gave him the strength to snap Catherine’s leg like that,” Felix said.

“A-And it was the second Hurricane King who got stabbed in the leg?” Bernadetta added.

“That’s right,” Sylvain said. “Catherine drove that dagger all the way into his thigh…” He gasped. “He’s got an injured leg!”

“All the way into his leg?” Ingrid asked. “Up to the hilt? A wound that deep can’t heal quickly, even with a powerful healing spell. Right, Professor?”

“That’s right,” Byleth said. “The other person with the Crest of Flames… must have a wounded leg. At the very least, I’d expect him to be limping.”

“So I guess our top suspect right now is Seteth, huh?” Bernadetta said, giggling.

No one else laughed.

“Stupid Bernie—this isn’t the right place for a joke! Now they all hate you! Great job!” she berated herself.

The doors to the common room opened, but it was not Archbishop Rhea who entered. Instead, escorted in by the pair of knights standing guard outside was Lord Volkhard von Arundel, flanked by Anselm, Hedwig, and Pascal.

Edelgard stood up from her seat. “Uncle Volkhard—”

“El! Thank the Goddess herself you’re okay,” Volkhard said, rushing to her and enclosing her in his arms. “Anselm told me everything. You were not injured, were you? Oh, what a relief. And what a relief that Pascal and Hedwig left before…”

“Was anyone hurt?” Pascal asked, eyeing the rest of the class with worry.

“Nothing serious,” Felix said.

“What Anselm has told me is true, then, Professor?” Volkhard asked Byleth. “There were two Hurricane Kings, and they murdered a knight and injured the captain?”

Byleth nodded.

He sighed and shook his head. “This situation is worse than I had feared. Get up, Edelgard. We’re leaving Garreg Mach today. I’ll speak with Seteth to have you withdrawn as soon as his office is open.”

There was an outcry from Edelgard’s younger siblings. “W-We’re l-l-leaving?” Hedwig gasped.

“Lord Arundel,” Byleth interjected, “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

“Every day this monastery becomes a more dangerous place,” he retorted. “I cannot allow my niece or her two youngest siblings to remain here. El, surely you understand. We’ve spoken about this—and how it would be best to withdraw you before the situation worsens. You said you were going to work on graduating early!”

“I said I would try,” Edelgard said, well aware that she hadn’t.

“If you can wait a day,” Anselm said, “I’m sure El can take her certification exam as early as tomorrow. Can that be arranged, Professor?”

“I do not even wish to wait that long!” Arundel said, his face reddening. “Last night, one of these fiends hobbled the captain of the Knights of Seiros! Who knows what they will do tonight?”

The doors swung open yet again and a hush fell over the room as Archbishop Rhea walked in, radiant and impeccable in her dress and manner as always. Seteth limped at her side, dependent on a cane to keep himself upright. He was clean and well-groomed, his injuries healed and the shaggy growth of his hair and beard neatly sheared away, but he was still sickly and thin. His uniform seemed to hang off of him the way old clothes hung on a scarecrow.

Volkhard and Anselm both bowed their heads in Rhea’s presence.

“Children…” Rhea’s eyes slowly roved back and forth, studying each student in turn. Dimitri snapped out of his trance and flinched when her eyes met his. “How good to see that you are all alive and well. Although…”

She ventured further into the room to where Felix was sitting. “My child,” she said, gazing upon the slit in his uniform that betrayed the bloody bandage underneath. “Does your wound trouble you?”

“It’s, uh…” Even he seemed to be cowed by her presence. “It’s fine, ma’am,” he grumbled.

“Still,” she said, “it must ache. Let me see.” A soft healing light wreathed her fingers and she pressed them to his side. “That should no longer trouble you anymore.”

“Um, Your Holiness,” Sylvain piped up, “they, uh, got me in the arm, and…” He grimaced and sucked air through his teeth. “It hurts…”

Edelgard could see Ingrid rolling her eyes. Dimitri stared at Rhea as she healed his classmates, his mouth folding into a tight scowl.

“Professor,” Rhea asked once she was done with Sylvain, “were you at all injured?”

Byleth shook her head. “No, ma’am. I’m fine. Just a scratch or two.”

“May I see?”

“Really, it’s fine. They’ve healed already.”

“And what about you, Edelgard, dear?”

“Thank you, but there’s nothing more for you to concern yourself with among us,” Edelgard told Rhea. “As much as we all appreciate it… surely you have better things to do.”

“Better things than to bring solace to a house that has been sorely lacking it this past year?” Rhea shook her head. “I think not, Edelgard. It is my duty as a servant of the Goddess’ will to grant you and your classmates succor in times of need. Lord Lonato, Sylvain’s brother Miklan, the loss of your classmates Ashe and Glenn… no house in years has experienced such a string of such deeply personal traumas. I want you all to know, each and every one of you,” she said, looking again to each student in turn, “that the Knights of Seiros shall do everything in its power to protect you in these last few weeks of the term. These heretical villains shall be struck down by the hand of the Goddess. And in the meantime, I am here should any of you want for comfort.”

“Thank you, Your Holiness,” Byleth said.

“Seteth,” Volkhard said. “I hate to trouble you so early, but if you could, at your convenience, ready the withdrawal papers for my niece—”

As her head swiveled and her gaze fixed itself on him, Rhea’s beatific expression vanished. “Edelgard is not to be withdrawn from this academy,” she said to him curtly, the words cutting like arrows through the air.

Volkhard was taken aback and stared at her with wide eyes. “Um—Er—I—Uh—It’s just that—”

 _“She shall not be withdrawn,_ Lord Arundel,” Rhea repeated. Remembering her place, she softened her face and voice, donning her calm and peaceful smile as one might don a hat. “If it makes you feel better, know that she shall be under my _personal_ protection.”

Recalling the Holy Tomb, Edelgard dreaded the sound of that and began to reconsider staying. Leaving with Volkhard wouldn’t be too bad, especially if Pascal and Hedwig were traveling with him.

“Personal protection?” Seteth asked, furrowing his brow. “Lady Rhea, what exactly—” He held his forearm to his mouth to catch a sharp cough. “What exactly, if I may ask, do you mean by ‘personal protection?’”

“We can discuss the details later,” Rhea assured him.

“I—” Volkhard’s words caught in her throat. “Lady Rhea—”

“I can assure you, this monastery will be made peaceful for all of you,” Rhea said to him, taking a hand and resting it gently on his shoulder. “I know it is a Hresvelg tradition for all of one’s brothers and sisters to attend graduation, and I have no intention of allowing that tradition to break down. I would hate to warn Edelgard’s older siblings to keep their distance from this place.”

Edelgard felt her heart sink, realizing that she ought to have spent her adolescence traveling to Garreg Mach every year to see another one of her elder siblings graduate. If not for the Agarthans, Burkhart and Gerlinde would have attended when she was twelve, Justine, Immanuel, Dagmar, Joachim, and Heidemarie over the next few years alone or in pairs, and finally Anselm the year before her. In the years following her own graduation, Edelgard would have repeated the tradition with her fellow siblings for Pascal first, then Hedwig.

She’d never been sentimental about tradition before, but there was something different about the ones she herself had been deprived. The life she could have led, the family rituals she should have taken part in, struck her like a blow to the gut.

Volkhard acquiesced. “Of course, Lady Rhea. I myself, though, shall take my leave and see to it Hedwig and Pascal return to their homes.”

“I’ll stay,” Anselm announced. “It is only a few weeks, and I am quite capable of conducting my affairs by mail. As well, I would be honored to help the knights hunt down these monsters and bring to them the Goddess’ justice.”

“Thank you, Prince Anselm,” Rhea said, turning her smile upon him. “Your devotion to the church and the faith is a beacon for all of Fódlan to follow.”

“I follow an infinitely brighter beacon,” Anselm retorted, “by which I mean the archbishop who leads us with such grace and strength.”

Edelgard wanted to gag. Certainly Anselm would leap at the occasion to butter Rhea up, and certainly Rhea herself would love to do the same to him. They were perfect for each other.

“I can trust anybody to safeguard my dear El, it is the archbishop herself,” Volkhard admitted.

“Lord Arundel… I remember your sister,” Rhea said. “It was not that long ago that she was herself a student here. Your niece takes after her in so many ways. You can rest assured that I will keep the flame of her spirit burning.”

“Thank you, Lady Rhea,” he said, bowing to her as she and Seteth headed out of the room. “Hedwig, Pascal, it is time to pack your things. We set out this afternoon.”

Hedwig looked worried, kneading her hands over her skirt. “Ah… I—I n-n-need to… t-to… I-I h-h-have p-p-people to s-say g-g-g-goodbye to…” She looked to Edelgard. “E—El, c-c-can you h-help me?”

“Of course, Hedy,” Edelgard said, standing and crossing the room to meet her. She looked back to Byleth. “As long as I don’t miss…”

“There’ll be no lecture or morning drills today,” Byleth said, nodding. “We’ve suffered enough.” An edgy, nervous laugh rippled through the classroom.

Pascal went to Bernadetta. “Uh… Hi.”

Bernadetta stared at him, remembered it was rude to stare, and looked away. “Hi.”

“It was fun baking with you yesterday,” he said.

“Uh… Thanks.”

“If you’re really going to marry Anselm, I’ll be your brother-in-law, right? And, uh, maybe we can bake more things the next time we see each other.”

“I—I guess? Okay?” Bernadetta mumbled. “That, um… sounds nice, I guess.”

“Look out, Prince Anselm,” Sylvain called out. “Looks like your little brother has eyes for your fiancee, too!”

Anselm scowled at him.

Pascal’s round face turned bright pink. “Um, anyway, goodbye!” he stammered to Bernadetta, his voice cracking, and then he hurried back to Volkhard’s side.

Volkhard patted Edelgard on the shoulder. “Bring Hedwig back to her quarters when you’re done,” he said, and he and Pascal left.

Edelgard took Hedwig out of the common room and the two of them stepped out onto the lawn. The sun had risen, and long spears of amber dawn light stretched across the snowy grounds. The sunlight gleamed on the round lenses of Hedwig’s glasses. Her light chestnut brown hair, instead of being pulled up into the typical circlet of braids that held it up, was much more simply braided and allowed to hang down the same way Edelgard typically wore hers. As tall as she was for her age, she seemed small as Edelgard took her by the hand.

“So, who should we say goodbye to first?” Edelgard asked her. “Petra, perhaps? I know she’s always up by dawn at least. Or maybe we should have breakfast first—”

Hedwig cut her off by driving the air from her lungs with a spine-snapping hug.

“Hedy,” Edelgard gasped, hearing her stomach gurgle. “Breakfast?”

Hedwig nodded.

“Let me go?” she asked.

Hedwig shook her head.

“I understand,” she said, folding her arms around her and patting her on the back, and she allowed Hedwig to keep clinging to her as they crossed the lawn to the dining hall.

* * *

It just so happened that Petra was in the dining hall with Dorothea and there was plenty of room for more diners at the table she’d chosen, so Edelgard and Hedwig got their food and sat with them.

Petra’s smile was as bright as the sunrise as she greeted Hedwig and Edelgard. “Hedwig, Edelgard,” she said, “it is good to be seeing you this morning! We have had great worry for you. Words are being spread with quickness about last night.”

“They certainly are,” Dorothea said. “Edie, did you really run into _two_ of those costumed lunatics?”

“We did,” Edelgard said as she and Hedwig sat down and set their plates onto the table. “Fortunately, no one in our class was seriously injured, though I hear Catherine’s been sent to the infirmary.”

Dorothea sighed as she picked at her food. “I have to say, when I came here, I was hoping to find a suitor who wouldn’t make me want to choke to death on my own tongue. Instead the whole school’s being terrorized by some villain straight out of some lurid play… though I suppose I should count my blessings he, or they, seem to have it out for the Blue Lions in particular—no offense, Edie. I’m glad to see you’re okay.”

“Thank you, Dorothea,” Edelgard said.

“Um… P-Petra,” Hedwig stammered, “I, um… I n-n-need to t-tell you s-something.”

Petra’s brows knitted with concern. “Oh… is something being the matter?”

“W-Well, it’s—it’s j-just that—um… m-m-my, er, El’s uncle Vo—Volk—Volky is, um—h-h-he wants to t-t-take me b-back h-h-h-home. T-Today.”

“Oh. Well, over these past weeks I have been liking greatly our time together,” Petra said. “I am being sad to see you go, of course, but I am also wanting you to be safe.”

 _“Will_ you be safe at home?” Dorothea asked. “I’ve heard from a few friends in the Mittelfrank Opera Company recently and, well… things seem a bit tense in Enbarr.”

“I-I’m g-g-going to s-stay w-w-w-with my m-m-moth—mom’s f-family,” Hedwig explained. “P-P-Pasc, too. P-Petra, w-w-would—a-are you g-g-going back to Brigid when you g-graduate?”

“I am not knowing,” Petra said. “Duke Gerth is taking me back after graduation. If he has been getting the concessions he wants from my grandfather, maybe I can be returning.”

“Oh.” Hedwig stared down at her food, a conflicted furrow in her brow and a frown on her face. “I—It would be h-h-hard to keep in t-t-touch with you all the way in B—Brigid,” she mumbled. “B-But it would be—I mean—I-I d-d-don’t want you to think that—I w-want you t-t-to go h-h-home—I mean I d-d-don’t want you to—I mean I don’t n-n-n- _not_ w—”

Edelgard put a hand to her back to help her steady her breathing.

“I understand,” Petra said. “If I am staying in Fódlan, we can be exchanging letters with ease. You are only needing to send your letters to Duke Gerth. But owls cannot be flying across the ocean. We would need to be using messenger albatrosses!”

Edelgard and Hedwig laughed. But Edelgard’s thoughts quickly turned to Vual’s radio. Apparently, devices he called ‘repeaters’ had to be placed across the land to keep the invisible waves that silently carried the sound from growing weak and fading away. But if that could somehow be overcome, then radio technology could connect Fódlan with Brigid like never before. Messages could travel instantly from the mainland to the tiny archipelago, instead of having to travel a month’s voyage in the hold of a cargo ship.

“B-But—But it’s g-g-good,” Hedwig said, her cheeks reddening as she fumbled over her words, “if—if you can go h-home.”

“I would be missing you as well in Brigid,” Petra said. “I have been making many friends here, despite my circumstances. When you are being taken from your home, sometimes you are beginning to make a new home where you were taken. Then, when you are returning, you are still homesick for the new home.”

Edelgard wondered how she would feel when she returned to her own world—her old home. To a world filled with her best and closest friends, to the side of her wife—but to a world where she was once again an only child and the new friends she had made here among the Blue Lions were rotting beneath the earth.

“Th-Thank you for u-u-understanding,” Hedwig said. “M-My w-w-words n-never c-c-c-come out r-right.”

Petra reached across the table and cradled her hands in hers, wrapping her bronzed, sun-kissed fingers around Hedwig’s pale hands. “I am having much understanding. I am trying and trying, but Fódlanish is still having difficulty— _I_ am still having di—Fódlanish is still difficult for me. I am knowing the importance of listening carefully to those who are struggling to speak.”

Sometimes Edelgard forgot just how young Petra was. At fifteen upon enrollment, she had been the second-youngest student in Garreg Mach, older than Lysithea by only a few months (and of course, without Lysithea on campus in this world, that made her the _youngest_ student here), but unlike Lysithea she had never been teased for her age; nobody had wanted to view a girl from Brigid, a foreign land and a conquered enemy country, as young or innocent. She was only less than three years older than Hedwig and about a year older than Pascal, but she had been forced to grow up very quickly.

“I am thanking you for being my friend,” Petra told Hedwig. “I am wishing more of Adrestia’s nobles were being like you. If Fódlan were having more Hedwigs in it, Fódlan would be a better place, and the people of Fódlan and Brigid would be liking each other more.”

A disbelieving smile crossed Hedwig’s face. Edelgard could tell that nobody had ever told her that other people should be like _her;_ if anything, she’d probably gone her whole life being told that _she_ should be more like other people.

“Y-You really mean it?” Hedwig asked, jaw slack from shock.

“If you want a commoner’s opinion, I can second that,” Dorothea said. “You and Edie aren’t so bad, as far as aristocrats go. Same the rest of you don’t see it that way.”

Dorothea had always been an interesting contradiction to Edelgard. She hated bloodshed; she’d vomited on the spot on her first mission in the academy after having to kill a man, but in the war she had drowned herself in a sea of it nonetheless, and it had been obvious to everybody, but especially to Edelgard herself, that it exacted a terrible toll on her. Edelgard had spoken to Dorothea on more than one occasion, sometimes going so far as to beg her to leave the Black Eagles Strike Force and settle down somewhere far from the war—but Dorothea soldiered on, no matter how much it hurt, because she thought that Edelgard’s vision of a world without the nobility was worth not only dying for, but irrevocably damaging her very soul for. By her own admission on those occasions when the pain had been more than she could quietly bear herself, Dorothea was a beautiful rose who had, because she had loved Edelgard’s ideals, cast aside all those petals for thorns. Edelgard had always seen the petals.

In this world, Edelgard had to admit, Dorothea was probably better off without her close friendship to her.

The four of them finished their breakfast and went their separate ways. Hedwig and Petra said their goodbyes and that was that.

Edelgard led Hedwig out of the dining hall. “So,” she said, “who do you want to say goodbye to next, Hedy?”

Hedwig was still visibly euphoric from Petra’s embrace, but it was clear that it was fading fast. “Um… I-I w-w-w-would like to see P-Professor Han—Hanne—Professor H, if I c-c-can.”

“Very well. His morning lecture should be starting soon, but if we hurry, we might catch him before he leaves his office.” Edelgard led her through the main hall, up the stairs to the faculty offices, and to Hanneman’s office. She knocked on the door. “We might have to wait and catch him after the Black Eagles have had their morning lecture—”

The door swung open and Professor Hanneman stood on the other side. “Hello there. What is this? I appear to be seeing double!” He squinted at them. _“Four_ Edelgards!”

Edelgard hadn’t fully realized it at first, but as Hedwig was roughly as tall as her, had the same color hair, and currently wore that hair the same way she did, the two of them actually looked quite similar at a glance save for Hedwig’s glasses.

Hedwig blushed. “Oh, um—i-it is m-m-me, H-Hedwig,” she stammered, flustered.

“Ah, Lady Hedwig. A pleasure to see you. What brings you to my office?”

“I hope we haven’t caught you at a bad time,” Edelgard told him. “Hedwig is leaving later today, and she would like to speak to you before she goes.”

Hanneman looked to the dawn light streaming in through his window, then to the clock in his office. “Well, I suppose I do have time to spare,” he said, leading the two of them inside and taking a seat at his desk. “What can I help you with, Hedwig?”

“W-W-W-Well, um, I, uh… er… I’d…” Hedwig nervously kneaded her hands and chewed on her lower lip, avoiding Hanneman’s gaze. “H-How soon c-c-c-can I enroll?”

Hanneman thought for a moment. “Hmm. Well, that depends. Fifteen is the minimum age for enrollment, but the average age is seventeen, and I would recommend you enroll then. But for your own edification, when do you turn fifteen?”

“T-T-T-Two years from now!”

“What month?”

Yet again Edelgard recalled with a pang of embarrassment that she didn’t know when Hedwig’s birthday was. Or any of her siblings’ birthdays, for that matter. She suspected that the certain days in the year that always left her feeling noticeably more depressed for some nebulous reason might have been them, but she couldn’t place a name to each of those ten dates.

“L—Lone M-M-Moon,” Hedwig said.

“So you turn thirteen a month from now.”

Hedwig nodded. “Um—uh… m-m-more like th-three w-weeks, s-s-sir.”

“In that case, you will be eligible to enroll for…” Hanneman did some mental calculations, stroking his mustache. “…the 1183 term, starting in the Great Tree Moon of that year. You can submit your application whenever you please the year before, as long as the enrollment exam is scheduled after your fifteenth birthday. But again, I would recommend you enroll after you turn seventeen—that would be 1185. You may even wish to wait until you turn eighteen.”

1185\. From Edelgard’s perspective, in her world, that would have been last year. Hedwig would have been attending the Officer’s Academy _last year._

In her world, right now, Hedwig would be eighteen years old. Just as old as Edelgard had been when she’d started the war that had set all of Fódlan aflame.

“Lady Edelgard,” Hanneman asked, “is something the matter?”

Edelgard felt Hedwig’s hand curl tighter around hers and realized something about her face must have given away her melancholic musings. “Oh—Hedy, you’re just growing up so quickly. You don’t need to hurry so much.”

Hedwig pursed her lips. Evidently, neither Edelgard nor Hanneman had given her the answer she wanted, which was probably ‘yes, of course, enroll as soon as possible.’

“Why do you want to enroll so early?” Edelgard asked her.

“B-Because n-n-n-no one’s ever d-d-done it before,” Hedwig said, nervously adjusting her glasses. “F-F-From our f-f-f-family, I mean.”

“Since you’ve spent so much time with Petra, you probably know that the younger you are, the more difficult the curriculum will be,” Hanneman told her. “You will have to keep up with many older and stronger students who will be setting the pace. And that is on top of growing pangs and other… pubescent developments that may not have fully subsided by the time you are fifteen.”

“Th-Then I’ll w-w-work t-twice as hard as everyone else!” she said. “I—I can d-d-d-do it. E-Everyone will know that I c-c-can do it!”

For a moment, Edelgard could see the same fierceness in her eyes that she had often seen in Lysithea’s. She couldn’t say anything about this world’s Lysithea, having never met her, but in her world at least, Lysithea had always wanted to prove to everyone that she could be treated as a capable adult in spite of her youth and physical frailty. Likewise, the eleventh daughter of the emperor, plain and gangling and mousy and stumbling and tripping over her words, wanted to make the world take her seriously. To be the youngest of this generation of Hresvelg to enroll in and graduate from Garreg Mach would be a feather in her cap none of her brothers and sisters could share.

She and Lysithea would have gotten along well.

“As well,” Hanneman added, “you will need to consider your retainer’s needs as well. As I understand it, it is customary for a Vestra serving a Hresvelg to enroll at the same time as their liege. You may want to think about when Miss Cassia will be ready as well.”

Hedwig nodded. “I—I’d n-never thought of that.”

Edelgard took Hedwig’s hand in both of her own. “Hedy, if you decide to try the enrollment exam as soon as you turn fifteen, I’ll be behind you every step of the way. Just give it some thought.”

“You have a few years still to think about it,” Hanneman said. “Whether it is in three years, four, or five, I look forward to having you as a student.” He glanced at Edelgard, his brow furrowing and pinching his monocle in a look of mock bitterness. “Unless, like your big sister, you decide that another house would suit you better.”

“No hard feelings, Professor,” Edelgard said.

“All water under the bridge, Edelgard. I still think myself responsible for your academic transformation, at least in part.” Hanneman stood up and went to his coat rack, slipping on his old brown overcoat. “I suppose I should begin preparing for this morning’s lecture. Perhaps you would like to sit in, Hedwig? Unless, of course, you have more people to say goodbye to—I would not want you to keep them waiting.”

Hedwig nodded. “Um, th-thank you, s-s-sir, but y-yes, I—I don’t w-want to keep anyone w-w-waiting.”

“I understand. Well, I do hope I see you again at graduation,” Hanneman told her. “Actually, Edelgard, may we speak in private before class?” he asked, lowering his voice.

“Yes, Professor.” Edelgard turned to Hedwig. “Hedy, please wait outside for us.”

Hedwig nodded. “A-Alright, El,” she said, and she slipped outside and closed the door behind her.

“What do you want to talk about, Professor?” Edelgard asked him.

Hanneman stared out the window and let out a wistful sigh. “I am… sorry about Hapi. It is simply awful what happened to her. That you had to witness the deed yourself, and that my potential cure proved utterly useless.”

“It wasn’t utterly useless, Professor,” Edelgard said. Technically, it wasn’t a lie, although that did not clear her conscience. “At least she died peacefully.”

“That she did,” Hanneman said, his voice strained. “That she did. Edelgard, I do not confess this lightly—if I speak to you on this matter, can I trust you not to let it leave this room?”

Edelgard knew exactly what he was about to tell her. “Of course, sir.”

“A long time ago, my youngest sister passed away. The physicians had said it was a disease of the heart which led her to an early death, but I think it would not have had she been treated better beforehand. She was made by her husband to bear many children with the hopes that one might bear a Crest. The strain on her body during those years, having child after child, and the mistreatment she endured after her husband cast her aside… I am certain it was this that sealed her fate.”

“I’m sorry, Professor,” she said. She knew this story well, and countless others like it. It was stories like those that had given her the impetus to keep pushing for a better world even when the war had devolved into a hopeless quagmire.

“It is because so many people were harmed by Crests that I have become so zealous about understanding them,” he continued. “Had I understood more, just a little more, then perhaps my cure would have worked to cure Hapi’s affliction.”

“I hope her blood is of some use to you, at least,” Edelgard said.

“I hope so as well. Who knows how many more victims Cornelia has left in her wake?” He was silent for a long while. “Manuela told me about Mercedes, as well.” He shook his head sadly. “It still boggles the mind that my old friend would do such a thing. It is as though she is mocking me personally, though I would hardly be so pompous to assume so.”

“Are the knights going to do anything about it?”

“With Cornelia under the aegis of House Rusalka and outside of the jurisdiction of the Knights of Seiros, there is little they can do to apprehend her. Baron Rusalka would need to sanction any church operations in his territory, as Lord Arundel did last month. Cornelia’s manor in Fhirdiad is similarly under the auspices of Lord Fraldarius, but I hope he would be amenable to allowing the knights in.”

Edelgard caught Hanneman looking to the cabinet in which he kept the potions and concoctions he had developed over the course of his research. No doubt his next attempt at a cure sat on the shelf behind those locked doors.

“If there are others like Hapi, I hope we can find them and cure them,” she said.

“Thank you. I do as well.”

“Is that all you wished to speak to me about?”

“Yes, Edelgard. Thank you.” Hanneman sighed. “I should be getting to class now. I would hate to be late and set a poor example for the students.” He drifted from the window to the door. “Oh, and one other thing—little Hedwig is quite a lively girl.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“She does not bear a Crest of Seiros herself, does she?”

“No; only Anselm and myself do.”

“My sister did not have a Crest, either—but the potential still existed for any children she bore to have one, and that was what doomed her. Please watch over Hedwig, Edelgard. If she is made to marry the wrong sort of man, do whatever it takes to protect her from him.”

“Of course, Professor,” Edelgard said. “I’ll do my best.”

“It is, sadly, all we can do,” he concluded, and with that he opened the door and ushered her out.

Hanneman locked the door behind him and went off to teach the Black Eagles’ morning tactics lecture, leaving Edelgard and Hedwig alone in the hall. Hedwig was waiting expectantly, but seemed to be gently vibrating with pent-up energy.

“Well, that’s Petra and Hanneman,” Edelgard said, already feeling exhausted. “Who else is there? Flay—”

Hedwig thought for a moment, then shook her head. “Um, n-n-ob-b-b-b—one. No one.”

“What about Flayn?”

She shook her head harder.

“Why not?”

Hedwig’s eyes darted across the hall. “Um… b-because I… I th-th-think she… she h-hates me now.”

“Why would she think that? Edelgard asked, taken aback. The two of them had been thick as thieves before Gaspard.

“I, um… I—I think I d-d-did something,” Hedwig said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “El… h-h-how old were you whe—when y—when you—”

Edelgard drew her in close and ran her fingers through her hair. “Deep breaths, Hedy. Go slow if you must.”

“When you… found out… you… liked… g—gi—”

“Girls?” she finished.

Hedwig nodded.

Edelgard realized that she couldn’t answer that question. She had been seventeen when she’d realized she was still capable of feeling love in the first place and eighteen when she’d realized it was possible for someone to love her back, regardless of gender. But according to them, Dorothea had known since she was twelve that she preferred girls and Mercedes had figured it out at ten, somehow. But in this world, who knew when the other Edelgard had realized that girls caught her eye far more often than boys? Perhaps she’d been Hedwig’s age. Perhaps not. At a time like this, Edelgard wished her counterpart could be here with her.

“Is that how you feel about Flayn?”

Hedwig nodded. “I—I th-think s-s-so. M-Maybe. A-A-And I think sh-she knows.”

“How would she know?”

“I-I d-d-don’t know! M-Maybe I-I-I l-l-look at her the wrong w-w-way or… m-m-maybe I t-t-t-told her—s-she was p-p-p—pretty too many t-t-times…”

“You said she was behaving differently after we came back from Gaspard?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, you know Seteth was badly injured there, right?”

Hedwig nodded.

“That’s why Flayn is acting differently. She’s just worried about him. It has nothing to do with you,” Edelgard told her.

She sniffled and nodded. “O-Okay. I—I, um… D-D-Do you think she—she might l-l-l-like… th—that I might h-have a chance?”

Edelgard rested a hand on her cheek. “Well, you know, she is quite a bit older than you.”

Hedwig bowed her head. She might have been about to cry. “I—I know. She s-says she’s a-a-as old as m-m-m-most of the s-students…” Her voice was small, fragile, and weak. “And—and she p-probably isn’t…”

“No,” Edelgard said. “She probably isn’t. It’s okay, Hedy. It’s normal to have crushes on people who are older than you, especially when you’re young. And it’s normal to have crushes on people who… just can’t feel that way about you,” Edelgard said.

Hedwig began to weep. Edelgard held her close, gently leading her head to her shoulder and stroking her hair. There were few things more painful than the sound of her little sister crying—the pained, lurching rhythm of shuddering breaths and heart-wrenching sobs called to mind the squalor and agony of the dungeons. She wanted to put a stop to that sound more than anything, but all she had the power to do was hasten its passing, if only a little.

“Shh. There, there. Let it out, Hedy. Let it pass.” She held Hedwig closer, waiting for the stream of tears dampening her shoulder to slow to a trickle. “Can I tell you about my friend Ingrid?” she asked.

Hedwig sniffled. “Sh—She’s, um… th-the one with the—the p-p-pegasus?” she asked, her voice muffled.

“Yes. She’s a good friend,” Edelgard said. “And she’s quite pretty, isn’t she?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I thought so as well. Soon after we met, I realized I was falling for her. I drew myself closer to her. We ended up dancing together at the winter ball and… we got too close, she pushed me away, and I learned that she couldn’t feel the same way about me. The most we could ever be was friends. _Just_ friends. Unrequited love is a part of life, Hedy. For everyone, not just… girls who like other girls. I know it hurts, but the most any of us can do is tough it out. Whoever it is, whatever they are, you’ll find the right person someday, or perhaps they’ll find you.”

Hedwig slowly nodded. “Okay.”

“Now why don’t we go see Flayn?”

“Okay.”

* * *

Flayn and Seteth shared their quarters deeper in the monastery cloisters where the students of the Officers’ Academy typically feared to tread. Security was tighter in this part of the monastery, especially so in light of last night’s attack, but Edelgard and Hedwig were allowed to pass the knights’ checkpoint and enter the cloisters. Edelgard wondered if it was Rhea’s doing that she was allowed past the iron gates and gratings that separated the central church’s ascetic population from worldly affairs so easily.

Edelgard knocked on the door. Seteth was working, but she had it on good authority from the knights that Flayn would be here—she would likely not be allowed to leave for her own protection.

The door creaked open a hair. There was a sliver of emerald in the gap, and then the door closed.

Hedwig knocked on the door. “Um… F-F-Flayn?”

 _“Please go away,”_ Flayn said from the other side of the door.

Hedwig’s face crumbled. Edelgard patted her on the back. _“I’ll handle this,”_ she consoled her. She knocked again. “Flayn, please. It’s Edelgard and Hedwig.”

_“I cannot see you now.”_

“It’s urgent. At the very least, may _I_ come in?”

_“No.”_

“Flayn. If we do not talk now, it will be too late,” Edelgard said, losing her patience and allowing a stern, iron bite to creep into her voice. Whether she was seventeen or a thousand years old, Flayn most certainly did _not_ act her age.

“L-Let’s j-j-just g-g-go, El,” Hedwig whimpered. “Sh—She h-h-hates me, and th-that’s o-o-o-okay.”

The door opened another crack, and before it could shut itself again Edelgard wormed her fingers into the crack and pulled it the rest of the way open. “Hedy, wait here for us,” she said brusquely, forcing her way into Flayn’s room and shutting the door quite firmly behind her.

Flayn hastily backed away from her and stood in the center of the room. Here, far from the ascetic décor of the cloisters, was a modest but still somewhat indulgent living space. In this room were bookshelves (nothing unapproved by the church, Edelgard supposed), drawers, a table and chairs, cabinets, and a small stove and hearth. There were two rooms off to each side which Edelgard presumed, from seeing a bed and wardrobe within each one, were bedrooms. There was a soft rug on the cold stone floor beneath her feet and curtains parted over the window.

“E-Edelgard,” Flayn stammered, her demeanor unusually skittish. “What are you doing here? You—You cannot just barge in here like you own the place.”

“Hedwig is leaving the monastery today. You two have been such good friends. Don’t you want to see her off?”

“No,” she said. “Please get out of our quarters. Good day, Edelgard.”

“Has Hedwig done something to displease you?”

Flayn crossed her arms and looked away. “It is nothing Hedwig has done,” she responded curtly. “Please, just go away. I want nothing to do with you, and you should want nothing to do with _me.”_

“Hedy adores you, Flayn.”

“Well, she should not!” she snapped, and with that she stormed off to what Edelgard presumed was her room. There was no door separating the rooms but rather a curtain which Flayn tried to slam shut to the best of her ability.

Edelgard followed her, but stopped at the curtain. “You say you want to be treated as an adult, don’t you?” she asked. “Then meet me halfway and stop acting like a child.”

_“You do not understand, Edelgard!”_

She sighed. “This has something to do with Vual, doesn’t it?”

Flayn drew the curtain aside and scowled at her. “Who else could it have anything to do with? You have all seen him for what he is. You all know what he has done. And yet even my fa—even my big brother allows him free rein in the monastery!”

“Flayn,” Edelgard said, reaching out to her, “he is no longer affiliated with Solon and his kin. In fact, he is helping Seteth learn more about them so that the church can see to it those fiends are stopped.”

“How can anybody trust him? He _tricked_ us! He lied to every single one of us and—” Her voice cracked, her irate facade broke apart, and her bright emerald eyes began to water. “And—even me—I was so, so, stupid.”

Flayn fell to her knees and pressed her hands to her face, choking back a sob. Edelgard knelt beside her. “Flayn, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have accused you of being immature.” She had known that the truth would weigh heavily on Flayn’s mind as soon as she had started suspecting that the man she’d known as Seteth was not who she’d seemed to be. Yet she’d only had eyes for Hedwig this morning, and hadn’t thought about how Flayn’s pain had been manifesting.

“Seteth is the closest person in the world to me,” Flayn sobbed. “Since Mother died, I have had nothing but him. And yet I could not tell him from an impostor! I could have searched for him, but instead I allowed myself to be taken in by a forgery and—and I put all of the strength I had into saving that man when he wasn’t even truly my father!”

_“Father?”_

Flayn curled up tighter, wrapping her arms around her legs and tucking her head into her knees. “Oh—Oh, no… Please forget you heard that! No one is meant to know! If my big brother finds out I told anyone—”

Edelgard had always suspected that Seteth seemed too old to be Flayn’s brother. “It’s okay. I won’t tell anyone.”

“But you see now, don’t you?” Flayn continued to weep. “My own father—the man who raised me and gave me everything—I abandoned him for an imitation! I don’t deserve to call myself his daughter. And if I cannot do that, then how can I call myself anybody’s friend, if I would just as soon throw _them_ away for a lie as well?”

Edelgard very slowly put an arm around Flayn’s shoulders, ready to pull away if she would balk at her touch. She didn’t.

Flayn sniffled and let out a wordless wail. “I’m a selfish, ungrateful daughter,” she sobbed, “that’s why! I never really respected him or cared about him or loved him because if I had—if I had, I would have known!”

“That’s not true,” Edelgard told her. “Flayn, listen. You know that I am pretending to be somebody else as well. Would you say that Hubert or Ferdinand don’t care about me? Or what about my uncle, or any of my siblings? Would you accuse them of not loving me enough?”

“N-No…” She sniffled. “I am a horrible person. I am no better than those monsters.”

“That is not true, Flayn.” Edelgard reached out, found Flayn’s chin, and angled her head up to force their eyes to meet. Her eyes were rimmed with red and her cheeks glistening with rivers of tears, her mouth pulled in a deep-set frown. A dribble of snot threatened to drip from one nostril. For a moment, Edelgard thought she could see on Flayn’s face slit pupils in her eyes, like a lizard’s, and a thin patina of scales, but it must have been a trick of the light. “You are a kind person and a good friend. Hedwig has told you as much, and I believe it as well. Please don’t throw aside your friendship with her simply because you don’t think you deserve it. Go outside and talk to her. If she and Pascal leave without saying goodbye, you may not see her or hear from them for years. This is your last chance; you cannot be so consumed by your tears that you will let it pass you by.”

Flayn sniffled and gulped down the lump in her throat, then nodded. “I… I understand. Please, just give me a moment to make myself presentable,” she croaked.

Edelgard let go of her and stood up, then offered her a hand to pull herself up with. Flayn rose shakily to her feet, still choking back the occasional tear, and went to her room. While she tidied herself up, Edelgard excused herself and stepped out into the hallway, where Hedwig was still waiting, anxiously gnawing on her knuckles.

“She’ll be out in a minute,” Edelgard told her, and Hedwig sheepishly removed her hand from her mouth and dried it on her blouse.

They waited, and soon Flayn stepped out into the hall, fresh-faced. “Hedwig, my friend… please forgive me,” she said, her voice still fraught. “I did not mean to upset you in any way. I have just been going through something very painful and… and I was foolish enough that I thought I had to push you away because of it.”

“Th-Thank g-g-g-goodness,” Hedwig stammered. “I—I was s-s-s-s-so af-f-f-fraid I’d d-done something h-h-horrible to you…”

“Oh, my friend, I am so sorry…” Flayn threw her arms around her, and the two of them embraced and began to cry anew. “Are you really leaving today?”

“Y-Yes, Flayn. I—I’m s-s-sorry, but Uncle Volky th-thinks it isn’t s-s-safe. Maybe y-you should l-l-leave, too?”

“I do not think my brother would allow it. Leaving did not work out well the last time. Hedwig, if I wish to write to you, where should I send it?”

“I-I’ll be in B-Boramas, with—w-with my mom’s s-s-side of the f-family. A—And I c-can just write to h-here?”

“Yes, and please do! Nobody has ever written to me before. I am excited! You must tell me what it is like in Boramas. I have only seen it on a map! It is right next to the Morgaine Ravine, isn’t it?”

“U-Uh-huh! Y-Yes! I’ll t-tell you all about it!”

“I already cannot wait for it.” When Flayn finally pulled herself away, she was smiling through her tears. “Please have a safe journey home, friend. Write to me as soon as you return—”

Hedwig, who wasn’t done hugging her, dragged her back into her embrace, squeezed her hard enough to make her eyes bulge, and let go. She wore a wide grin. “I-I will. G-Goodbye, Flayn.”

“Goodbye, Hedwig,” Flayn croaked, catching her breath. “Take care.”

Edelgard took Hedwig by the shoulder. “Is there anybody else you’d like to see before you leave?” she asked.

Hedwig shook her head. “No—oh, b-b-but I—I g-guess I should p-pray at the ca—ca-c-c-cathe—church?”

“I think we can fit that in,” Edelgard said. “Thank you, Flayn.”

The two of them left the cloisters, cut through the academy grounds, and made their way across the bridge to the cathedral. There, Hedwig knelt before the altar, hands clasped and head bowed, lips silently tracing indistinct words, and Edelgard stood by her until she was finished. The sunlight streaming through the windows fell upon her as she prayed, motes of suspended dust twinkling in the air around her like a glittering aura. Few people might have called the sight of Hedwig praying in a shaft of sunlight beautiful, but Edelgard certainly would have. In the light, the little girl—who was not so little anymore—looked as holy as the statues of the four saints.

At last, Hedwig opened her eyes and stood up.

“All done?” Edelgard asked her.

She nodded. “Y-Yes. B-But, uh, c-c-can we see the s-s-saints’ statues, t-too?”

“Of course,” Edelgard said, leading her to the sacristy off to the side of the altar where the statues of the four saints stood, five times taller than the average man and cast in polished gold.

Hedwig stood under the statue of Saint Cethleann, staring up at her as though in awe. At times her brow furrowed as though some detail of the saint’s appearance had sparked a thought worth mulling over. The statue of Saint Cethleann depicted a beautiful young woman dressed in flowing bishop’s robes and clasping a caduceus staff sculpted with two winged serpents curling around the rod in the shape of a double helix. Hedwig seemed to be studying every detail.

“El,” she asked, “h-h-have you ever thought that—um… th-this p-p-p-probably sounds s-s-silly, but… I—I th-think Flayn l-looks a bit like… S-Saint Cethleann.”

“You do?” Edelgard studied Cethleann’s face as well. Perhaps there was a _slight_ resemblance, she supposed. “Well, Flayn does have a major Crest of Cethleann. I suspect she’s a direct descendant of hers.” If Flayn really had been around during the War of Heroes, then perhaps Cethleann had been her mother. Which meant, if Seteth was her father, that he had been Cethleann’s husband. The idea sounded almost too ridiculous to consider, but there were more impossible things.

“I-In m-m-m-my letter,” Hedwig said, balling her hands into fists and shaking them with excitement. “I—I’m gonna s-s-say to Flayn that s-she’s as b-b-beautiful as her! Um—I-Is that t-t-too much, El?”

Taken aback, Edelgard laughed and gently tousled her hair just a little. “I don’t think it’s too much at all, Hedy. I think you’re going to be quite the romantic someday.”

Hedwig smiled and focused her attention on the rest of the statues in return, finishing with Saint Cichol. “Hey… Th-This one k-k-kinda looks f-f-familiar, too,” she said, pointing to it.

“Oh?” Edelgard stared up at Saint Cichol’s visage. Saint Cichol wore a bishop’s robe as well, and a flowing cape, and somehow the sculptor had captured the flow of the fabric so well that Edelgard almost expected it to flutter in the air. As sculpted, Cichol wielded a spear with a long, thin blade at the end and two curved axe-head blades. Edelgard must have seen this statue thousands of times before in both her world and this one, but something about the way Hedwig pointed at it made her feel as though she were seeing it for the first time. “What about it looks familiar?”

“Um… h-he’s got a—k-kinda s-stern scowl. A—A bit like S-Seteth?”

Now that Hedwig mentioned it, Saint Cichol _did_ have a bit of a severe expression that bore more than a passing resemblance to the face Seteth made when he was upset. Perhaps Seteth _was_ in fact Saint Cichol himself. All of the saints might have been members of the Immaculate One’s family. Edelgard wondered what all their true forms might have looked like. They couldn’t all have been as big or as fearsome as Seiros. Well, perhaps Seteth could be.

“The scowl might run in the family. Ferdinand has the Crest of Cichol as well, and he can scowl like that when he is cross.”

Hedwig giggled. “I—I g-guess he c-c-can.”

Satisfied, the two of them left the cathedral, walking back down the long bridge that spanned the fog-choked ravine far below.

“Th-Thank you s-so much, El,” Hedwig said, a grin still fixed on her face. “I th-think I’m r-ready to g-g-go now. I’ll h-h-help Cassia p-pack my th-things.”

“Okay. Let me know before you leave so I can see you off,” Edelgard said. As the words left her mouth she finally realized that Hedwig was leaving, and as with the other siblings who’d left just weeks ago, she couldn’t know if she would ever see them again before she found a way back to her world—and when she did return to her own world and her own time, she would most definitely _never_ see Hedwig again. She would never see her grow up, never see her enroll at Garreg Mach (whether she did it three or four or five years from now), never see how much taller she would get. She wouldn’t see Pascal again, either.

Hedwig looked at her and frowned. “Wh-What’s w-wrong, El?” she asked.

Edelgard opened her mouth, but no sound came out. “I’m just… really going to miss you, Hedy,” she croaked.

She wrapped her arms around her and held her tight, and for a moment Edelgard felt as though once again she was twelve and Hedwig was seven or so and neither of them knew if they would live another day.

Edelgard couldn’t remember the last time she had done it, but she _did_ remember that she certainly hadn’t had to raise herself up on her toes to kiss Hedwig on the forehead then. The two of them remained locked in their embrace, neither willing to let go for the longest time, caught in a stalemate neither wanted to break. She wanted to fix this moment forever into her memory as something Thales could never take away from her again. She wanted to remember every detail; the softness of her skin, the scent of her hair, the way she clung to her as though it was a competition and trembled ever so slightly from nervous energy. And the color of her eyes—Edelgard wanted to remember the color of the eyes behind those round glasses, the one detail that had left her before any of the others. Hedwig had inherited her father’s steel-blue eyes. She swore she would always remember from now on that her baby sister Hedwig had her father’s eyes.

She would have held onto her forever if she could have.

* * *

As auspicious as Edelgard’s morning with Hedwig had been, the departure of the youngest Hresvelg siblings with Volkhard von Arundel from Garreg Mach would prove unfortunately acrimonious.

A caravan was prepared out in front of the monastery’s gate, ready to spirit away the lord and the two royal children and associated attendants. Two carriages, one for the lord and one for the Hresvelgs and Vestras, and a company of Arundel soldiers would take a roundabout path southeast, cutting through Ordelia territory in the Leicester Alliance and then crossing the Airmid River into the county of Bergliez where Pascal would be returned to his mother’s side of the family; from there, their path would cut southwest to Boramas on the tip of the southern Adrestian peninsula to likewise deposit Hedwig; afterward, Volkhard would travel to Enbarr.

It hadn’t occurred to Edelgard until after she and Hedwig had parted ways, in spite of the map of Fódlan burned into her mind, that the county of Boramas shared almost all of its only land border with Rusalka.

“I know you have little choice in the matter, Uncle,” Anselm said as he helped the driver and attendant pile the passengers’ bags into the back of Volkhard’s carriage, “but it does worry me that you plan on going through Rusalka.”

“You are being paranoid, Anselm,” Volkhard said. “Do you think Cornelia would have House Rusalka’s knights seize us at the border? What could such a thing possibly accomplish? And why would Baron Rusalka agree to it?”

“I don’t think you can so easily discount the possibility, Uncle Volkhard,” Edelgard agreed, mirroring Anselm’s unease. “You know what Cornelia has done, and I fear we can’t imagine what further horrors she is capable of. If you travel past Rusalka to Enbarr, you can go east to Boramas, clinging to the coast south of the Morgaine Ravine. I know it is much more circuitous, but it would assuage our fears.” The idea that Cornelia might find some way to sink her claws into Hedwig frightened her more than anything. Those Who Slither in the Dark—the Agarthans—could not be allowed to lay hands on another Hresvelg, especially not _her._

“In fact, why bring her to Boramas at all?” Anselm added. “Leave her with Pascal. I trust Count Bergliez to look after the both of them, at the very least, even if the man cannot stand me.”

Volkhard sighed. “I suppose… it might be better not to risk it.” He took the last of the children’s bags from Cassia and Armin and set them in their carriage. “Pascal, Hedwig, your carriage is ready,” he called out, beckoning the children on.

“If House Ordelia were on better terms with us, I might suggest reaching out to them,” Edelgard said as she helped Hedwig up into the carriage. “Like how you brought me to Fhirdiad all those years ago. Gloucester territory, perhaps, might be amenable.”

“Well, I suppose the Empire _has_ become something of a powderkeg, thanks to your _brother,”_ Volkhard said.

 _“Me?”_ Anselm asked.

“Anselm, I never said I was referring to you,” Volkhard said. “Now, Pascal—”

“But a hit dog hollers,” Pascal muttered darkly.

“What was that?” Anselm asked, taken aback.

Edelgard and Volkhard were just as surprised by his outburst. Edelgard, unfortunately, didn’t know Pascal as well as she should have, but she had figured from his time here that he was growing from the sweet young boy she had once held in her arms as he’d breathed his last into a polite and empathetic, if conflict-avoidant young man. He wasn’t aggressive and didn’t care much for physicality, preferring the company of books to people; while Hedwig had spent her days at Garreg Mach excitedly following her newfound friends around, he had mostly spent his in the comfort of the library.

But he _was_ about fifteen years old, which made him mercurial enough to sharpen his tongue when he was at his limit. Which, apparently, he was.

“I-I said you _know_ this is all your fault,” he said, looking up and staring Anselm right in the eyes. “If it wasn’t for you, Burk wouldn’t be so desperate to curry all these other nobles’ favor, and he wouldn’t be marrying Lady Cornelia!”

“I’m sorry, Pascal,” Anselm said, reaching out to tousle his brilliantly colored curls, “but it was Father’s decision. The will—”

“I don’t care!” Pascal swatted his hand aside. “You’re ruining this family! You’re ruining our family and—I’m sick of standing around and watching everyone else not tell you that!”

“Pascal!” Volkhard exclaimed. “Macuil’s sake, just get in the carriage!”

“Why don’t you just challenge Burk to a duel, Anselm?” Pascal asked. His round face and soft cheeks didn’t wear anger well; neither did the quaver in his voice project it. “L-Like—Like how Derick von Aegir did to Agnes I, you can challenge him to a duel for the throne! Why don’t you do _that,_ you coward—”

“Because,” Anselm snapped, his quicksilver charm (which had withstood days of Count Varley’s heinous attitude) breaking down for once at the sight of his youngest brother’s insolence, “Burkhart only accepts challenges he can win—and he _knows_ that I would defeat him!”

“Well—Well, _I’d_ duel you to make you stop,” Pascal said as firmly as he could, which wasn’t very, “if it would be fair.” He balled his hands into fists.

“I’m not talking about this with you, Pasc,” Anselm said. “You’re being ridiculous. I’m not dueling you.”

“Then duel El! If she wins, give up. If you win, do whatever you want. But at least someone _tried!”_ Pascal looked needily up at Edelgard. At nearly five feet tall, he was to Edelgard’s knowledge the only person in her family who could still _literally_ look up to her. “R-Right, El? Right?”

“P-P-P-Pasc, p-p-p-p-please,” Hedwig stammered from within the carriage, poking her head out. “J-J-Just g-g-get in…”

“No one is dueling anyone,” Volkhard said. “It is a barbaric and unbecoming way to settle personal and political affairs,” he said, and the way he looked straight at Edelgard made it clear he wanted to remind her of the time she had broken Justine’s arm.

A part of her would have liked to simply duel Anselm into irrelevance; he was strong and skilled, but while beating him wouldn’t have been as easy as when she’d shattered Justine’s elbow, she would be likely to win. And after all, Anselm stood for everything she stood against; if he were in charge of the empire, he would surely build it into as much a theocracy as the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus was. But two facts stayed her hand:

One, as long as Burkhart’s marriage stood, Anselm was the only thing standing between Cornelia and the Adrestian Empire.

Two, what kind of an Agarthan agent would she be if she made the Adrestian Empire a _more_ stable place?

She had a role to play, much to her displeasure, and she didn’t need to feel Dedue’s icy gaze on her back to remind herself of that.

“I’m sorry. Uncle Volkhard is right, Pasc,” she said. “The story of the Warrior Prime Minister is not one we should take any positive lessons from.” A part of her had always found the story of Derick von Aegir and Agnes von Hresvelg I amusing, in no small part because of how many times Ferdinand had strolled up to her to parrot the dramatic little line his ancestor had used to propose the duel to hers.

“It’s immature,” she added.

Pascal hung his head and let out a heavy, resigned sigh. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Yeah. I know. Sorry.”

He gave Edelgard a perfunctory hug, offered Anselm the most awkward barely-touching side-hug Edelgard had ever witnessed, and then got into the carriage with Hedwig and their retainers.

Volkhard wore a weary frown on his face now. “Anselm,” he said, “as Lord Regent, I shall throw my full support behind you if and _only_ if we are unsuccessful in separating Cornelia from Burkhart. But in the event that Burkhart annuls the marriage, I want you to renege. Please. You cannot enjoy seeing your family like this. Take my word for it—the fights were much worse when your older siblings were here.”

Anselm was unusually silent.

“It is hard for me to forget that you are not my flesh and blood,” Volkhard continued. “Your mother was so close to my sister that she named you after her. I want you to remember that and put this ugliness aside.” He turned to address both Anselm and Edelgard. “I will speak with my men about the route we are to take. I shall send a letter informing you of our destination as soon as we reach it. Pray for our safety, both of you.”

“Of course, Uncle Volkhard,” Edelgard said.

The two of them hugged one more time—perhaps for the last time—and Volkhard retreated to his carriage and made preparations with his driver and the soldiers accompanying him. The caravan began to head down the road as Edelgard and Anselm watched.

Hedwig poked her head out of one window and waved as the carriage drifted farther away. _“G-G-Goodb-bye, El! A-Ansy! I l-l-love you!”_

As Edelgard stood by and watched them go, she felt as though she were losing them all over again. _“I love you, too!”_ she called out, scarcely able to force the words out. Tears sprang to her eyes, reducing the road ahead to a shimmering haze that consumed everything, carriages, horses, soldiers, uncle and siblings and all.

Anselm patted her comfortingly on the shoulder. “If you need me,” he said, sounding much more subdued and lost in his thoughts than usual, “I’ll be at the cathedral.”

* * *

Things went back to normal that afternoon, as much as they could. The departure of her younger siblings had left Edelgard feeling empty—as though they had died in her arms yet again. The sky seemed less blue; the cold wind had a colder bite. The food for lunch tasted blander.

In the afternoon she attended Hanneman’s session on black magic, as she typically did on Thursday afternoons, but had such difficulty focusing on the lecture and practical demonstrations that her typical exhaustive note-taking hardly took up half a page in her notebook. After the seminar, she typically practiced with bladed weapons, but today every misstep in her form, every angle just a little off from the norm, felt magnified tenfold for how much it slipped her up. She felt as clumsy and uncoordinated as she had felt when she had first came to this world, when her body was weak and soft and unfamiliar to her.

It hadn’t been half this difficult when Joachim, Heidemarie, Justine, and Gerlinde had left. Because as hard as it had been to say goodbye to them, Edelgard was still their _younger_ sibling. But between herself, Pascal, and Hedwig, she was the eldest, the one they looked up to and expected to protect them. She still remembered, faint as those memories were, what it had felt like to be the only older sibling they had left—and to be powerless to fulfill that sacred social contract of the eldest sister. To say goodbye to them felt as though she were betraying them.

The sword fell from her hand and dropped to the sandy floor as the flat of Ingrid’s blade found the hollow of her wrist. The wooden point of the training blade found Edelgard’s throat next, and then with a gentle yet firm application of force the blade came to rest against her chin and pushed it up so that she had no choice but to stare Ingrid in the eyes. Those green-apple eyes, at least, were a welcome distraction, if only for a moment.

“You’re off your game, Edelgard,” Ingrid said, removing the blade to let Edelgard collect her sword. “It’s alright. Normally I’d be the first person to tell you to work through it, but I understand—it must’ve been hard to see those two go. On top of all the stress from last night, too…”

“Sometimes you can read me like a book, Ingrid,” Edelgard said. She let out a sigh. “With things as they are, I don’t know what news to expect from one day to another. It’s like being in a war, waiting for and dreading the latest report from the battlefield.”

“I know we’re all supposed to be learning and practicing, but maybe you should go to your room and let your head clear itself out for a bit.”

“Who will you spar with?”

“Felix, if he’s not being ornery and his side feels better. Someone who’s in the right frame of mind to give me a challenge. I’m sorry, but I don’t get anything out of sparring with you if your mind is elsewhere, whether I win or lose.”

“I suppose not. Although I think you would learn _something_ at the very least if I managed to defeat you while my mind is elsewhere.” Even her glib remarks felt weak and lifeless, Edelgard thought.

Ingrid laughed anyway. “I guess it would be a pretty embarrassing lesson. I remember when you first joined our house, it was a foregone conclusion that when the Professor put us up against each other, I’d win. Now it feels like I can’t beat you unless you’re distracted.”

“Quite a compliment, coming from you,” Edelgard said, setting her training sword on the rack with the rest of them. “Also, perhaps an impetus to start fighting dirtier.”

“I don’t learn anything by cheating when I’m supposed to be improving my technique. Wasn’t that one of the first things the Professor told you when she paired us up?”

“You’re right. Clearly, you need to set some of your training time aside specifically for learning how to cheat.”

Ingrid shook her head and tried not to smile. “Go and get some rest, Edelgard.”

Edelgard left the training hall, disappointed in herself. Outside she found Dimitri and Dedue, as though they had been waiting for her.

“El,” Dimitri said, a welcome brightness in his icy eyes. He looked worn and weary, as though his thoughts had etched themselves onto his face. “It is good to see you again. You were with your little sister all morning?”

“I was,” she said. “She’s gone now.”

“You must miss her.”

“Well… I know I’ll see her again,” Edelgard lied.

“That’s right—graduation is approaching so quickly, and I am sure your whole family shall be visiting. Perhaps it is the only way to get Burkhart and Anselm under the same roof,” Dimitri said with a smile. “Are you okay?”

“Are _you?_ You look worse off than I do.” She, Dimitri, and Dedue found some secluded place tucked away on the monastery grounds to converse in private. “About last night… the man with the other Crest of Flames. You must be scarcely able to think of anything else.”

“It is true,” he said. He inhaled and let out an anxious sigh, struggling to hold back a stream of words that wanted to pour out of him like a river bursting through a dam. “I do not know how to feel. There… Beyond Professor Byleth, there is someone else like _me_ in the world. Another bearer of this horrible burden, the Crest of Flames… Another one who survived Rhea’s wicked experiments.”

“I wish that were better news to hear,” Edelgard said. “I suppose you’ve been looking for any students or faculty with suspicious limps while I was with my family.”

“Oh, I do not think it is a student or professor,” Dimitri said, “and certainly not a knight. Remember the night I saw Yuri, El. I _knew_ it was not a spirit. He is real; he is _here—”_ His expression darkened. “But… why would Rodrigue not tell me about him? Nothing would excite me more than to know that someone else survived that hell. Is it because I have been disrespectful? That I have not valued his kindness enough?”

“I—I don’t know, Dima,” Edelgard said, conscious of Dedue’s watchful eye. “I don’t think Rodrigue would hide another survivor from you. But perhaps this survivor was from a different set of experiments, one he didn’t know about.” The possibility made her feel ill. On occasion, when she reflected on the torture she, Lysithea, Dimitri, and Mercedes had survived, she considered those who had perished luckier than those who had lived. The dead had no obligations to the living, but the living were forever burdened by them. So much as one more person out there bearing the same scars as her was a moral evil.

“I… I suppose that is possible, though the possibility—” Dimitri raised a hand to his mouth, as though he felt a rush of nausea. “The possibility makes me ill. Do you think it could be him, though? That the Hurricane King could be _him?”_

Edelgard wondered as much. She had always felt the presence of the Crest of Flames within the real Hurricane King on the occasions she had encountered him, in the catacombs and in Zanado. And because of that, she had always assumed that the Hurricane King had been Dimitri. But was it possible that the Hurricane King had never been Dimitri to begin with?

No, Thales had referred to Dimitri by that epithet in private once or twice. Dimitri was the Hurricane King. _A_ Hurricane King, rather. But had he been the Hurricane King in the catacombs? At Zanado? She could no longer be sure.

“Were you and Yuri friends?” Edelgard asked him.

“Friends? I would hardly use the term. A friend is someone you spend pleasant days with and have fond memories of,” he said, bowing his head and swallowing a sad lump in his throat. “In truth… we hardly knew each other, from what little I can remember. I did not know it at the time, but before the experiments he had just recently been adopted off the streets by Count Rowe. He was… crude, a bit, from his impoverished upbringing, but kind. I recall little else, but I remember weeping when the monsters told us he had passed.”

“A friend is someone who is there for you when you are in pain,” Edelgard said, “not merely someone you spend pleasant days with. It sounds to me as though Yuri was a dear friend to the very end, as premature as it came.”

“Do you think he would still be so kind to me now, though?” Dimitri asked. “I recall at times thinking he was pretty. I know, it is unusual for a man to think another one pretty, but apparently we were both often mistaken for girls in our youth. Maybe now he is as hideous as a monster.”

Edelgard took him by the arm and laid her head on his shoulder, feeling her spirits lift just a little. “You survived with your looks intact, it seems,” she said. “If Yuri is still alive, then there’s a good chance that he’s as pretty as ever behind that mask.”

Dimitri managed to force a smile, then relax it into a more genuine and earnest smile. “I… I do not know if I did,” he said, nervously fixing his gaze on something far away from her.

“I think Marianne thinks so,” she added, watching pink rise to his pale cheeks. “And I think monsters can be beautiful, anyway.”

“Thank you,” he said, laying a cold hand atop hers. As cold as his touch, there was something warm about it nonetheless. “I am sorry about bothering you with my problems, though—I know how lonely you must feel, now that all of your little siblings have left.”

“Not all of them,” Edelgard said.

Dimitri furrowed his brow. “But I thought… Is Anselm not a year older than you?”

“First off, he is _eight months_ older than me. Second, I still have one other younger sibling.”

“Who? I thought you were the ninth of eleven.”

“Well, I was born in the Garland Moon, and he was born in the Ethereal Moon, six months later in that same year. He ended up much taller than me, though, and stronger, too, and he has blue eyes and white hair…”

The pink flush stamped on Dimitri’s cheeks turned red and began to spread as, with each detail she provided, he realized who she was talking about. “I…” He let out a nervous chuckle. “I am only your stepbrother, El.”

“So are the rest of them,” Edelgard pointed out. “Every single one of my other siblings is a step-sibling on my father’s side; we have different mothers. You’re a step-sibling on my _mother’s_ side.”

“Only through marriage, not blood.”

“Still, you’re just as much my little brother as Pascal.”

“If you truly feel that way, then I am happy to be your little brother,” he said, pressing her to his chest. As she felt his warmth and heard his heartbeat, she realized that she meant every word of what she’d just said.

She glanced at Dedue. “Can I talk to Dedue in private?”

“Certainly,” Dimitri said, letting go of her and stepping away. “You two have been spending quite a lot more time with each other as of late, haven’t you? Deude, it does my heart good to see you making more friends. You and Edelgard were so frosty to each other before.”

Edelgard led Dedue away so they could talk in private, without even Dimitri hearing.

“You know who those people last night are,” she said to him. As usual when she was donning her disguise as Vepar, she allowed a little hint of a singsong, Kronya-esque lilt to slip into her voice, but it was especially difficult to maintain it today; perhaps it was her imagination, but she could feel it slipping far more often than usual.

“Of course. I organized the event.”

“Including getting revenge on a certain racially prejudiced knight.”

“Justice, Vepar,” Dedue corrected. “I got _justice_ on him.”

“Well, either way, I approve. But I digress. I don’t like that you organized this without our input. Vual and I would have been happy to put on costumes and wreak havoc for you.”

“But if you were absent, you might have been suspected,” Dedue said. Edelgard, of course, knew that, but she was acting as though Vepar wouldn’t have thought of it.

“I suppose you’re right. Anyway, about your other friends… did you know that one of them had the Crest of Flames?”

Dedue shook his head. “That was not to my knowledge.”

“Well, who is it?”

“Sometimes it is best for the right hand not to know what the left is doing.”

“Vual and I are your allies, Dedue. Your co-conspirators! If anybody is entitled to know…”

“And if you are exposed, captured, and interrogated? By either Thales’ loyalists or the Knights of Seiros?” Dedue glared at her. “There are too many enemies. I will safeguard their identities as long as I must—even from you.”

Edelgard knew he had a point.

She racked her brain. It could have indeed been a survivor of the Tragedy of Duscur—perhaps Yuri, as Dimitri so wholeheartedly believed, or Emile, or one of however many others had been caught up in those experiments. There would be some advantage to using somebody whom the whole world believed was dead as an accomplice—no one would suspect them. And Dedue had no problem with hiding important information from Dimitri.

Perhaps, Edelgard theorized, Claude knew. He was one of Dedue’s ‘secret’ accomplices, after all—Dedue had shown no sign of knowing whether she and Vual knew about their partnership or caring to inform them about it. If not for that glimpse of pale skin beneath the first Hurricane King’s facemask, Edelgard might have even suspected that Claude had been him.

“I understand, Dedue,” she said. “Keep as many cards up your sleeves as you need, as long as they help us win. But if they become liabilities, I want names—so I can help you dispose of them.”

Dedue nodded. “Acceptable,” he said. “Also, I must commend you again. An entire morning spent with Edelgard’s closest sister—your disguise is perfect. You even sound distraught.”

“Thank you,” Edelgard said. “Do you know the secret? It’s because Vual and I have _respect_ for the people we imitate. Our kin, Thales’ loyalists, look upon you surface-dwellers with nothing but disdain. That is why they fail. And why _we_ are sympathetic to your goals.”

“I am glad to have such trustworthy allies. I, too, respected Edelgard.” His eyes drifted away from her, and following his gaze Edelgard saw Ingrid standing in front of the training hall and talking to Vual. “But I hope that you have not done as Vual did. If the real Edelgard is still alive and capable of returning here, I doubt you will be as welcomed as he was.”

“Of course,” Edelgard said. “No, Dedue. Edelgard is dead. Dead as a doornail.”

* * *

Later that afternoon, Seteth found her. He looked as serious as ever, though the gaunt hollows of his eyes and cheekbones lent an unintentional grimness to his face.

“Lady Edelgard,” he said, “I need to see you in my office.”

He led her there, his steps slow and halting and his cane tapping on the floor all the way; Edelgard found herself worrying as they ascended the stairs that he might trip and fall. Even though Vual had mimicked his injuries—his broken leg, the loss of his eye and the two fingers on his left hand—he had never seemed so decrepit, though Seteth had obviously had it much worse due to how much longer he’d gone without adequate treatment.

“I can see that you are waiting to catch me should I fall,” he said to Edelgard as they reached the top of the staircase. “I appreciate it.” He led her to his office, eased himself into the chair behind his desk, and bade her to take a seat. She closed the door behind her and sat down.

“As I understand it from my… counterpart,” Seteth said, “and from this morning’s visit to your class—” He paused to stifle another chest-rattling cough. “—Lady Rhea seems to have taken an… unhealthy interest in you.”

“You think so?” Edelgard asked.

“Yes. You, and your professor as well. I had always found it odd—suspicious, even—that Lady Rhea had hired Miss Eisner sight unseen, though I will admit that despite her murky past and lack of credentials she has proven to be a wonderful teacher. And, just so I am clear in the matter, can you recount for me how your professor’s hair and eyes changed?”

Edelgard did so, explaining the battle with Solon and the spell that had banished Byleth to the darkness.

“I see.” Seteth stroked his beard, which he had long since trimmed back to its usual chinstrap despite Manuela’s protests. “That is what Vual— _Albus_ told me as well, but I wanted to hear it from a less potentially biased source. And how did Lady Rhea react to this?”

“She had been absent during the incident,” Edelgard said, prompting a surprised arching of Seteth’s eyebrows in response. “I believe she had been working on… _something_ with the late Cardinal Aelfric. It was a week or so, I think, after the incident that Lady Rhea first saw us—the very same night Flayn returned to the monastery with you—with who we _thought_ was you.” She explained to Seteth how Rhea had reacted that night and the following morning.

Seteth nodded along. “I see, I see. And Lady Rhea was interested in spiriting away _both_ of you.”

“Yes.”

“As I recall, you claimed to have had a revelation from the Goddess when Flayn was kidnapped,” he said.

“Do you not believe me?”

“Whether I believe you or not, I am grateful all the same that you were able to lead us to her,” he said, rubbing his throat as though he could still feel the bruises where the Hurricane King had grabbed him. “But I digress. Lady Rhea investigates such claims very seriously, and most of the students she investigates turn out to have been doing it for attention. All this time I have been gone, has she been… pursuing you on those grounds?”

“Yes,” Edelgard said. She explained some of Rhea’s behavior to him. What she left out was the incident in the Holy Tomb—after all, it hadn’t actually happened; it had merely been a might-have-been which Byleth by her abilities had seen.

“She… tucked you into her bed and sang you a lullaby,” Seteth recounted flatly, dumbfounded.

“On one occasion, yes. She says she can feel the presence of the Goddess on my skin, or smell it on my breath, or such and such. I think she’s far past simply investigating.”

“Whether or not she does feel the Goddess within you, to say the very least that is indeed an inappropriate way to act toward a student. I must apologize on her behalf.” His expression darkened. “I suspect, due to Lady Rhea’s familiarity with Miss Eisner and Jeralt from the beginning, that your professor’s change is something she had planned for or expected, somehow. Perhaps she expects you to undergo a similar transformation as well. I do not like this.”

“Nor do I, sir,” Edelgard said. She realized that she understood more about Byleth than Seteth did. He didn’t know about the Crest Stone implanted in her heart or that she was meant to be a vessel for the Goddess. If he knew the truth, she wondered, would he still find it disturbing? Perhaps the knowledge that Rhea aimed to resurrect her mother, the Goddess herself, would change his tune.

“Which, of course, brings us to the crux of the matter. Rhea’s intention toward putting you under her ‘personal protection…’ I simply cannot allow it. She was even planning to have your belongings moved from the dormitories to her personal quarters upstairs, which is simply beyond the pale.”

Thank goodness Seteth was just as on her side in this affair as Vual was, Edelgard thought, shuddering. For now, at least.

“I did my best to talk her down,” Seteth said, which made Edelgard dread that the next words out of his mouth would be that she would be forced to share a bed with Archbishop Rhea for the rest of the term. “I will say that I had moderate success. You shall not be under Lady Rhea’s _personal_ protection, but she will be assigning two hand-picked knights to accompany you from now until the end of the term. They will stand at your door while you sleep, sit in on your classes, eat with you, stand by and observe during your drills and personal training, and escort you to any place in the monastery or town you wish to visit. Given the danger, I cannot exactly _disagree_ with these provisions, though I assume you must find them distasteful.”

Edelgard’s heart sank. Such a dogged security detail was, of course, understandable, and not something she was unused to—Ladislava and Hubert had been, at critical junctures during the war, just as inseparable from her. But Ladislava and Hubert answered to her and nobody else and were unflinchingly loyal. These knights, on the contrary, were not for her protection but rather would serve as the wardens of a mobile prison. Wherever Edelgard went, she would be chained to the Archbishop.

That meant no clandestine meetings with Dedue and Vual (which, Edelgard supposed, might at least spare her from any further whims Thales might have to have her harmed). No investigations into the mystery of this second bearer of the Crest of Flames. And no nightly visits with Hapi, which somehow stung the most.

“I suspect you are starting to regret that you did not take your uncle up on his offer to have you withdrawn from the academy,” Seteth said.

“Yes,” Edelgard said. “It’s a shame you caught me after he left with Pascal and Hedwig.”

“There is another matter,” Seteth said, “concerning yourself, your professor, and Lady Rhea. I have had to compromise, too, with her on this. She wishes to have you and your professor brought to the Holy Tomb, a sanctuary deep beneath Garreg Mach which is typically inaccessible to anyone but herself. In light of her behavior, I do not wish for the two of you to be alone with her.”

“Thank you, sir,” Edelgard said. “What is the compromise?”

“There will be a ceremony in the tomb. Flayn and I shall accompany Rhea, and you and the rest of the Blue Lions to accompany Professor Byleth. I can only hope that whatever Lady Rhea wishes to do to you, she cannot do it with an audience.”

“And… when will this ceremony be?” Edelgard asked, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. In her heart, she already knew the answer. Even these two different worlds could have moments of synchronicity. In her world, Rhea had brought Byleth and the Black Eagles down to the Holy Tomb at the end of the Pegasus Moon, and as the treacherous wintry winds the month was known for howled over the vast stone ocean of the tomb’s ceiling, the Flame Emperor had shown his true face.

“The end of this month,” Seteth said. “Now, make sure to return to the dormitories before it gets dark. The curfew is back in effect, and I am certain that Rhea’s knights will make sure it is enforced, for _you_ especially.”

“Thank you, sir,” Edelgard said, standing up from her seat. “But before I go, might I ask you why you haven’t spoken to Lady Rhea about… Albus yet?”

“For starters, because I would prefer him not to die,” Seteth said, scratching idly at the edge of the eyepatch that covered his left eye. “I cannot imagine how she might feel if she discovers that I was not myself for the past few weeks and she was none the wiser.”

Edelgard recalled how Flayn had reacted to that same knowledge and agreed that Rhea’s reaction would be orders of magnitude more vicious.

“These Agarthan people,” Seteth continued, “have done horrible wrongs to myself, to Flayn, to our family, and to Lady Rhea. Toward them, she is particularly vindictive and vengeful to an extent I would rather you do not dwell upon.”

Edelgard did dwell upon it, though. She supposed she had something in common with Rhea after all. Perhaps Thales himself had taken something from her—something as precious as her family, her innocence. Perhaps the beast she and Byleth had slain in Fhirdiad had been, like her, warped by the heinous deeds of the Agarthans into something unrecognizable; perhaps Rhea had looked at herself in the mirror as many times as Edelgard had, or many thousands more, and wished she could remember a time when she had seen a person staring back at her. But while Edelgard had had Byleth and her fellow Black Eagles, Rhea had had no one to stop her from growing more and more monstrous until no further reasoning with her had been possible.

“Currently, Albus is performing a helpful service for me,” Seteth added, “by informing me about their plots and feeding them misinformation. I would rather Lady Rhea’s feelings do not interfere with this for the time being.”

“Are you used to keeping secrets from her?” Edelgard asked him.

“No,” he said, “and I do not particularly enjoy it, but I believe I can manage. Good day, Lady Edelgard. Be safe.”

Edelgard went for the door, only for Seteth to call her back once more.

“Oh, and I am not sure I have properly thanked you yet for advocating on that man’s behalf,” he said. “If you had not visited me that night, I do not think I would have been so charitable toward him. You are a good person.” A slight smile breached his severe disposition. “What? Do not look at me as though I have just said something patently untrue.”

She felt her lips crack open into a faint smile. “Thank you, sir.”

She left the office and headed down the hall. A chill ran up her spine as she passed the doors to Rhea’s audience chamber, as though a part of her feared they would swing open behind her and a pair of scaly claws would hook into her shoulders and whisk her away. The worry didn’t subside until she had made her way well past the heavy oaken doors.

Since Vual’s office was on this floor, she decided to see if he was available. The existence of the third bearer of the Crest of Flames still wore heavily on her mind, and if anybody would know anything about those horrendous experiments and the fruits they had bore, it would be an Agarthan.

She knocked on the door to Vual’s broom closet, not expecting a response but willing to at least try. She was surprised, then, when the door swung open.

“Ah, hello, Edelgard. Come in. What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I’m sure you know about last night,” she said, following his invitation into the room and closing the door firmly behind her.

“About the Hurricane Kings. Yes, Dedue has informed me.”

“Has he also informed you that one of them bears the Crest of Flames?”

Vual stared at her, dumbfounded. “And how would you know?”

“Since Professor Byleth possesses that Crest, she can sense its presence when it’s used. So can Dimitri. One of the two Hurricane Kings used it to shatter Catherine’s kneecap—both of them could feel it.”

“I see.” He sat down at his desk and rested his chin on his clasped hands thoughtfully.

“I know about the Crest experiments Dimitri and Mercedes endured,” Edelgard said. “What I don’t know is if there were any survivors beyond those two. How many other people are there in this world right now who bear the scars of Those Who—of the Agarthans’ handiwork?” Moreover, she wondered, who else out in her own world beside herself and Lysithea were like that—survivors of an event that never ought to have happened?

Vual raised his eyebrows. “Those Who what?”

“Those Who Slither in the Dark. Just something Hubert and I called you before we knew what you were called.”

“Oh. Like Dedue and his Men in Black.”

“Or Claude and his No-Eyed People.”

“I like that one. Those Who Slither, too—it’s poetic, I’ll give it that, though a bit of a mouthful—”

“Vual,” Edelgard said sternly, placing her hands down on the desk and bracing her arms against it. “The experiments. Could there be any other survivors?”

“You’re asking the wrong person, I’m afraid,” Vual said, shrugging. “In my past life, before I was Vual Unit Five-Fifteen, I was a theoretical physicist.”

“What were you before you were Vual Unit Five-Fifteen?”

“I was Vual Unit Two-Eight; altering my serial number was a very challenging process, but I digress. Anyway, in my current life, I came to the monastery in 1170 to begin observing Seteth and planning his replacement. I wasn’t involved in studying your blood in either capacity.”

“But you report directly to Thales. He never said anything that hinted at those experiments’ results?”

“Of course I knew _of_ the experiments, but I’m just as surprised as you. I’d only been told there were two survivors.”

With a disappointed sigh, Edelgard took her hands off the desk.

“Perhaps this mysterious figure received the Crest of Flames by some other means,” Vual suggested to her, “such as however your professor obtained it—some connection to the Fell Star. Perhaps Byleth Eisner has a twin sister her father never told her about?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” she said. “That someone else has a connection to So—to the Fell Star, not that Byleth has a secret twin.” That would mean, however, that whatever Rhea had done to place the Crest Stone in Byleth’s heart, she had done to someone else—another child, perhaps, whose body and soul were meant to be used as nothing more than kindling in a ritual sacrifice to bring the Goddess herself to this lowly mortal plane. She wasn’t sure that was much of an improvement. Rhea, Thales—Thales’ method might have left more scars and caused more nightmares, but it was essentially the same.

“Well, never mind us—perhaps the Knights of Seiros will get their man this time.” Vual stood up and idly examined the tiny clock he kept in his pocket. “I’m going to share dinner with Ingrid. You’re welcome to join us if you’d like.”

“I can’t see the harm,” Edelgard said. “Thank you, sir.”

The two of them left the cramped office together, only to find that they weren’t the only people leaving. Seteth was also making his way down the hall, his cane tapping with every halting step, and at his side was Rhea.

“I cannot thank you enough, Lady Rhea,” Seteth said as Rhea accompanied him. “What a horrible poison that was—I feel as weak and feeble now as the day I arrived here.”

“I am simply relieved that you are on the mend, Seteth,” Rhea replied to him, her voice soft and soothing as freshly cleaned silk bedsheets. “I worried so much for you…”

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of Edelgard and Vual.

Edelgard felt that prickling on the back of her neck again, the cold caress of dragon’s breath against her skin.

“Edelgard, dear,” Rhea breathed, beckoning her forward. “What a delight to cross paths with you again.” She looked at Vual. “And you…”

Vual took a deep breath and exhaled through his nose to calm his anxiety. “Good day, Your Holiness,” he said.

“Ah, Albus… Duerr, was it?” She smiled. “You are Seteth’s new assistant, are you not? But I cannot help but think I have seen you before.”

“Oh, no, no.” Vual shook his head. “I do not think that is possible. I didn’t even go to the Officers’ Academy here. I think I just have one of those familiar faces.”

“Perhaps you do. Sometimes I struggle to tell so many names and faces apart myself. It is quite a common affliction to archbishops; we see so many of them every day…” Rhea reached out toward Edelgard, but a stern cough from Seteth stayed her hand. “I would love to speak longer with you, but I do not feel comfortable allowing Seteth to return to his quarters alone. Take care, Albus, of that familiar face. And Edelgard… Princess Edelgard… I hope you will find your new accommodations more than acceptable.”

* * *

As soon as she had returned to the dormitories after dinner, Edelgard met her hand-picked prison wardens, Sir Biggs and Sir Wedge of the Knights of Seiros. She stared at them from the side of her bed as they stood in her room. Unexpectedly, Wedge was big and Biggs was somewhat wedge-shaped.

“So,” she said, “you are to follow me wherever I go?”

“Yes,” Biggs said.

“Under Lady Rhea’s orders,” Wedge said.

“You will be eating with me?”

“We’ll stick to you like glue,” Biggs said. “Even if the kitchen’s serving fried Caledonian crayfish.”

“On the occasions they serve that, I prefer to have my meal at one of the taverns in town,” Edelgard said.

“We’ll go with you,” Wedge said.

Edelgard crossed her arms. “As I understand it, you will be standing outside my room at night. What will you do if I have guests over?”

“We’ll come inside with them,” Wedge said.

“It wouldn’t be safe for you to have guests over. They could be Hurricane Kings,” Biggs said.

“I can have no privacy with them?” Edelgard asked. She was racking her brain for ways she could still conduct her secret meetings.

“Well, when you’re with someone, you’re not in private anyway, so there’s no harm in us being there,” Wedge said.

“What about if Seteth or another member of the faculty calls me to their office? Would you excuse yourself if I or he requested it?”

“Well, if _Seteth_ said it was okay,” Biggs said.

“It seems… reasonable to trust the faculty,” Wedge said. “But only if they say so.”

Edelgard thought for a moment. “Would you follow me into the sauna?”

“I can’t see why not,” Wedge said. “The sauna’s nice.”

“Can always use a good trip to the sauna,” Biggs agreed.

“And should I need to use the privy or the bathhouse…”

Both knights’ faces turned red.

“W-Well, of course,” Wedge stammered, “we’d—we’d wait outside.”

“It wouldn’t be proper to watch a princess do… those sorts of things,” Biggs said.

So that left Edelgard with three ways she could continue to conspire—see them in a faculty member’s office, meet them in the bathhouse, or meet them in the privy. She couldn’t say she relished the idea of using either of the latter as meeting places. Besides, it would be difficult to coordinate.

“What will you do,” she asked Biggs and Wedge, “if _you_ need to relieve yourself or wash up?”

“Well, one of us goes and the other stays, Your Highness,” said Biggs.

“What if you both need to… go to the privy?” she asked.

“The one who needs it most goes first and the other waits,” Wedge said, “I suppose.”

“But if you _both_ need to relieve yourself _very_ urgently,” Edelgard said, “I would hate to have one of you soil yourselves. Could you not both go to the privy, should that vanishingly rare possibility occur, and leave me alone for just a few minutes? What could happen in just a few minutes?”

“Lady Rhea wouldn’t like it,” Biggs said.

“But it’s pretty unlikely,” Wedge said. “I guess… if that happens, which it probably won’t, it wouldn’t hurt to leave you for just a _few_ minutes.”

“Good,” Edelgard said. “The last thing I would want is for you to lose your dignity over the course of this assignment.” She would have to find a way to subtly see if she could procure something with laxative qualities. Surely Claude would have something like that stashed away. She might also be able to put them both to sleep while they stood guard at night—or at least, assuming they took turns sleeping, one of them. “I look forward to getting to know you both better.”

“Just doing our jobs, Your Highness,” Wedge said.

“I like hunting, whittling, and collecting rocks that look like things,” Biggs said. “Once I found a dried bean that looked like Saint Indech’s face, and, well, it’s not really a rock, but it counts…” He trailed off, withering under a stern look from Wedge. “I mean, just doing our jobs, Your Highness,” he said, bowing to Edelgard.

Edelgard took a deep breath and steeled herself. It was going to be a long two weeks. For herself, of course, and for these two unfortunate knights, who she was sure had just been saddled with the worst possible job in the whole monastery.

“I just remembered,” she said, “there was a tactics primer I wanted to check out from the library, but couldn’t because Claude had it. Could you please escort me down the hall to his room so I can ask him to borrow it for an evening?”

Biggs’ and Wedge’s faces lit up. “Sure, Your Highness,” Wedge said.

“That’s easy enough,” Biggs said. “You stay right here with Wedge and I’ll go get him.”

“No, no—I wanted to speak to him personally. I had a question about it he might be able to answer,” Edelgard hastily added before Biggs could open the door.

“Well, it’s curfew…” Wedge said.

“It’s just down the hall,” she retorted. “If you ask me, I understand putting the dormitories as a whole under guard, but keeping us all in our rooms after dark is positively draconian.”

“You know what, you’re right,” Wedge said.

“But it’s Lady Rhea’s orders,” Biggs said. “Just tell me what you were going to ask him and I’ll ask him for you.”

Edelgard rolled her eyes. She was being treated like a spoiled nobleman’s daughter. She was certainly glad Lysithea wasn’t here, or she would have gone berserk by now. “Never mind,” she said. “In fact, forget about the book. I’m going to bed.”

“Alright,” Wedge said, bowing politely to her as his counterpart did the same. “We’ll be outside if you need us, Your Highness.”

The two of them left. Edelgard changed into her pajamas, let down her hair, and collapsed into her bed, not even bothering to snuff out the candle on her bedside table. The bed was no less empty than it had been the last time she’d slept in it, and yet tonight it felt as empty as it had been the first morning she had woken up in it. And even with her new ‘friends’ standing outside, Edelgard felt no less lonely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's right. After 35 chapters I'm finally giving you a proper breather chapter instead of one that starts out like one but then delivers a soul-crushing bombshell at the end.
> 
> I was gonna put a bombshell at the end of this one but... nah. I'm saving it for next week. You all deserve a break.


	37. In the Presence of Another World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which something unexpected happens in the Holy Tomb.

Despite her new entourage following in her footsteps with the dogged determination of a pair of ducklings who’d decided she was their mother, Edelgard once again felt the kind of crushing loneliness she’d had just enough of a respite from to start forgetting how it felt. She’d been less ready to say goodbye to her family a second time than she’d initially been to say hello to them. Now they were gone again—except for Anselm, who was quite his own can of worms—and Edelgard felt as though the floor had dropped out beneath her.

And so soon after she had finally gotten used to looking Uncle Volkhard in the eyes and not seeing Thales leering back at her, too.

For the first time since Gronder Field, she felt an aching homesickness so strong it was nearly physical. It didn’t help that under such heavy supervision and surveillance she didn’t even have her secret treaties to occupy her mind in addition to her classes.

She missed Hedwig and Pascal, and on top of all that she missed her world’s Hubert and Ferdinand, her world’s Dorothea, her world’s Lysithea, her world’s Ashe and Petra, her world’s Bernadetta and Linhardt and Caspar, her world’s Annette and Mercedes, and above all, her world’s Byleth.

Which was why she found herself approaching her professor after battalion drills that Friday morning, before Biggs and Wedge could catch up to her from their positions on the sidelines.

“Professor,” she said, hurrying to meet her before the rest of the class could regroup around her, “can I speak to you in private for a moment?”

The rest of the class approached, worn from the morning’s exercises and leaving clouds of their heavy and tired breaths in their wake.

_“I can’t be the only one who thinks it’s suspicious,”_ Sylvain was saying, _“that just a_ few _days after curfew gets lifted, we get not one but_ two _Hurricane Kings attacking the monastery…”_

_“You’ve gotten more paranoid than the princess,”_ Felix grumbled at him. _“What, do you think this whole thing was some kind of false flag?”_

_“Hey, the church has deep connections to the Crest of Flames, doesn’t it? Nemesis was literally ordained by the Goddess before he went nuts…”_

_“Yes, Sylvain. The Church of Seiros is throwing psychotic masked men at us so that_ you _can’t schmooze with girls. Ingrid, tell him how ridiculous he sounds.”_

_“Honestly, Sylvain, it’s bad_ enough _that you accused Claude_ _because he sprained his ankle…”_

Byleth nodded, then waved the class away and took Edelgard aside. “What’s wrong?” she asked, her voice low and brilliant green eyes narrowed in concern. “Vual’s kept me as up-to-date as he can.”

“Well, it’s, um… I suppose it’s actually rather frivolous,” Edelgard said, finding it suddenly hard—or, rather, embarrassing—to articulate what she wanted. “But… since neither of us are going anywhere tonight…”

Byleth leaned in close to her and held up a hand to her mouth. _“It wouldn’t be right for me to date you,”_ she whispered.

“Heaven forbid! No, that’s not what I—” Edelgard sputtered. “Professor, it’s just… well, I’m not one to ask you to use your powers for personal gain or indulgence, but—”

“You want to visit home.”

“For information-gathering,” she quickly appended. “There’s a lot I can learn from my world that I can bring back. Tactics—it would be a tactical advantage.” The excuse came so easily that for a moment she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it earlier—she hadn’t wanted to demand so much of this arcane power, she supposed, after seeing how worn out Byleth and Sothis had been the night they’d misused the power to give her an extra night’s sleep, and she knew that it was even more difficult to use now that Byleth had no one to rely on but herself. “If, tonight, you could send me back for… two hours, perhaps?”

Byleth nodded. “I can do that. Ten o’clock, two hours.”

“Thank you, Professor.”

The rest of the day was uneventful, though Edelgard had her entourage to thank for making it so. Night came, and Edelgard waited out the night a prisoner in her own bedroom, waiting for the magic hour to strike.

As the sky turned black, guilt and second thoughts flooded her mind. She didn’t know how often Byleth had made use of the Goddess’ power in her world, but she had to assume it was far less sparingly than in this one. In this world, after all, there was collateral damage every time it was used—Byleth had to constantly think to herself about the risks, knowing that using it would leave Edelgard and Hilda both catatonic for the duration. It was because of their very presence in this world—intruders, foreign objects, like dirt in an open wound—that Byleth’s hands were tied when it came to this incredible power.

The time finally came. Outside, the bells tolled ten.

And the world froze and burned away.

Edelgard found herself sitting in her bedroom in the imperial palace, engulfed in a thick and cozy comforter and sinking into the plush and sumptuous mattress expected of the emperor of an entire continent. She was reading a book. From outside the windows came the echoes of distant bells tolling eight o’clock.

She examined the book her counterpart was reading. It was a collection of shockingly bawdy stories… with illustrations that were just as salacious as the text. She hadn’t been aware the palatial library _had_ such lewd material.

She cleared her throat. “Ahem,” she said. Her counterpart quickly slammed the book shut as though embarrassed she’d been reading it and threw it across the room, and by the heat on her cheeks and the quickening of her pulse, she _had_ been. “In bed at this hour, my fellow Edelgard?”

The other Edelgard sighed. “I guess you’ve got no choice but to surprise me. Yes, at this hour. I have a lot of long meetings to survive tomorrow. Besides, early to bed and early to rise makes one healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

Edelgard dragged herself out of bed. “Yes, I’m well aware of that saying, but early to rise and early to bed makes one healthy but socially dead. If you don’t mind, I need to visit a few people. I don’t suppose my wife is here?”

“No,” the other Edelgard said.

“Just my luck; it is as though the universe itself conspires to keep us apart,” Edelgard muttered, trudging to her closet and finding a crimson robe to layer over her pajamas.

“She’s been going back and forth between here and Shambhala with Linhardt.”

“You’re quite in the loop.”

“I’m the _emperor._ Hubert’s been telling me all about Those Who Slither in the Dark. They’re the ones ruining my world, too, aren’t they?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say they’ve _ruined_ it just yet. But they have made quite a mess of things.” As Edelgard cinched the robe tighter around her waist, she couldn’t help but notice that something felt different about her body. She pressed a finger against her stomach and the flesh that met her fingertip was nowhere near as firm and unyielding as she remembered. “My counterpart… you have not been keeping up with my exercise routine, have you?”

“I tried for a bit,” the other Edelgard said, “but I don’t know how you do it. Your body _already_ aches all the time from these scars, and you expect me to do a full-body workout three times a day on _top_ of that?!”

“I suppose it is an unrealistic expectation,” Edelgard admitted. She had to admit that keeping fit was much easier with a younger and less physically traumatized body. Her body was growing older, and the two Crests and the cost of that burden didn’t exactly improve her situation. “Anyway, where is Hubert? I know for a fact that he’s skulking around nearby.”

“I’m not sure. I try to avoid him unless I have work to do.”

“Hmm? That sounds counter-intuitive.”

“Well, if I have work to do, he can help. If I _don’t_ have work to do, he can _find_ some. I like the gaps in my schedule just fine, thank you.”

“Ah. Right.” Edelgard nodded. She’d gotten so used to the other world’s Hubert that she’d forgotten how much of her lack of free time owed itself to his dogged support of her goals. One day, she’d once said to Byleth, the two of them would know the joys of idling and Hubert would have nothing new to pester her about.

Then again, perhaps _Hubert_ wasn’t really the problem: Edelgard found excuses to meddle and make busywork for herself with or without him. It seemed that the other Edelgard was much more protective of her free time now than Edelgard herself had ever managed to be.

“Well,” she said, “I _do_ have business here, so just relax and let me do all the talking from here on out. I’ve only got two hours to spare.”

“Alright, just don’t embarrass me,” the other Edelgard said.

Edelgard left her bedroom and traced the familiar halls of the palace. A pang of melancholy struck her. Now that she’d met her family, she felt even more strongly that these halls yearned for their presence just as her heart did. The rugs begged for Hedwig to run across them, the books in the library begged for Pascal to read them. The palace seemed now even more deeply haunted by regret and culpability for the sins it had contained in its dungeons so deep within its bowels.

That melancholy was replaced first by relief and excitement, then by an altogether new and different sense of melancholy when Edelgard found Mercedes and Jeritza wandering the halls near the courtyard.

It was astonishing to see Mercedes in this world after growing so used to the sight of her in the other world. This Mercedes had thick, fluffy, luxurious champagne-colored hair like her brother, though she’d cut it short a few years back for the sake of the war, and she looked as hale and hearty as ever—her cheeks were rosy, her face was full, her skin was smooth and practically glowing. The gaunt and pale girl whose body and will had been subsumed into the Death Knight’s frightful armor was almost unrecognizable in comparison.

At her side, taller, lankier, looming, with the indescribable aura of a sword that had somehow been transfigured into a man, was her brother Jeritza von Hrym, the man once known as Emile von Bartels… and the Death Knight of this world. He shared Mercedes’ lustrous hair in color though not in style; he wore it long and let his bangs frame his sharp, thin face as curtains framed a window. He had mellowed out considerably over the past year, though he still almost permanently wore a severe and cold expression on his face. It was a very subtle, mostly internal form of mellowing.

Edelgard felt her pulse skyrocket at the sight of Jeritza and concluded that the other Edelgard, probably rightly so, was terrified of him.

“Oh! Hello, Your Majesty,” Mercedes said, her voice as soft and sweet as ever. “It’s a pleasure to see you. Emile and I are going to have some fresh peach sorbet in the courtyard—would you care to join us?”

Edelgard looked out the window. The sun had set and a rime of frost was settling on the windowpanes. “It looks a bit cold,” she said.

“You must be busy, Your Majesty,” Jeritza said. “You do not come often to this world.”

“You can tell that I’ve returned for a visit just by looking at me?” Edelgard asked, amused by his observation.

“It is simple,” he drawled. “Your counterpart cowers in fear of me.”

“It’s a pleasure to have you, Edelgard—” Mercedes began, but the rest of her words were swallowed up by the force of Edelgard’s embrace.

She hadn’t realized just how _wonderful_ it would be to properly see her again. She reached up to press a hand to Mercedes’ cheek and tease her fingers against her hair. “Oh… Oh, Mercedes, my friend…”

“What is this? You can’t have missed me _too_ much in the other world; I’m sure I’m right there!” Mercedes said, gently taking Edelgard by the wrist but allowing her hand to linger.

“Well…” Edelgard said, releasing her.

“Well what?” she asked.

“You’re… the Death Knight.”

“Oh!” Mercedes and Jeritza shared a bemused glance. “Oh, my! That means _I’m_ the one terrorizing people and slaking my bloodlust in that frightful black armor!” Mercedes said, laughing for a bit with a laugh like bright sleigh bells before it dawned on her what exactly it _meant_ for her to be the Death Knight. “Oh… oh, dear.”

“Anyway, I don’t want to ruin your lovely dessert—” Edelgard said.

“Show me how to journey to this other world with you, Your Majesty,” Jeritza said, his sharp violet eyes betraying a cold fury, “and show me who has cursed my sister with the burden of that title. I will bathe in his blood for you.”

“Thank you, Jeritza. Let the record show that I’d love to bring you along with me if I could. Anyway, I can’t stay here long, I’m afraid—do either of you have any idea where Hubert is?”

“Yes, I believe he’s in the parlor with Ferdinand. Of course—you come here so infrequently, I’m sure you have so many other people to talk to. We won’t keep you.”

“It’s good to see both of you again,” Edelgard said.

“I’m sure it must be,” Mercedes said. Her gaze found the floor, a nervous energy in the movement of her eyes. “I… don’t suppose Annie is taking it well? In the other world, that is? On the other Mercedes’ behalf, I’d like to apologize for causing her such distress.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not so sure if your apology would help,” Edelgard said bluntly. “You and the other Mercedes are two different people; apologies on another’s behalf are rarely more than an empty gesture.”

“Oh, no, _I’m_ sorry—I wasn’t thinking. Of course, you’re right, Edelgard. Now go before your time runs out and your carriage turns back into a pumpkin.”

Edelgard couldn’t help but smile at the reference to that old fairy tale. “Who else is here?”

“Besides the two of us, there’s Hubert and Ferdinand, of course. They’re in the parlor now. Annette left to oversee the rebuilding of Arianrhod a few days ago, and Caspar leaves for Fort Merceus tomorrow. Oh, and Bernadetta and Ignatz are here as well.”

“What about Lysithea?”

“Hanneman and Manuela took her back in Ordelia, spending the rest of her convalescence at her parents’ estate.”

“Dorothea?”

“Oh, she’s gone back to Brigid with Petra and Ashe.”

Edelgard sighed. Of course, her new family in the Black Eagles had families and lives all their own, not to mention business; she couldn’t expect all of them to be at her beck and call at all times.

“Marianne is here,” Mercedes added cheerfully. “With Hilda and Claude. Those two haven’t left yet! I’m not sure if they ever will.”

“Hilda and Claude? What are they doing here?”

“You’ll have to ask Hubert,” Mercedes said with a shrug.

“Thank you, Mercie,” Edelgard said, giving her another hug, and then they parted ways.

She found Hubert and Ferdinand, as Mercedes had told her, in the parlor. At the sight of her, the two of them stood up in her presence from the sofa they’d been sitting on. Edelgard couldn’t help but notice that their cravats hung loose around their collars and their hands held not cups of tea or mugs of coffee but rather glasses of dark red wine. The bottle resting on the table before them was nearly empty.

“Lady Edelgard,” Hubert said, hastily setting down his glass and bowing to her as Ferdinand did the same. “Pardon me. I thought you had retired to your quarters for the night.”

“Pardon _me,”_ Edelgard said. “I wouldn’t have arrived unannounced if I’d known you were on a date.”

It was rare for this world’s Hubert to blush, but that was exactly what he did. “Ah… A… _date,_ milady? By no means. The Prime Minister and I are simply… unwinding after a long and stressful day.”

“With wine,” Ferdinand said, clearly a bit tipsy. “We are unwinding with wine. One might say the Minister of the Imperial Household and I are… un _wine-_ ing.”

“Well, I do hate to interrupt you,” Edelgard said, “but seeing as I’m only here for less than two hours, Hubert, may I have your ear for a moment?”

Both Hubert and Ferdinand realized that they had been speaking to _their_ Edelgard and turned red in the face.

“Yes, of course, Lady Edelgard,” Hubert said, mortified. “Of course. Certainly.”

“And when you have finished having this moment, Your Majesty, may you join us for a glass?” Ferdinand asked. “It is a fine vintage. Of course, House Aegir has always prided itself on its sense of taste and its legendary wine cultivars—”

“I’d like to have a drink with you before this night is done,” Edelgard said. “But Hubert, please, a word.”

“Of course.” Hubert followed her out into the foyer and then into the hall. “Lady Edelgard, I am certain we have much to discuss. Perhaps you wish to see your villainous ‘uncle?’ We are currently keeping him in the dungeons—yes, the very same ones in which he left you and your family to rot. Perhaps it would be cathartic.”

“No, not tonight.” Edelgard would have loved to gloat in the monster’s face, but as far as he knew, she was dead and replaced by one of his underlings, and showing up to sneer at him would blow her cover.

“I doubt he would be in any mood to converse, anyway,” Hubert admitted, carding a hand frustratedly through his hair. As she’d been told once by Annette, Edelgard could see a streak of gray winding its way through the black; all the stress had taken a toll on him. “He seems to spend nearly all of his time in a self-induced coma. I have had little opportunity to extract any information from him.”

“Then let me tell you what he told me,” Edelgard said, and with that she told him everything.

Hubert’s jaw hung slack for a moment. “He is… a time traveler? I see. That could explain why we found him unconscious in Shambhala, presuming that Byleth had used that curious ability of hers at that moment. It also means,” he added, stroking his chin thoughtfully, “that at this very moment, in the other world, he is completely unconscious…”

“Yes… at this very moment, wherever he is, he is completely unconscious. In the other world, Byleth uses her powers far more sparingly due to the collateral damage it risks, but…”

He raised an eyebrow and grinned a sinister grin. “That sounds like a very enticing opportunity to me, Your Majesty.”

“Would that you were there with me, Hubert, you could help me seize it,” Edelgard said. “The other Hubert… he is a nice, kind person; not at all suited for the work you do so well. Sometimes it is as though I’m trying to fly with only one wing.”

“I would not ask any other version of myself to do what I do,” he agreed. “I wish I could have been caught up in this madness with you, Your Highness.”

“I wouldn’t want to deprive Ferdinand of you.” She looked off across the hall. “Hubert… do you recall Hedy?”

“Your sibling, Hedwig?” He furrowed his brow as he thought and frowned. “The last I saw of any of your siblings was… fifteen years ago, before the insurrection. They were all spirited away as you were. Hedwig must have been three or four the last time I saw her.”

“She’s almost thirteen in the other world. I saw her. She’s already as tall as me, and I suspect that when she grows up—” The words caught in her throat. “When she grows up, she might be nearly as tall as you. She’d be almost nineteen now, in this world, if she’d… lived.”

There was an unusually soft melancholic look on Hubert’s face as he took Edelgard by her hands. “Lady Edelgard… I swear to you as your vassal that the fate that befell your family shall never befall another, neither in this world, nor the next one.”

“It’s… funny, though. Some of my siblings, sometimes, are… well, they’re insufferable. Siblings often are, I suppose.” Edelgard sighed. “I miss them so much… but if I had to, I think I would rather be with my fellow Black Eagles than with them.”

“I felt the same way about my family,” Hubert said. “Some of them I found tolerable, but I did not exactly _choose_ to be related to them.”

“You didn’t choose any of our former classmates, either.”

“I chose not to have them disappeared, murdered, or placed under house arrest. That counts.”

“But I digress,” Edelgard said. “I’m afraid I have business here; I can’t spend all of my time socializing, unfortunately.”

“Say the word and I will do whatever it is you ask.”

“Give me all of our documentation on the assault on Shambhala.”

He was taken aback. “Our…”

“I am certain Shamir and Byleth have both written very detailed reports on our operations in Shambhala. Points of egress, the city’s layout, their defenses, their weak spots. I’m going to memorize as much as I can tonight and bring it back to the other world.”

With a knowing sinister cackle, he bowed to her. “As you wish, Lady Edelgard. I shall fetch the reports posthaste. If I am not asking too much, please keep Ferdinand company for me.”

“Of course,” Edelgard said, and she returned to the parlor alone. “Sorry, Ferdinand, but Hubert has to fetch something for me.”

“Of course,” Ferdinand said, a bright grin on his face. “Shall I pour you a glass?”

“Normally, I’d love one, but no—I need to keep my wits about me tonight.” She sat down across from him. “So, has anything interesting happened while I was away? How is my counterpart doing?”

“You shall be delighted to hear that Ellie is pulling her weight.”

“‘Ellie?’”

“Ah, that is what she has us call her in private. She thinks ‘Other Edelgard’ is demeaning.”

“It _is,”_ the other Edelgard, or rather Ellie, said. “She’s just as much the other Edelgard to me as I am to you!”

“She is not quite as… obsessive as you, or as hardworking, or as strong-willed…”

_“Yes, yes, I get it,”_ the other Edelgard muttered frustratedly, her fingers digging into the arms of her chair.

“But the rest of your cabinet shores up her shortcomings rather well! And occasionally, she has quite interesting ideas. For example…” Ferdinand said, uncharacteristically sloshing his wine around in his glass.

Edelgard enjoyed hearing Ferdinand’s voice as he blathered on about everything from war orphanages to the former Church of Seiros’ infrastructure to tax plans and his pride and joy, the nascent educational system. It felt good to hear him talking with such passion about _important_ matters. Occasionally she relaxed her grip on her body and allowed Ellie to take control when it felt appropriate to have her speak on her own behalf about her work. The first time Edelgard relented, Ellie immediately poured herself a glass of wine and took a sip. It seemed she enjoyed this Ferdinand’s company more than she enjoyed her fiance’s; Edelgard wondered if she would miss anybody from this world when she returned the way she herself would miss the new friends she had made.

“…It all started,” Ellie said, “when I met with a guild of merchants from the former Alliance and thought about how heavy a sack of five hundred gold coins is. And then I had an idea while I was talking with Claude.” It still felt unnerving to Edelgard to feel her mouth and lips moving and her vocal chords vibrate but not have any control over the words that emerged from it.

“Why, might I ask, _is_ Claude still here?” Edelgard asked, interrupting her counterpart.

Ferdinand snickered. “Pardon me. I must admit it is amusing to see you talking to yourself, Your Majesty. Claude, or rather Prince Khalid, will not leave until he brings an Agarthan back to the Almyran court. And he insists on it being Lord Arund—er, Thales, and we cannot persuade him otherwise. But I digress. Do continue.”

“Anyway,” Ellie said, taking another sip, “the Almyrans have been using paper for money for centuries—for _everything,_ not just promissory notes—and paper is a lot lighter and easier to carry than coins. And you can print up paper bills in different denominations! One bill could be one coin, five, twenty, and so on.”

“You should see the designs Bernadetta and Ignatz helped her draw up, Your Majesty,” Ferdinand said, filling the silence. “Your profile is on the one-gold bill! We figured that the highest ranking figures should be depicted on the most common denominations. So the Professor is on the two-gold bill, my handsome visage is on the five, Hubert’s, despite his protests, is on the ten—Bernadetta has made some wonderful woodcuts to demonstrate a proof-of-concept! Your Majesty, do you have any questions?”

“I see my counterpart—Ellie—has been taking as much initiative in this world as I have in the other,” Edelgard said. She would have to pick up on whatever bold ideas Ellie had seized upon when this whole mess was sorted out. “I’m only concerned about the implementation. Will the nobility, especially in the north, really consent to trading in their coffers of gold for mere paper?”

“It wouldn’t happen overnight,” Ellie hastily interjected.

“Exactly. This would be a long-term project,” Ferdinand said. “With the Victor Trading Company’s connections, we have met with a few mercantile bigwigs from the former Alliance who are _very_ excited about it. But, of course, only as long as the government can guarantee its value…”

“…Which means,” Edelgard finished, catching on, “that the merchant class has a vested interest in our political survival. But what about forgery? Anyone with access to woodblock printing and the right material could make their own money.”

“Well, Ellie is exclusively a high-concept person,” Ferdinand said. “The details will need quite some time to work out, at which point, hopefully, you and she will have returned to your rightful places. But I do think it is an intriguing start!”

Edelgard smiled. She herself had been a high-concept person, too—for a very long time, her only plan to create her ideal world had been to sentence the old one to death. Without people like Ferdinand and all her other friends and allies working so tirelessly to find ways to realistically realize her vision, her new world would have died a quick death even if she’d won the war on her own—which had likely been exactly what Thales had wanted.

She was only just beginning to fully realize how immature she’d been before Byleth had came into her life. Part of her at seventeen had honestly expected to be able to browbeat the world into submission.

She was also beginning to realize that her empire was already humming along just fine without her. If she could find a successor as adept as Ellie, she wouldn’t have anything to fear.

Hubert returned to the parlor with two leather-bound notebooks. “Lady Edelgard,” he said with a bow, “I trust that the Prime Minister has not been boring you. I have the reports from Shamir and Byleth on the conquest of Shambhala.”

Edelgard stood up and took them from him. “Thank you, Hubert. I will be reading these in my study. You have fun with Ferdinand tonight.” It may have been her own excitement playing tricks on her mind, but as she held the keys to Shambhala’s fall in her hands she felt as though they radiated pure energy. “Oh, and Ferdinand—you mentioned that Linhardt is leading the research teams at Shambhala?”

Ferdinand nodded. “Yes, he and Byleth have been going back and forth between here and there ever since we conquered it.”

“Send him a letter and tell his researchers to prioritize something called ‘radio.’”

“As you wish, Your Majesty.”

Edelgard turned to face Hubert. “I don’t know when I’ll be back—I don’t like straining the other Byleth. But it’s been good to see you again.”

“Likewise, Your Majesty,” Hubert answered. “If only it were easier.”

“You must worry about me constantly.”

“Worry? About you?” Hubert mustered a wry smile. “Lady Edelgard, I have too much faith in you to waste my time worrying. And far too many worries here in this world to concern myself with, besides. Do what you have come here to do. I shan’t fret over you.”

“Okay,” Edelgard said, and she wrapped her arms around him. She’d never seen Hubert’s face turn so red.

“Sh-Shall I relay a message to your wife for you?” he asked, flustered by her show of affection.

“Yes,” she said, letting go of him. “Tell her that I love her, I miss her, and to stay in one damn place for once.”

“By which you mean here, of course.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I shall do it.”

She left her jewels of the Empire to their own devices, and went to her study to immerse herself in Byleth and Shamir’s diligent reporting. She sat down at her desk and tried to light her lamp herself, but a snap of her fingers only produced a measly spark—great, she thought to herself as she fumbled in the desk drawers for a match, she would have to teach herself to do magic all over again when she returned to her own world.

Eventually she got the lamp lit and could study the reports in peace.

Until the door flew open and Hilda barged in.

_“There_ you are!” Hilda snarled. She was wearing what looked like an evening gown made from layers of rich, sheer Almyran silks in peach and scarlet that drew one’s eye all too easily to the silhouette of her ample curves underneath, and her time in Almyra had given her skin a healthy tan. Edelgard felt her other self’s eye wander and struggled to control herself.

“Hello, Hilda,” Edelgard said. “Do you mind? I’m busy.”

“Of course you are.” Hilda put her hands on her hips. “Why didn’t you _tell_ me you were going to use Byleth’s powers again?”

“Oh, what oh-so-important activity did I interrupt while we were all under curfew? Were you painting your nails? Or sorting your underwear by color, or some other inane thing?” Edelgard snapped. “Moreover, how do you expect me to _tell_ you things if you won’t even _speak_ to me?”

“I _was_ painting my nails, and now they’re probably ruined,” Hilda pouted.

“You poor thing.” Edelgard returned her focus to the notebooks. The first page of each detailed on a hand-reproduced map of the mountains separating Hrym territory from Ordelia territory the size and initial positions of combined Imperial and Almyran battalions—mage corps, archers, infantry and cavalry, wyvern riders, and so on. “Now, I have work to do, so why don’t you go catch up with Marianne? I hear she’s here.”

Hilda crossed her arms. “I can’t believe you,” she grumbled. “The _audacity…”_

“Why are you acting like it’s _my_ fault you were dragged here without consent? _You’re_ the one who stopped speaking to me. Over what? What have I done that was so heinous—Is this because of Hapi?”

_“Is_ it? Of course it is! I thought you’d softened up. That deep down there was some spark of, I dunno, sympathy? Decency? And then you go and murder someone to make a stepping stone out of their corpse. Same old Edelgard. I guess a leopard really can’t change his shorts.”

Edelgard pressed her hands to her brow. “Hilda, you colossal idiot… Do you think I had a _choice?”_

“Oh, that’s your excuse for _everything,_ isn’t it? Sorry I started a war, I didn’t have a choice! Sorry I killed Leonie and Judith and Lorenz! It was all completely out of my hands! Whoops!”

“Don’t pretend to care about those things; I know full well why you _really_ resent me. You’d rather the whole world stay the same like an insect frozen in amber as long as you don’t have to lift a pretty little finger!”

“Hapi depended on _you_ to protect her and you _killed_ her!”

_“I faked her death, you idiot!”_

Hilda was speechless.

She blinked a few times, her jaw hanging agape.

_“...And you didn’t_ tell _me?!”_ she finally cried out.

“I had to keep it as secret as possible. Only myself, Byleth, Catherine, and Alois are in on it. The more people who know, the greater chance of it leaking, and I’m sorry, Hilda, but _you_ count as more people.” Edelgard sighed. “Now, can I please return to my work? I’m _trying_ to save another world here.”

Hilda took a halting step back, her eyes darting across the study as she struggled to think of a response.

“A few more steps,” Edelgard said, “and close the door on your way out, please. Oh, and don’t you dare tell the other Claude about Hapi, or you’ll ruin everything. He still thinks she’s dead, and because of his secret treaties with Dedue and the Men in Black, I need to _keep_ it that way.”

Hilda left the room, closed the door behind her, and let Edelgard get on with her work. Edelgard buried herself in the notebooks, branding every word she read and every diagram she laid eyes on into her memory, copying especially salient passages, figures, and maps onto scratch paper to aid her recall.

At last, when the clock struck ten and she found herself returned to the other world, she pulled out a fresh notebook from her desk drawer and began furiously transcribing what she had read onto its blank pages as though desperately relating the contents of a dream before it could fade from her waking mind.

When she’d finished, she leaned back in her chair and let out an exhausted sigh, her shoulders and eyelids leaden. She realized as she set the notebook in the desk drawer and trudged to her bed that the excuse she had used to convince Byleth to send her back had become real. She just hadn’t been able to help herself. She hadn’t fully assuaged her loneliness, but at least she’d gotten a lot of work done.

* * *

Byleth was very fatigued the next day, even though she had only used her power to undo two hours. Edelgard wondered if the strain of sending the time travelers’ minds between worlds was growing stronger. Were she, Hilda, and Thales like parasites in this world, leeching Byleth’s strength and giving nothing in return like ticks on a dog’s back fattening themselves on its blood?

She decided that day that she needed to speak to Claude, but Biggs and Wedge weren’t exactly keen on letting her have her privacy. Wherever she went, they were there. Whatever she did, they saw. Whatever she said, they heard. They were a bit of a bumbling duo, but they did their jobs earnestly. Edelgard decided she would just have to wait them out—eventually, she told herself, they’d get tired of watching over her so doggedly and start slipping up.

She wondered what Kronya would do in her situation. Contrive for them to fall victim to some ‘accident,’ she supposed. Likely, knowing Kronya, a fatal one. She doubted Thales would accept an excuse if she didn’t manage to throw them off at least long enough to have a clandestine meeting or two.

If there was one benefit to their company, though, they were quite helpful with the chores Edelgard had been assigned to do that Saturday morning, and so she finished them much more quickly than usual.

Fortunately, for a brief moment that afternoon, Edelgard managed to give Wedge the slip while Biggs was in the privy. She knew at this particular time of day that on this particular day of the week, Claude was usually finishing up at the archery range, and so she cut a zigzagging path through the academy grounds and ran into him on his way out, his bow resting at his side and quiver slung over his shoulder. She noticed him favoring his leg, just as Sylvain had the other day. He didn’t walk on it as though he’d recently sprained an ankle, though.

“Hello there, Princess,” he said, offering her a mock bow. “You look like you’re in a hurry. What’s up? Does the eagle need help finding her tailfeathers?”

“Actually, I need help getting rid of them,” Edelgard said, glancing over her shoulder to see if her entourage was gaining on her. She’d made a lot of false turns to throw them off, but she didn’t know how much time it had bought her.

“Permanently?” Claude smiled in a rather Hubert-like way, looked to his left and to his right, and leaned closer to her. _“Well,”_ he whispered, _“you shouldn’t need any help doing_ that, _Vepar. Right?”_

“It’ll make a scene if I kill them,” Edelgard retorted. “Might I make use of one of your… peaceful poisons again? Perhaps a sedative or a laxative I can slip in their tea…”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve asking for my help again after what happened to Hapi.”

“Given the path you’re walking, you’d better get used to being an accomplice—and to worse deeds than that.”

“I know, I know.” Claude put a hand on her shoulder and pulled her closer toward him. “Alright. I’ll get you something from my supply. But first, tell me the truth. Hapi’s still alive, isn’t she?”

Edelgard refused to react to what he’d said. She hoped Hilda hadn’t gone and _told_ him behind her back. “Catherine ran a blade right through her heart. The Professor and I saw it with our own eyes.”

“And the blade snapped off at the hilt,” Claude said skeptically, “and she didn’t get a drop of blood on her.”

“A sleeping beast can be killed quite cleanly,” Edelgard said. “I’m not happy about it either; neither is Byleth.”

“Sorry for having a modicum of hope,” he said, letting go of her and drifting away.

“How did you injure your leg?” she asked him, studying his limp. “A… sprained ankle the other day, was it? I would have thought any decent healer could fix such a thing easily.”

“Yeah… well, Manuela has her hands full,” he said with a shrug.

“And Marianne is too busy making out with His Highness?”

“You got it,” Claude said, grinning. “Poor Claude can’t depend on anyone but himself. Isn’t that sad?”

Edelgard couldn’t believe that she, like Sylvain, was finding herself suspicious of him just because of a limp. If he’d been the one in the costume who’d been stabbed by Catherine’s dagger, that would mean he had the Crest of Flames. And she didn’t see any scars on him. He didn’t wear high-collared outfits to hide his neck or long gloves to hide his hands or any of the tricks Edelgard had used to keep anyone from seeing the private shame of her mutilated body. And besides, his hair was jet-black.

“The truth is—” Claude said, “and this is _really_ embarrassing, so don’t tell anyone—the other night, I was practicing some cool knife tricks in my room and my hand slipped. I’m lucky I missed my femoral artery, or I would’ve bled to death in minutes. I staunched the bleeding and hurried to the infirmary, but Manuela was already taking care of Catherine’s busted leg, so…” He shrugged. “One of her assistants put in a few stitches, put a bandage around it, and sent me back to bed. Marianne took a look at it and mostly healed it the next morning, but it’s still a little sore.”

“‘Cool… knife… tricks,’” Edelgard repeated. She didn’t believe that for a second.

“I can show you some of them if you’d like,” he said, reaching into his satchel and producing a slim hunting knife.

“That won’t be necessary. I wouldn’t want you to cut yourself open again.” She looked behind her shoulder for any trace of Biggs and Wedge. She could see one of them—the big one, Wedge—zeroing in on her location from across the lawn, and his counterpart wasn’t far behind. She only had a few seconds now.

She turned her attention back to Claude as he stowed his knife away. “You wouldn’t happen to know the identities of those two Hurricane Kings, would you?”

“Well, of course I do. But Dedue doesn’t want me telling you or Vual. Need-to-know basis, you know. But I’ll tell you one thing.” He put both hands on her shoulders, leaned close enough to her that she could feel the heat of his breath on her cheek, and whispered in her ear, _“They’re both supposed to be dead.”_

_“What?”_

_“Your Highness! Hey!”_ Wedge called out. _“Heeeeey! Princess Edelgard!”_

“Wait,” Edelgard said as Claude let go of her and slipped away. “What do you mean? Is it Yuri? Is he one of them? Or Emile?”

Claude winked and took off. Edelgard would have pursued him, but the knights had caught up with her, and Wedge’s meaty hand fell on her shoulder like a blunt axe head.

“Whoa there, Your Highness,” he said. “You can’t go taking off like that. Lady Rhea wouldn’t be happy if we lost track of you.”

“Yeah,” Biggs said, panting. “Phew. You sure can run though, Your Highness. But seriously. We’re not to let you leave our sight, unless you’re doing… private things.”

“And how do you know I wasn’t doing private things just now?” Edelgard snapped at them. “I am a young woman. Claude is a handsome young man. Do I need to paint you a picture?”

Biggs and Wedge stared at her, jaws agape, eyes bulging.

“Oh, my Goddess,” Wedge said.

“We’re so sorry,” Biggs said.

“We didn’t mean to—”

“Neither of us thought—”

“Y’know, we’re both from Bergliez, so we’re gonna be the subjects of your brother—”

“Uh, or _one_ of your brothers—”

“We wouldn’t want to, um, you know—”

“We’re not going to tell Ferdinand about this—”

“Or anyone. Not a soul. Our lips are sealed,” Wedge concluded.

“Totally,” Biggs said. “We’ll forget all about it. Just, uh… please, Your Highness. We have jobs and the Archbishop expects us to do them _really_ well. You know how much she cares about you.”

“Yeah! If someone snatched you up or stabbed you or did something unmentionable to you while we were away,” Wedge said, “she’d probably excommunicate us!”

“You wouldn’t do that to us, would you, Your Highness?”

“Would you?”

Edelgard let out a heavy, contrite sigh. “You’re right. Sir Biggs, Sir Wedge, I’m sorry I ran off like that. I know you must have been terrified for my safety,” she said, projecting remorseful airs with a sad pursing of her lips and knitting of her brow. “I shouldn’t have put all three of us in jeopardy over a silly little tryst. Why don’t we all go inside and play chess or something?”

Wedge’s mood brightened. “I’m pretty good at chess! We gotta play by house rules, though.”

“Whose house?” Edelgard asked as Biggs frantically shook his head and tugged at his collar.

Fortunately, Edelgard found herself saved from what, if Biggs’ behavior was any indication, would be an onerously labyrinthine set of special rules for chess that no doubt ensured that the ‘house’ always won by the sudden arrival of Alois.

“Well, hello there, Lady Edelgard!” he called out, full of good cheer as he strode up to the three of them. “Hello, Biggs! Hello, Wedge! I hope Her Highness isn’t proving too much of a handful. Though if she is, I’d love to take her off your _hands_ for you!”

“You’re in luck, Lieutenant,” Wedge said. “Her Highness _just_ ran off to have a tryst with—”

Biggs elbowed him in the ribs.

“—her, uh, fiance, the young future Prime Minister, because, uh…”

“Because, of course, public displays of romantic affection are quite gauche among the nobility,” Edelgard said.

“Ha! That’s one place where commoners have a leg up on nobles, eh?” Alois said. “I can kiss my wife in the market square all day if I want!”

“I agree, Lieutenant,” she replied. “Sometimes it feels as though nobles are meant to suppress everything that makes them human.”

“Well said! Captain Jeralt always said the same thing. Anyway, Biggs, Wedge, might I borrow Lady Edelgard for a moment? In private?”

Biggs and Wedge looked at each other.

“Lady Rhea wouldn’t like it,” Biggs said.

“Oh, come on, don’t you trust me? If Lady Rhea gets mad at you two, I’ll take full responsibility.”

It took a bit more cajoling, but finally Alois was able to get Edelgard away from her entourage with the assurance that he’d ‘be right back’ and the two of them headed off, not to his office but to a hidden entrance to the catacombs where Byleth was waiting for them.

“Is something wrong with Hapi?” Edelgard asked once they were well out of earshot of anybody in the monastery. If she was ill or horribly injured beyond Byleth’s capabilities to heal, what would they do?

“Well, sort of,” Byleth said, yawning.

“Didn’t sleep well, eh, Professor?” Alois asked.

“Just some insomnia,” Byleth mumbled, rubbing her eyes. “It’s fine.”

As the three of them ventured deeper into the catacombs, Edelgard could hear a faint caterwauling growing louder. Her pulse quickened and she hurried ahead of Byleth and Alois. It sounded as though Hapi was in agony, miserable, anguished…

As she drew closer and Hapi’s voice grew louder, Edelgard realized that the yowling sounded suspiciously like her name.

She found Hapi sitting in her little nest. Edelgard and Byleth approached her while Alois hung a safe distance away.

Edelgard hadn’t gotten far before Hapi stopped yelling her name, hurried away from her nest, and scampered across the floor to meet her. “Edelgard!” Hapi exclaimed, circling around her.

“Yes, Hapi?”

“Edelgard!” Hapi started sniffing her.

“What is it, Hapi?”

“Edelgard!”

“I think she wanted to see you,” Byleth said to Edelgard as Hapi forcefully nuzzled her cheek.

“Well, here I am,” Edelgard said, reaching up to scratch under Hapi’s chin. “No need to shout.”

“Worked, didn’t it?” Hapi mumbled, purring. “Took you long enough.”

“I should apologize. Archbishop Rhea is keeping me on a tight leash for the rest of the month,” Edelgard said. “Didn’t Alois tell you?”

“I _tried_ to,” Alois said, keeping his distance, “but she doesn’t exactly tolerate my presence.”

“I mostly tune out everything he says so I don’t have to hear his jokes,” Hapi said amid Alois’ protests. She started licking Edelgard’s hand. Edelgard felt two things—one, a tongue as rough as sandpaper scraping against her skin, and two, a deep sense of embarrassment both firsthand and secondhand.

Both of those things ceased as Hapi bit down on her hand just hard enough to make a point.

“Anyway, the point is,” Edelgard said, wincing even though no skin had been broken, “Hapi, I can’t visit you as often as I’d like.”

Hapi removed her teeth from Edelgard’s hand and went back to nuzzling her. “You’re visiting me now.”

“This is a special circumstance. I thought you were seriously injured or ill! Alois won’t be able to drag me away every time you get lonely.”

“Fucking knights.”

“I know, I know.”

“It’s just until the end of the month, right?”

“Yes, Hapi. Just until then,” Edelgard said. “Although… if something happens to me or Professor Byleth, you’ll have to learn to tolerate Alois.”

Hapi let out a disinterested little chirrup.

“And that means his terrible jokes, too.”

“Kick a man while he’s down, why don’t you?” Alois lamented.

“And Hanneman, too,” Edelgard added. “I know you don’t like him, either, but he’s still working on a way to get you back to normal—”

Hapi wrapped an arm around her and very gently placed a paw against her face. It was big enough to cover from her chin to her forehead. As warm as her fur was, her paw pads were as cold as ice. “Shh.”

“Hapi, I’m serious,” Edelgard said, batting it away.

Hapi hunched over and rested her chin atop her head, then covered her face with her paw again. She was still purring, and the vibrations coursed from her chest through Edelgard’s back and seemed to rattle her bones.

“Hapi, stop.”

Hapi seemed to grow twice as heavy, and as much as Edelgard had trained her body to regain some fraction of the strength she was used to, she couldn’t hold up a giant cat-person who was dead set on making herself dead weight. Edelgard’s knees buckled and before she could muster enough strength to pry Hapi off her she collapsed to the floor.

She realized that she was being pinned to the floor by a muscular, seven-foot-tall woman and started thinking very hard about Byleth.

Hapi kept purring.

“Hapi, let Edelgard go,” Byleth said. “What would Jeralt say?”

“Promise,” Hapi said.

“What do you want me to promise?” Edelgard asked, filling her lungs as much as she could with her chest pressed firmly against the floor.

“You promised you’d be there for me. Maybe you should promise again. And _mean_ it this time.”

“Hapi, I know that all cats are practically just small furry children, but you’re a grown woman and just because you have a tail doesn’t mean you don’t have to _act_ like one,” Edelgard said, growing frustrated. “What I mean to say is—Hapi, do you remember what happened to Aunt Anselma?”

While Hapi pondered her question, Edelgard realized that _she_ didn’t even know what had happened to her mother. Dedue had hinted at the possibility that she might still be alive somewhere in Fódlan, but perhaps he’d only said that to unnerve her.

“Cornelia took her away,” Hapi mumbled. She was no longer purring.

“That’s right.” Edelgard slowly wormed her way out from under her. “I wish I could always be here for you, but someone might take _me_ away, too. If that happens, you’ll need to accept help from people you don’t otherwise like. Like Alois. I know the Knights of Seiros haven’t treated you well… but just look at him.”

Hapi looked at him.

Alois smiled and waved nervously at her.

“He’s just a big teddy bear,” Byleth said. “He and Dad go way back, you know.” She reached out and scratched Hapi behind one ear. “I’ll get you some catnip if you’re nice to Alois.”

Hapi rolled her eyes. “Just because I’m part-cat doesn’t mean I’ll go nuts over catnip.”

“We won’t know unless we try.”

With a shrug Hapi stood up, releasing Edelgard, and walked up to Alois with tentative, hesitant steps. She stared down at him.

“You know, I like cats,” Alois said, staring up at her while she skeptically sniffed the air around him, “but we’ve got a dog at home. Maybe _that’s_ why you don’t like me! I’ve always been a dog person. I mean, not a dog person like _you’re_ a cat person, but… well… you know.” He scratched his chin. “Actually, come to think of it, when I was just a boy I _did_ often think people would be much better off if they all had tails they could wag when they were happy…”

Hapi sat down in front of him and waited expectantly, her tail slowly swishing back and forth. Alois looked down at her. “Uh… What do I do now?” he asked.

“I think she’ll let you pet her,” Byleth said.

“Well, alright, here goes,” he said, placing a hand slowly on her head and patting her hair. “Uh… good kitty!”

Hapi pulled herself away from him, stood up, and walked back over to her nest. “Anyone tries to take you away,” she said to Edelgard as she settled back into the mound of fur-covered blankets (that hadn’t been covered in fur before), “I’ll bust out of here and claw ‘em up good. Okay? So no excuses.”

“Thank you, Hapi,” Edelgard said. “I suppose, then, that no matter what happens, I’ll see you soon.”

Hapi smiled, and it made her dirty face shine like moonlight.

* * *

The Pegasus Moon, most miserable month of the year and bitterest month of winter, wanted to bring itself to a swift conclusion, and with the passing of the next week, Edelgard could feel her own dread mounting. The day Rhea was waiting for was fast approaching, and its inevitable approach brought Edelgard closer to her own memories of that fateful day in her world.

The day the normal life she’d pretended to have for nearly a full year shattered.

By the time of the final night before the ritual, the night before she had thrown everything aside and took the first step upon the path of thorns, she’d hardly been able to sleep. The weight of her betrayal had weighed so heavily on her mind that she needed not to sleep for the nightmares to find her. She had imagined the looks of shock and betrayal on her friends’ faces and the near certainty of her own death at Rhea’s hands so often that night that it had felt as clear and vivid as a memory.

She could feel those same horrors creeping back into her psyche now. And she could see the same worries weighing Dimitri down. Day after day, he seemed more dour, darker, more withdrawn; an anxious energy crept into his training and coursework.

Edelgard was called alongside Vual and Dedue for another meeting with Thales. The poison Claude had gifted her worked perfectly—she had slipped it into Biggs’ and Wedge’s afternoon tea, and hours later, well into the evening, it had taken effect and both of them had dropped like stones to the floor right outside her bedroom. In the middle of the night, Edelgard left the dormitories and returned to the meeting place.

Vual fiddled with the radio in a way that had become quite routine, and within moments, Thales’ voice broke free of the noise.

“We can hear you, Thales,” Vual said once he’d slipped into his guise as Seteth. “Can you hear us?”

_“Yes, Vual. And who is ‘us?’”_

_“Myself, Vepar, and Dedue.”_

_“Good. I hope you have better news than our last meeting.”_

“I do. I’ve found a way into the Holy Tomb,” Vual said. “Lady Rhea shall be inviting us down there herself just a few days from now, at the end of the month. Once the way is opened, we can warp our platoon on standby inside.”

_“And ransack the wretched place.”_ Thales laughed, and it was the most sickly satisfied laugh. _“I’m very pleased with this. Dedue, is our Hurricane King—the genuine article—ready to reveal himself?”_

Dedue nodded shakily. Edelgard had never seen him look so unsure about anything before as much as he did now. “He is, sir.”

_“As soon as your men have taken everything they can carry, you and him will warp outside of the monastery and plot a course directly for Fhirdiad to announce his coronation to the masses.”_

“Yes, sir,” he said. “His Majesty respectfully wonders if the attack can be postponed until after graduation.”

_“His Majesty shall have to be content with being a dropout. I do hope he does not get cold feet between now and then.”_ Thales chuckled. _“For your sake, of course, Dedue. If his resolve falters, the failure will be yours to bear.”_

“I understand.”

As Dedue gave his update on the plan of attack and Vual reported on the knights’ vulnerabilities, Edelgard felt the finger she’d recently broken throb anew, as though it feared it would need to be broken again to satiate Thales’ sadism.

But the meeting passed without incident—until the very end.

_“Thank you all for your reports. I am glad to see that at least_ one _of our plans is on track,”_ Thales said. _“Oh, but Vepar—”_

“Y-Yes, sir?” Edelgard asked.

_“You’ve been quite reserved tonight. You don’t seem quite… yourself.”_

Edelgard’s blood ran cold. Did he know? Perhaps Hubert had bragged to him in the dungeon about the survival of his impeccable Lady Edelgard. No, no, he wouldn’t have. He was smarter, less impulsive than that. “I’ve been on my best behavior, sir.”

_“So it seems. Well, it’s unnerving. Vual, why not break another one of your protege’s fingers for me?”_

“S-Sir—” Vual gasped.

Thales laughed. _“It was only a jest. One must keep one’s subordinates on their toes. But the next time I instruct you to discipline your subordinate, I expect you to obey without question or hesitation, not stammer_ ‘s-sir?’ _Do you understand?”_

“Yes, sir.”

_“I have nothing more to say. Good night.”_

Vual turned off the radio.

“I don’t understand,” Edelgard said, cradling her hand to soothe the phantom ache that anticipated further pain, “how Thales’ conduct engenders loyalty. He is sadistic to the point of absurdity. Does everybody else follow him out of fear?”

“Many do, I think,” Vual said as he packed away the radio. “But just as many follow him zealously, no matter how he mistreats them, as long as he mistreats their enemies worse. He embodies and celebrates their vices, and that makes him their hero. Now, we should return to our quarters for the night.”

The three of them set out across the snowy lawn, leaving behind the abandoned guard tower that served as their meeting place. Edelgard noticed Vual’s face—or rather, Seteth’s face, which he was still wearing—grow grimmer with every step.

“Vual,” Edelgard said, “your disguise…”

“Oh. Yes. Of course,” he said. There was a ripple and a flash of sparks and Seteth’s face gave way to that of Albus Duerr. “Thank you, Vepar.”

Dedue split away from the two of them and went to his room on the first floor of the dormitories, while Edelgard and Vual continued on to the staircase that led to the second floor.

“What’s wrong?” Edelgard asked Vual. His distress was palpable; it radiated off of him in waves.

“Oh,” he said, “nothing. Just that… Seteth and Flayn will be accompanying Rhea to the Holy Tomb.” His downcast eyes roved, searching for something to focus on that would assuage him of his guilt.

“Surely you can think of something to keep them away,” she said.

“I hope so,” he said. “Rhea is my enemy as well as Thales, but those two… I don’t want any harm to come to them.”

“I feel the same as you,” she said.

“I’ve seen the way Dimitri looks at those two. Like vermin. Thales has taught him our hatred far too well. I fear for what he might do to them.”

Edelgard supposed she could lift Vual’s spirits. “Follow me to my room. I have something to show you.”

She led him to her room, crept over Biggs’ and Wedge’s catatonic bodies, and brought him inside. She found the journal she’d written the reports from Shambhala in and handed it to him.

“Don’t ask me how I got this,” she said to him as he opened it and began to read. “It’s a tactical report, albeit quite a bit abridged, of a successful military assault on Shambhala.”

Vual stared at it as though he were gazing upon holy scripture. “A successful assault… by a military force as primitive as yours? Did you come up with this all by yourself?”

“It’s complicated.”

“You gained this information the same way you and your professor learned what Rhea had planned for you in the Holy Tomb, didn’t you?” He closed the book and slipped it under his cloak. “The ‘power of the Goddess,’ she said. Foresight? Manipulation of time?”

Edelgard was speechless. “I—don’t know—”

“I knew that both you and your professor were affected by the Dirac tidal surges for a reason; I just didn’t know what that reason _was._ For your professor, it’s obviously because of her connection to the Fell Star. For _you,_ though… I’ve been at a loss this whole time. Are you from the future? Or an alternate time-line?”

“It’s complicated,” she repeated.

“I _know_ complicated,” he said. “Ashe _did_ always say your personality had changed out of nowhere. Is _that_ why you’d asked Myson about transmitting one’s consciousness from one timeline to another?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m from… the future of an alternate time-line. And so is Thales.”

Vual was silent for a moment. “…Solon was researching parallel worlds and trans-timeline information transference,” he muttered to himself, “but I wasn’t involved in it. My field was cis-timeline matter transference. _And_ that was four hundred years ago from my perspective. If only Thales hadn’t gotten Solon killed, we could have consulted him. He may have cut him loose specifically because he knew so much about the field…”

Something stirred in the hallway.

“I should go,” he said, “before your guards wake up. Thank you for your gift. I hope someday we can liberate Shambhala with it.”

He left, and Edelgard changed into her pajamas, snuffed out her lamp, and slipped into her bed just in time for someone to knock on the door.

She stayed still, burying herself in her sheets to warm herself up and hopefully hide any trace that she might have been outside in the middle of the night.

There was another knock on the door. Edelgard waited a bit longer.

At the third frantic knock, she pulled herself out of bed, trudged to the door, and opened it. “Hwhuuh,” she muttered blearily, squinting at whoever was knocking.

“Oh, thank the Goddess you’re alright!” Wedge exclaimed in a low voice. “Biggs and I were so worried…”

Biggs elbowed him sharply in the side. “He means, we just wanted to say we wanted to make sure you were sleeping well, Your Highness.”

“I dunno what it was, but something in our dinner must’ve not agreed with us,” Wedge added, “because we both just—”

“Wedge—”

“—passed out—”

_“Wedge, she doesn’t need to know that! She was asleep the whole time!”_

Edelgard yawned. “Can I go back to bed now?” she croaked.

“Oh—of course, Your Highness,” Biggs said. “You go right back to bed. Sorry for waking you—we just wanted to check up on you.”

“We _definitely_ didn’t pass out in front of your door,” Wedge said after another few nudges from Biggs. “So don’t worry about that.”

“Thanks,” Edelgard mumbled, and with that she shut the door in their faces and went back to bed.

* * *

The second-to-last day before the last day of the Pegasus Moon came too quickly, even for the month’s unnatural haste.

The last day of the month.

The day of treachery and betrayal.

The day Dimitri would reveal himself.

“Are you okay, Edelgard?” Ingrid asked. “I don’t mean to be rude, but you… you look _awful.”_

Edelgard wasn’t much for makeup, which made the weariness she wore on her face more apparent than it otherwise might have been. But Ingrid wasn’t, either, and for all the attention she had given Edelgard her face looked no less haunted than Edelgard’s did. Faint gray crescents hollowed out her green eyes; her lips which took a natural pink so well were worn down as though she’d bitten them too frequently.

Before Edelgard could retort, Annette spoke up. “You and Dimitri both. You two look like you haven’t slept in a week!”

“I slept just fine last night,” Dimitri snapped a little too quickly after the words had left his mouth. “I do not have any issues sleeping at all. Nothing is on my mind; I sleep like a baby.”

“Ah, yes, babies,” Sylvain said, “those things that are so well known for sleeping soundly and quietly.”

“It is an idiom, Sylvain,” Dimitri said.

“And you’re an idi _ot,_ Sylvain,” Felix added.

“We’re just worried about exams,” Edelgard said. “With all the mayhem that’s been going on, neither of us have had enough time as we’d have liked to prepare.”

“So are we,” Sylvain said, “but you don’t see the rest of us lumbering around like revenants. Oh, Felix, sorry—you’re scared of those, too, right?”

“Shut up,” Felix said.

The Blue Lions were crowded around a bulletin board in the training hall to sign up for their final certification exams through the first week of the Lone Moon—next week. It was Bernadetta’s turn right now, and she pored over the list uneasily, muttering to herself: _“Okay, Bernie… you can do this. You don’t wanna take the first time slot, because then you’ll set the standard for everyone else. And you don’t wanna take the last, because by that point everyone else will have gone and you’ll never live up to their standards… but right in the middle… Aha! There are still plenty of open slots there! You’ve got this, Bernie!”_

After penciling in her name she skipped away and scurried off to the dormitories.

Without any internal deliberation, Felix signed up for the first available time slot. Which, since the Black Eagles had gotten to the bulletin board first, was right after Ferdinand von Aegir.

“Feeling confident about your magic skills, huh, Felix?” Annette chirped. At least she was in lighter spirits now. “I knew that mnemonic device I taught you would come in handy!”

“The sooner I take the exam, the sooner I can get it out of my head,” he grumbled.

“I know! It’s really catchy, isn’t it?” Annette took his place and scanned the schedule. “When exams are done, we’ve still got about a week or so before the graduation ceremony. Plenty of time to hang out and unwind as a house one last time! Well… most of a house.”

“There’s a hot springs a bit northwest of town,” Sylvain said. “How about it? We could invite a few people from the other houses, too, if we…”

“…desire more girls to leer at?” Ingrid concluded.

“That’s a low blow. I was gonna say, if we wanna foster some inter-house camaraderie. Anyway, who’s up for it?”

“Aren’t you worried the Hurricane King might crash the party?” Felix asked.

“No need for that; he’s invited,” Sylvain said, taking the remark in stride. “Both of him. Maybe all he needs is a good soak—you know, wash all the bloodlust out.”

Edelgard looked over to Biggs and Wedge, who were off to the side of the training hall and watching her like a pair of hawks. “Is my… entourage invited?” she asked.

“Sure, they can join the party,” Sylvain said. “I bet they need some excitement. Looking after you must be the most tedious job in the world.”

“I try to keep it interesting for them,” Edelgard said. “I sneak away on occasion, poison their tea, so on and so forth…”

He laughed. “Uh-oh. Ingrid, looks like someone’s been a bad influence on Her Highness!”

“They’re probably grateful to have an easy job,” Ignatz said. “The rest of the knights have been running all over the place these past few weeks. Raphael and I heard that Catherine’s been responding to requests for their aid from all over Fódlan. Even some Adrestian houses are asking for help, like Lord Arundel did last month. I don’t know if they’ve ever been stretched this thin in peacetime.”

“Maybe we are not in peacetime anymore,” Dedue muttered gravely.

“All the more reasons to go to the hot springs,” Sylvain said. “So, we’re all down for it, right? Dimitri, you can invite Marianne…” he added in a singsong voice.

Dimitri’s mood only darkened. “Yes… th—that would be nice, Sylvain. I’ll… invite her. I think she would… like it very much.”

“Aw, dang. You two break up or something?”

“Sylvain!”

“That’s rough, Your Highness,” Raphael said. “But hey, there’s plenty of other girls out there. I don’t have a clue about ‘em, but how about I help you find a new one?”

“We have not broken up,” Dimitri insisted. “It is just—it’s…”

“It’s complicated,” Sylvain finished for him. “I _get_ it, Your Highness.”

“Way too well,” Ingrid muttered. “Stop harassing His Highness, Sylvain.”

Dimitri’s lips curled in an uneasy smile. “I-It’s fine, Ingrid. You, Sylvain, Felix… I—I am glad to have had you as friends.”

He turned tail and strode away from the bulletin board as though he’d just remembered he had somewhere more important to be, leaving the rest of the class dumbfounded.

_“Uh… Your Highness? You didn’t put your name in!”_ Raphael called out after him. _“Want me to pencil you in? How about one o’clock on Tuesday? Is that alright?”_

Ingrid watched Dimitri leave, a concerned furrow to her brow. “Edelgard, can you put me down for the earliest available time? I’m going to see what’s wrong with Dimitri.” She hurried off after him.

“There goes the mother hen,” Felix muttered, and he headed off in the opposite direction.

“Ignatz,” Edelgard asked, “can you put Ingrid and myself down for the earliest available times?”

“Uh, sure, Your Highness,” Ignatz said as Edelgard broke away from the group and went after Ingrid.

Even though Ingrid was taller, with longer legs and longer strides, Edelgard caught up with her fairly quickly.

“What’s wrong?” she asked her.

Ingrid glanced at her and slowed her gait so that Edelgard could more easily match it. “W-Wrong? Nothing’s wrong. I’m concerned about Dimitri. He’s been acting jumpy all month. I know exams are a stressful time, but…”

“I can tell something’s wrong, Ingrid. You don’t look as well as you think.”

“I’m fine; it’s you and Dimitri I’m worried about.”

But by that point, Dimitri had gotten too far away from her to continue pursuing.

“Dimitri’s fine,” Edelgard lied. “But I’m sure he’ll be off to his coronation as soon as we graduate. He probably doesn’t think he’s ready for all that authority yet. And what do you have to worry about me over?”

“Well, you must be nervous about the ceremony at the Holy Tomb tomorrow,” Ingrid said. “I don’t know if you and Professor Byleth will have to _do_ anything, but it sounds nerve-wracking all the same. I don’t think there’s ever been a real _prophet_ since Saint Seiros received her revelation—not one officially recognized by the Church, anyway. You two might be the first.”

“Perhaps,” Edelgard said, “but I wonder what happened to all the false prophets.”

“I’m sure they were killed for blasphemy,” Ingrid said. “But you and our professor don’t have to worry about that. I mean… she even _looks_ like Archbishop Rhea now, and you… you _talk_ to the Goddess. One of my uncles is a priest and you two are still the holiest people I’ve ever met.”

“Well, I suppose I do have a few butterflies in my stomach,” Edelgard said, eliciting a relieved smile from Ingrid. “But you’re right. It’ll be fine.”

“And Anselm’s over the moon about it, isn’t he? I think you might be his favorite sister now.”

“Does flattering me make you feel better?”

Ingrid’s smile grew smaller.

“It’s your father, isn’t it? You haven’t heard anything from him. Or _about_ him.”

She stared at Edelgard for a moment, dumbfounded. “I’m sure he’s… fine.” She drew out the word _fine_ as though it were a whole sentence on its own. “You don’t need to worry about him, Edelgard. He’s my father, not yours.”

“Ingrid…” Edelgard put a hand to her shoulder.

“I really should be going,” Ingrid said. “Lots to practice before the exam and not much time…”

“Ingrid, you could have passed that exam a week ago if you wanted,” Edelgard told her.

“I’m flattered. But you don’t have that same luxury, so maybe you should go get some studying in, too,” she said, brushing away Edelgard’s hand and turning away from her. She must have thought better of it, though, because she didn’t leave.

“I think he’s gone,” she said. “I—I’d love for him to send me another letter about a suitor, even if I’d just reject it. But I don’t think another one’s coming.”

“I’m sorry.”

“The way you say it, it almost sounds like you feel guilty about it.” Ingrid’s face wavered. “I don’t want to hold out hope until the snow thaws in spring—I’m tired of waiting for people I know won’t ever come back.” She shook her head and turned away again. “But you have work to do. I don’t need you shouldering my burdens, too.”

“Ingrid, wait—” Edelgard said, reaching out for her.

And then, like a bolt from the blue, it struck her.

For a split second, it felt as though her skull had burst into bits like a vase that had been smashed by a hammer. The world around her flickered and dissolved, and she could see the blue sky above her twisting and darkening into the arched and gilded ceiling of the hallways of the Imperial Palace, flickering in and out over the span of seconds. She collapsed in both worlds, her knees meeting the cold snow in one world and hard floor tiles in another. The pain clenched her jaw and gritted her teeth for her, forced her fingers to curl into talons and claw at the ground, arched her back, rolled her eyes back into her head.

Another Dirac tidal surge.

But how, if the provisional research facility under Castle Gaspard had been destroyed? How could Thales have resumed operations so soon afterward? How could there already be a secondary site without Vual knowing about it, if they took months to set up?

How could they have delayed Operation Antediluvia by so little?

_“Edelgard!”_ Ingrid pulled her to her feet and held her upright over buckling legs. _“Edelgard, are you alright? I’m getting you to the infirmary…”_

* * *

Edelgard lay awake in her bed on the eve of the final day, tormented by the anniversary of her own betrayal. Dimitri was _still_ following the same path as her, but without knowing what he was fighting for. Because of Thales, Dedue, and this horrible charade, her adversaries had run out the clock.

What would she do?

She’d often wondered what would have become of her classmates if Byleth hadn’t joined her. Would any of them have chosen to walk with her? She doubted it. They had stayed by her side at first, when all she had shown them had been the face of a villain, because they had trusted Byleth; they had later allowed themselves to hear her ideals and join her cause because they had trusted Byleth. If Byleth decided to abandon Dimitri tomorrow—to not set aside her sword when Rhea ordered her to execute her own student, but rather to raise it—what, Edelgard asked herself, would she do? What would the other Blue Lions do?

She had often fantasized about her classmates all turning their backs on her at that moment—fantasized about Ferdinand and Dorothea and Bernadetta and Petra and Linhardt and Caspar and Lysithea and Mercedes and Annette and Ashe and Ignatz and Marianne all meeting her at the siege of Garreg Mach one month later on the opposite side of the war and with hatred in her eyes. Even long after the war had begun and after dozens of campaigns with the Black Eagles Strike Force, those fantasies still plagued her, as though she hadn’t been able to shake off the feeling that the path her world had taken had been an aberration from the norm—as though there had been countless more versions of the same world, other time-lines perhaps, where the proper sequence of events had taken place and her teacher had led her students against her.

Because the idea that so many good people could have chosen to fight for her cause had just seemed _that_ impossible to believe.

What would she do?

She was an Agarthan agent now, One Who Slithered in the Dark, a Man in Black, a No-Eyed Person. When Dimitri revealed himself, would she be expected to break from the rest of the class and flee the Holy Tomb with him and Dedue? Would she stand with him and watch Ingrid and Annette glare at her, impotently furious over her betrayal? Or would she stay with the rest of the class, doomed to be a double agent? Would the mask of her own face ever come off?

What had she done to Ellie’s life? Oh, Goddess, what had she _done?_

Eventually, lying awake in bed became unbearable, and Edelgard slithered her way out from under the sheets, trudged across the rug, and threw the door open.

“Uh, Y-Your Highness,” Wedge said as she strode past him and Biggs (who was currently taking his turn sleeping on the floor), “you’re not supposed to leave your room past dark—”

She ignored him and made her way down the hall to Dimitri’s room. She could hear faint, muffled sounds from beyond the door; as she’d expected, he was having as much difficulty sleeping as she was.

She knocked on the door. _“Dimitri,”_ she called out.

“Your Highness,” Wedge said, catching up to her, “Lady Rhea really wouldn’t like if we let you break curfew and something happened—”

The door opened. Dimitri stood there, pale and wan, his eyes red, his face the picture of despair. “El…”

“You can’t sleep either, can you?” Edelgard asked him.

“You need to go back to your r—”

“Shut up,” she snapped at Wedge, and with that she stepped into Dimitri’s room, closed the door firmly behind her, and wrapped her arms around him.

“E—El,” he gasped, taken aback as his arms awkwardly found their way around her. “El, what are you doing here? You should be in bed.”

“So should you,” she said. “What’s wrong? You look terrible.”

“Tomorrow…” His fingers curled against her back, taking fistfuls of her nightshirt. “El, I—I fear Rhea is going to do something terrible to you tomorrow. You and our professor… you and Byleth… You two are my guiding lights and that beast wants to take that light away from me. I—I wish I could stop the world from turning and the sun from rising so tomorrow can never come…”

Edelgard pressed herself closer to him and rested her head against his shoulder. “Professor Byleth won’t let anything happen to us, Dima. She won’t. After Ashe, Glenn, Mercedes… I know she’ll move heaven and earth to protect every one of us. You know that nothing else in the world matters to her.”

Dimitri held her tighter. “The ghosts are back, El. Their voices, like chains…”

“There are no ghosts, Dima. They are simply your own fears taking familiar shapes.”

“Rodrigue wants me to do something tomorrow. I—don’t know if I’m ready. Father, Mother, Yuri, Emile… all of them… they make me feel like such a coward, El. I stand on the precipice, ready to do what I have wanted to do for years now, to strike against the evil of the Church of Seiros and… and I am afraid.” His voice cracked. “I’m afraid, El.”

“It’s natural to be afraid,” she assured him.

“But I shouldn’t be! I am a Blaiddyd and a King of Faerghus, like my father before me, and his father, all the way back to Loog. It is my destiny to bear the weight of the world without—without trembling like a child…”

“There, there.” Edelgard reached up to run her hand through his silvery hair, letting his locks flow like mercury between her fingers. “Dima, it’s okay. I know you have the strength to do this, but you are a human being as well. You feel fear and sadness, anxiety, terror, worry. It is a sign that your heart beats like any other,” she said, “and the soul within is as human as anybody else’s. You’re not a beast. You’re not a monster. You’re not a wild boar, Dimitri.”

Dimitri took a long, deep breath and exhaled through his nose, choking back what may have been a sob. “And… this is embarrassing…”

“There’s nothing embarrassing about getting a hug from your big sister,” Edelgard said, leading him gently to the bed so they could both sit down upon it.

“No—not that.” He sniffled. “El… I… Tomorrow, whatever happens, it will be an end to everything we know here. I did not want it to be this way. I wanted to graduate. I… I have not even heard back from Margrave Edmund yet. Tomorrow, I will no longer be a student here. And I’m afraid Marianne will hate me for it. Because…”

He held Edelgard even closer, bowing his head, bringing his lips to her ear.

_“Because I am the Hurricane King.”_

“I know,” she said. “I felt it at Zanado. I’ve known since then.”

“Even when those decoys…”

“Even then. My faith never wavered.”

She could feel his relief—the way his shoulders loosened, his fists unclenched, the shuddering and ragged breath that escaped his lips, and she almost envied him. On this night, in her world, she’d had no succor, no one to turn to for release from the prison of her mind and her darkest thoughts; she’d been utterly alone.

“El…” he sobbed, shivering from the cold. “El, don’t ever leave my side. Please.”

“I can’t promise you that,” she said, “as much as I would like to. But a part of me will always be with you.” She laid a hand over his heart.

She would have to leave someday. She would have to return to the world she belonged to, where her dearest friends and dearest love waited for her. Even if it meant she would never see him again, in a world where the only thing left of Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd was a grave that held a headless corpse and a corpseless head in repose.

“Dima,” she said, “if anything happens to me, there’s something I want you to have. In my desk drawer, there’s a journal I’ve hidden away. I want you to take it. Wherever you go that I can’t follow, it will be there for you. The truth is in there. And I want you to know it, if I’m not there when the time is right to tell you.”

“You speak as though you know you’re about to die, El,” Dimitri said. “Please… don’t ever speak like that to me again. I want you to live!”

“I’m not going to die,” Edelgard assured him. “Byleth wouldn’t allow it. You have to trust her.”

“I do,” he said, “but… just promise me, El, that I won’t ever see your spirit at our mother’s side.”

“I promise.”

At last, they both slept well.

* * *

The Blue Lions attended no classes the next day. There was no morning lecture after breakfast, no drills in the morning, no seminars to attend. Instead, they were to accompany Rhea, Seteth, and Flayn to the Holy Tomb deep beneath the monastery.

The house met up with each other in the cathedral, expecting to meet with Rhea, Seteth, and Flayn there. They were all armed and armored; Byleth kept the Sword of the Creator at her hip and Sylvain rested the Lance of Ruin’s grotesque ribbed spearhead against his shoulder.

“I wonder why she asked us to bring weapons,” Sylvain said. The weight of the Lance of Ruin seemed to chafe him; Edelgard had noticed that while he wasn’t loath to use it in battle, he didn’t seem comfortable holding it, as though it still carried within it some essence of his vile brother’s departed soul. “Does she expect us to run into any enemies in this Holy Tomb place?”

Edelgard wondered as much as well. It was true in this case that the Knights of Seiros were stretched so thin that they couldn’t even accompany Rhea down here right now, but that didn’t explain why her class had been asked to come fully armed to the Holy Tomb in _her_ world as well. Perhaps Rhea had known that the Flame Emperor would mount an attack—but, then again, she had those phantom soldiers she could summon. Perhaps she derived an authoritarian thrill from ordering real people to kill for her that ghosts could not provide.

“With the Hurricane King— _Kings—_ running around, who knows?” Ingrid wondered aloud. “Lady Rhea needs protection. If something were to happen to her, all of Fódlan would suffer.”

“I’m so nervous,” Annette said, taking a deep breath and checking over her steel gauntlets for the umpteenth time. “I’m not ready for this…”

“There’s no chance for battle unless something goes terribly wrong,” Felix said, “right? How boring.”

“Keep saying things like that and something _will_ go wrong,” Sylvain told him.

“Y-Yeah, shut up!” Bernadetta stammered, anxiously twanging her bowstring. “I-I mean, wow, was that the wind just going through the cathedral now? It sounded an awful lot like someone telling you to shut up! I didn’t say anything, though… I s-swear…”

“This might sound mad,” Dimitri said, “but I do not think we have to worry so much about Lady Rhea. She said she was capable of protecting herself when we were sent after the Western Church. I do not think she was lying, strange as a thing to say it was. You noticed it as well, did you not, Felix? She does not look it, but her movements remind me of a seasoned warrior.”

Felix chuckled bitterly. “Can’t imagine her wielding a blade in battle,” he replied, “but she’s chopped off enough heretics’ heads to at least know how to hold one correctly.”

“Well, if something happens, we won’t need her to lift a finger,” Raphael said, clanging a gauntlet against his cuirass with a bell-like ring. “We’ll clobber whatever comes after her ourselves, right guys?”

“I don’t wanna think about fighting anyone,” Ignatz said, nervously and compulsively fiddling with his glasses. “Let’s just think about the ceremony. I’m still a little fuzzy on the details. What exactly does Lady Rhea plan on doing? Professor, what do you think she means by ‘revelation?’”

“Saint Seiros received a revelation from the Goddess,” Ingrid said.

“Yeah, but Professor, don’t you _already_ have the power of the Goddess or something?” Sylvain asked. “What, do you need _more?”_

“Sometimes I feel like I do,” Byleth muttered.

“We’ll all just have to wait and see, I suppose,” Edelgard said. Her axe felt heavy in her hands. She had hoped to never relive this day. “It’s probably just some stodgy religious ceremony.”

“What do you think Rhea wants to do with _you,_ Lady Edelgard?” Ignatz asked her. “I mean… you _had_ a revelation from the Goddess already. Do you think you’ll be canonized as a prophet?”

“I hope not,” she said, trying to inject some levity into the class, “or else I’ll spend the rest of my life hounded by people who want to know the future.”

At least Sylvain laughed. “Someone with _your_ looks, Princess, should be hounded for an entirely different reason.”

A hush fell over the class as Rhea arrived, adorned in her usual regalia. At her side were Seteth and Flayn. Though Seteth still needed a cane to keep himself upright, Flayn held a light shield and a short spear; evidently she, too, was expected to defend Rhea as well as Seteth should any problem arrive.

But there was another person with them: Anselm, clad in holy knight’s armor and carrying a lance. As he followed behind Rhea, the shafts of sunlight streaming through the cathedral made his armor gleam like polished gold.

Bernadetta hid behind Ingrid.

“Anselm?” Edelgard gasped. “What are you doing here?”

“I wouldn’t miss something like this for the world, El,” he said. “I’m so proud of you! To think you would be granted such an honor. Lady Rhea, I must once again thank you from the bottom of my heart for allowing me to witness this ceremony.”

Edelgard had the sinking suspicion that Anselm knew more about what Rhea planned to do to her than she herself did.

Rhea raised her hand in a silent command for everyone to fall silent. “It is time to go. Professor Byleth, Lady Edelgard… are you ready to face your destinies?”

Dimitri looked pointedly away from her, as though he feared the daggers he glared might cut her.

“We’re ready,” Byleth said.

Rhea smiled and led the Blue Lions onward to the hidden entrance of the Holy Tomb. Edelgard noticed Dedue slink to the back of the group and assumed that, like Hubert had done in her world, he was seeing to it that the Hurricane King’s forces would be able to enter unimpeded behind them. For the third time Edelgard rode the mysterious floating platform down the hidden shaft that traveled deep beneath the earth, and for the second time she pretended it was her first time.

“Whoa! H-How is this thing moving?” Sylvain exclaimed. “There’s no ropes or pulleys!”

The shaft opened up to a vast cavern of jade so wide and so tall that it had its own weather; clouds wreathed the jade ceiling. A cold green light suffused the unnaturally smooth stone. The Blue Lions were awestruck, staring at the unearthly vista with jaws slack and mouths agape.

Ignatz rubbed his glasses clean on the hem of his cloak and slid them back onto his face as though he needed to make sure the lenses weren’t playing tricks on him. “It’s beautiful…” he gasped. His voice echoed through the cavern.

“To think such a vast space has been hiding under Garreg Mach all this time,” Dimitri remarked.

Rhea wore a wistful smile as the platform came to a halt, and as she beckoned everybody off it, she gestured to the wide expanse before them. “This, my children, is the Holy Tomb. This is where the Goddess Sothis, the Beginning, the creator of the world and all life in it, was laid to rest.” Her gaze fell on the reliquaries that lined the aisle leading to the massive jade throne. “Along… with her children.”

Bernadetta’s brow furrowed. “W-Wait. The Goddess is… _dead?”_

“No… only resting,” Rhea said. “That is not dead which can eternal lie. Byleth, Edelgard, what do you think?”

“It’s big,” Byleth commented.

“This place… it’s not of this world, is it, Lady Rhea?” Edelgard asked, fighting her way past a sense of déjà vu so cloying it almost left her nauseous.

“It is _in_ this world,” Rhea answered. “Look to the throne. Sothis once sat on this very throne, the spirit dais, and on it her power flowed to all corners of Fódlan. She sat there, and now she rests here—along the world axis, here at the locus of the land she birthed.”

“I’d wondered why Garreg Mach was built in the exact center of Fódlan,” Edelgard mused. “It was built to protect and defend this place, wasn’t it? The seat of the Goddess’ power?”

“Quite astute, my child.”

“Lady Rhea,” Seteth spoke up. “What exactly is the nature of this ceremony? You have yet to inform me—”

“In due time, Seteth,” Rhea assured him. “In due time.” She led the group down the aisle to a small stone platform that stood in the center before the throne. On the platform was a stone table, and on the stone table waited a chisel, a dagger, and a goblet, along with a lumpy and misshapen Crest Stone that had been whittled away little by little from a perfect sphere to a potato-shaped lump of luminous red stone.

Dimitri stared at the table settings, eyes wide, the greenish hue of the luminous jade casting a sickly pallor to his ashen flesh, his hands trembling.

“Lady Rhea,” Seteth asked, his voice hushed, “what… in the _world_ are you planning to do with this?”

“Something _wonderful,_ Seteth,” she breathed. “Byleth… Edelgard… I wish for you both to sit upon the throne of knowledge and receive the Goddess’ wisdom. But first… Edelgard…”

Edelgard felt Anselm’s hands fall on her shoulders. “El, you are going to receive the same sacrament,” he said, “that the cardinals of the church receive!”

“The gift of body and blood,” Rhea said, taking the goblet in one hand and a sliver of stone in another, “of life eternal, of world without end.”

“Didn’t help Aelfric much, did it?” Felix muttered. His voice carried far more than he’d expected, judging by the shocked look on his face.

“Lady Rhea,” Seteth said. “That is _not_ the goblet you normally use for that ritual. That is…”

“Not another word, Seteth!” Rhea snapped at him. “I know what I am doing. With this… I follow our dream!”

“You have no idea what could happen! I cannot allow this! Anselm, take your sister back to the entrance; this ceremony is over!”

“On whose authority?” Rhea asked, the placid calm vanishing from her face. “Anselm, bring your sister to me. Recall our bargain.”

_“Bargain?”_ Edelgard whipped around to look Anselm in the face. The light of the tomb made its contours ghoulish and macabre. “Brother… what have you _done?”_

_“Don’t you dare touch her!”_ Dimitri shouted out.

An arrow zipped through the air and flew past Rhea, the side of the arrowhead clipping her cheek and drawing a thin and shallow cut across it. In its wake, another voice rang out through the tomb. Deep, low, artificial; a voice altered beyond recognition by Agarthan technology.

_“Sorry to disturb you when you’re distressed, Archbishop… but it seems some uninvited guests have arrived.”_

The Hurricane King strode up the aisle, clad in swirling blue-turned-black under the dull jade light. Stonelight threw distorted reflections across the snarling wolf’s-maw that made his helmet. He carried in one hand a wicked black bow and on his hip a wicked black sword.

_“I,”_ he said, _“am the Hurricane King.”_

Around him, rays of light burst from the floor like seeds sprouting from the ground, fading to reveal a platoon of soldiers clad in the Hurricane King’s colors—blue and silver armor, black cloaks, and wolf’s furs. Flayn let out a horrified scream at the sight of them.

Another shape emerged from the Hurricane King’s shadow, coalescing into a twin clad in the same dark cloak and wolf’s pelt and bearing a helmet and mask of the same design. He carried in both hands two wicked black daggers. _“And I,”_ he said, _“am the Hurricane King.”_

The soldiers quickly moved to encircle the Blue Lions. _“Don’t move, any of you!”_ their commander shouted out. _“If you move, your lives will be forfeit! The Holy Tomb is now under the dominion of the Hurricane King!”_

“Which one?” Sylvain asked with a sardonic snicker, standing at the ready with the Lance of Ruin on hand and glowing with a fiery aura.

“Our charade is at an end, Your Majesty,” Dedue said with a solemn bow of his head, and Dimitri stepped forward to join the other two Hurricane Kings.

Dimitri’s gaze met each of his classmates one last time as the last traces of trepidation and fear vanished from his face.

“Your Highness… Wh—What are you _doing?”_ Ingrid gasped. “You’re not—”

_“And I,”_ Dimitri said, his voice ringing out loud and clear as a bell across the vast expanse of the Holy Tomb, _“am the Hurricane King, King of Kings and King of Faerghus.”_

“Insolence!” Rhea snarled. “You… You son of Blaiddyd! Corpse-robber! Grave-desecrator! You shall atone for the sin of trampling on this holy resting place! How dare you call yourself a king of Faerghus! I will never see you crowned!”

“You need not. I received my crown without your help or blessing months ago in a secret ceremony. My kingdom no longer bows to your sick will,” Dimitri said, “and soon, neither will the rest of Fódlan.”

“Blasphemer! I gave your people freedom!”

“You gave us nothing; we traded one cruel master for another!”

“Dimitri… buddy,” Sylvain said, “if this is a joke… you got us! You can stop now! This _is_ a joke, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid I have never been more serious, my friend,” Dimitri said. “My classmates, I ask all of you to lower your weapons. I do not wish to fight any of you. Surrender and no harm will come to you.”

The words had scarcely left his mouth before Ingrid charged at him, a feral and ragged roar tearing itself from her throat. Her lance gleamed in the sickly jade light.

With a sharp and swift wave of his arm, Dimitri snapped her lance in two like a twig. The gleaming blade went flying—and so did Ingrid, swatted away along with it as though she were a gnat; she was lifted off her feet and thrown to the floor, where she lay in a crumpled heap.

“I’m sorry, Ingrid—I asked you not to fight,” he said. He looked to his troops. “Men! By the order of King Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, I command you to take the Crest Stones from this place! Hurricane Kings, defend the soldiers! Should anybody stand in our way, kill them without hesitation—but leave Rhea to me!”

“Professor,” Rhea shouted to Byleth, “destroy these villainous traitors who dare dishonor our creator!”

Byleth looked to Seteth, who had thrown his body over a cowering Flayn. She looked to Rhea, whose once-placid face, painted green in the light of the tomb, was now contorted with equal parts terrible anger and bloodthirsty glee. She looked to Edelgard, and even from a distance Edelgard could see the turmoil behind her eyes. And she looked to Ingrid, who lay unconscious on the floor, and then finally to Dimitri, who stood among fiends with a hard look in his eyes— _too_ hard.

She looked to the rest of her students, and then she stepped toward Dimitri and turned to face Rhea, leveling the Sword of the Creator at her.

“You…” Rhea hissed. “How… _dare_ you!”

“Professor…” Dimitri gasped.

“I won’t kill one of my students,” Byleth said. _“Ever._ No matter who asks me. I made a promise to Sothis.”

“Take Mother’s name out of your mouth, you _failure!”_ Rhea snapped at her. “Your presence soils this Holy Tomb and disgraces my brethren! How dare you wield the power of the Goddess against me!” She turned to Anselm. “Anselm, bring Edelgard to me! Flayn, Seteth, run!”

With a wave of her hand, mist descended from the ceiling and condensed into gossamer bones, flesh, and armor, forming a battalion of the damned. In the distance, tremors wracked the ground as the golems arranged in rows beyond the reliquaries slowly began to bring themselves to life with slow, halting movements.

Anselm wrapped one arm tightly around Edelgard’s waist, pinning her to his side, and bared his lance as he dragged her toward Rhea, no matter how she dug in her heels. “Let’s get out of here, El!”

_“Save Edelgard!”_ Byleth ordered her students.

_“Kill every last one of them!”_ Rhea shouted to her army of ghosts. _“But save the failure for me! I’ll take her heart back myself!”_

As the Blue Lions scrambled into action, the ghosts surged forward like a raging tidal wave.

“There are no ghosts,” Dimitri intoned, drawing back one fist as the glow of his Crests bled through his sleeve and the gaps in his armor, “only your own fears taking familiar shapes! _Rhea! The dead have no power over me!”_

Edelgard wished she could have told him not to take that _literally._

He took a running leap at the horde and drove his fist into the floor. Jade tiles shattered and flew into the air; countless phantom soldiers were sent reeling backward, some ripped to pieces by the flying stone shrapnel, as a massive fissure snaked up the aisle and unearthed chunks of stone forced their way out of the floor like the misshapen fangs of a massive beast.

Rhea leaped out of the way of the approaching fissure as it ripped through the platform and split the table in two. _“What?”_

_“What in blazes?”_ Anselm exclaimed, loosening his grip just enough for Edelgard to drive the butt of her axe into his chin. There was a sharp crack as his jaw clenched from the impact and his teeth collided with each other. He let go of her and reeled away. _“El, what are you_ doing?!”

“My place is with my professor,” she said, “wherever that path leads—not to be the victim of some theological experiment!”

With that, she ran headlong into the fray, her axe cutting through the phantom soldiers as she fought her way to her class… to her professor. To Dimitri and Byleth. The only path she could take.

_“El! Get back here!”_ Anselm shouted out, pursuing her. The blade of his lance rang out against her armor, and that of her axe against his. _“What’s gotten into you? These heretics… they’ve_ brainwashed _you, haven’t they?!”_

“If you would give your own sister over to an arcane ritual,” Edelgard snarled at him, parrying a strike from his lance and forcing him back, “then _you’re_ the brainwashed one! Step aside from this madness, Anselm, I beg of you!”

With a flourish of his hand, he conjured a swarm of white motes of light and hurled them at her; Edelgard felt them burrow through her armor into her flesh and sap the strength from her muscles. Shaking it off, she staggered back, ducked under the swing of a phantom soldier’s axe, and paid Anselm back in kind with a roiling ball of fire that struck him in the chest but left barely a scorch mark.

She narrowly avoided the sword of another phantom soldier and cleaved him in twain with a swing of her axe—but more were soon upon her. Byleth only seemed to drift further away, but Dimitri cut through the phantoms with the same feral zeal he had shown against Solon’s revenants in the Sealed Forest as he closed in on Rhea.

_“Remember me, Rhea?”_ he shouted out. _“I was saved from your sick experiments… and I will make you pay for every scar your servants put upon my body! Tell me, Rhea… do you recall Duscur?”_

_“What are you talking about,”_ Rhea snarled, _“you blathering fool?”_

_“You’ll die for that! Die, die, die! You took away everything that I loved!”_ He cleared the last line of Rhea’s defenses. _“I’ll rip you apart… with my bare hands!”_

Their fists collided. Edelgard could feel the resonance from the Crest of Flames cast energetic ripples through her body. And as impossible as it was, she could hear the shattering of their knuckles even from her vantage point, like the boom of thunder in the midst of a terrible storm.

A sword struck Edelgard’s breastplate, sending a jolt of pain through her chest. She gritted her teeth through the pain and struck her foe, lodging her axe deep in his gossamer flesh; when she tore the blade out, long and wispy strings of fog followed it like strands of cobwebs. She wished for once that she had the Crest of Flames; when she called upon its power, she could feel it draw healing energy into her wounds in proportion to the strength of her blows, and the cracked ribs in her side were in desperate need of it.

A beam of crackling blue light shot over her shoulder, boring a sizzling hole in a phantom soldier who’d been about to strike her from behind. In the distance, Felix conjured another bolt of lightning and struck down another phantom, then drew his swords and cut another into pieces. He lacked Dimitri’s reckless and careless savagery; he fought like a wolf but moved like a dancer, fleet-footed, swift, nimble.

Edelgard searched for the others in the chaos of battle. Bernadetta was keeping her distance, stringing and nocking arrows to her bow almost as quickly as she let them fly; with a short sword in hand Ignatz kept the phantoms from closing in on her. Raphael and Dedue had formed a human shield in front of Annette as she channeled healing magic through Ingrid. Sylvain’s Lance of Ruin and Byleth’s Sword of the Creator stood out like beacons, burning a fiery red against the tomb’s eldritch green light.

_“Edelgard, stop! This isn’t you!”_ Anselm cried out, dashing through the phantom soldiers’ thinning ranks and grabbing her by the wrist. _“Come with me!”_

An arrow struck him between his cuirass and one of his pauldrons and stuck there, embedded in his shoulder. He was forced to relinquish his grip.

_“I’m sorry, Anselm!”_ Bernadetta shrieked through the chaos of battle. _“U-Uh… I-It was f-f-friendly fire! I s-swear! Please don’t kill me!”_

Anselm gritted his teeth and ripped the arrow out of his shoulder, and with a wave of his hand he healed the wound, then leaped back into the fray. His lance danced around the swings of Edelgard’s axe once more. His movements were surgical and methodical, not a single twitch of his muscles wasted—he fought with Ingrid’s strength and Felix’s swiftness and grace, and he probed her weak points the way Sylvain or Claude would when they sparred.

_“This is enough!”_ he shouted at Edelgard. _“El, stand down! Don’t make me do this!”_

“No one is forcing your hand but Rhea,” Edelgard retorted, parrying what she could and dodging what she couldn’t. “What did she promise you, Anselm? Our empire? It isn’t hers to give!”

_“Stop being such a selfish brat, Edelgard!”_

His lance dented her armor and bruised her ribs. She backed away, every breath sending a sharp knife between her ribs. Fire met light as the two of them hurled spells at each other. Her conjured flames glanced off his armor too easily, like water off a duck’s back.

Summoning her dark magic was far more difficult than the fire she’d grown so accustomed to, but she did it; the tendrils of shadow swirled around her in helical spirals as moonlight gathered in her hand. The silvery light cut through Anselm’s defenses, unlike the flames, sending him reeling—in a moment, the tide of battle shifted and he was on the defensive. His lance barely parried the next strike of her axe, and failed to parry the next one—the blade came down on the opening created by Bernadetta’s apparently wayward arrow and tasted flesh.

_“El!”_ he howled, letting out a pained cry as he ripped his flesh free of the axe and stumbled back. Tears sprang to his dark eyes. _“El…”_ he gasped, halfway to sobbing.

“I-I’m sorry,” Edelgard stammered, moved by his suffering—it was as though he’d plunged a dagger into her heart and twisted. “Anselm, I—I don’t want to go with her! Please, lay down your weapon and leave this place!”

“I won’t let you make such a poor decision! If you raise your sword against Rhea like your classmates have, even I—even the emperor himself won’t be able to save you!” Anselm readied his lance, only for a dark shadow to swoop behind him. An instant later, a black bow had slipped over his head and the bowstring was cutting into his throat as one of the Hurricane Kings yanked it backward and tried to twist it. Anselm threw him off and hurled the bow aside.

The Hurricane King righted himself and stood at Edelgard’s side, drawing his sword. _“Hello there, Prince Anselm. It’s me, Saint Seiros’ opposite number, the devil among demons! Shall we dance?”_

He very slightly turned his head toward Edelgard, staring at her from within the wolf’s-head helmet’s gaping maw, his facemask betraying no emotion. _“Ladies first?”_ he asked.

_“Get away from her, you monster!”_ Anselm howled, throwing himself at the Hurricane King with blinding white light swirling around the tip of his lance, and the three of them began to duel.

Dimitri was thrown through the air, reeling back from the force of Rhea’s blow; blood coated his face, black in the green light, and was splattered all the way up Rhea’s arm to her shoulder.

_“I’ll kill you slowly, Blaiddyd,”_ she snarled, a shimmering green aura clinging to her body as white scales sprouted from her shoulders, _“just like your namesake…”_

Edelgard felt the Crest of Flames’ presence in the air again as Byleth split apart the Sword of the Creator and struck Rhea with its whip. _“Dimitri!”_ Byleth cried out.

She felt the Crest of Flames again as the Hurricane King nimbly dodged a spear of white light from Anselm and retaliated with a much more physical and substantial blade, the steel cleaving steel armor and biting into flesh.

She felt it a third time in quick succession as Dimitri charged at Rhea. _“This ends here!”_

An earthquake shook the ground as the golems began to close in on the chaotic battlefield, raising their heavy metal fists and preparing to bring them crashing down. As Anselm and the Hurricane King scattered, Edelgard saw too late a shadow falling over her, only for someone to grab her by the hand and wrench her aside before a golem’s fist could flatten her against the floor.

_“I’ve got no idea what’s going on,”_ Annette gasped as she dragged Edelgard along, _“I’m just following Professor Byleth’s lead! Are you alright?”_

“A few bruised ribs, I think,” Edelgard grunted, clutching her side. The ground shook violently, so violently it seemed as though it would invert itself and become the ceiling, and she and Annette both collapsed to the ground, their bodies numbed by the force of the shockwaves.

Dimitri was undeterred, and with a single blow and both Crests surging through every inch of his body he drove his fist into Rhea’s stomach with enough force to lift her up off the ground and with a twist of his body he slammed her into the floor so forcefully that it formed a crater in the stone. A vortex of wind blew around the two of them, razor-sharp as it climbed high in the air and scattered debris across the tomb, as though his blow had been so mighty that it had conjured the storm that was his namesake.

At the same time, Edelgard felt the Crest of Flames in Byleth as the Sword of the Creator bit through one of the golems’ metal hides, and the Crest of Flames in the Hurricane King as he drove his sword into another golem’s body.

Three Crests of Flames.

And the world split apart.

The fissure across the aisle tore itself open, revealing a gaping, yawning chasm fading to an inky blackness like a wound across the tomb’s jade skin. Edelgard grabbed Annette and hurriedly backed away from the widening gash as the remaining phantoms tumbled into the abyss and vanished into its depths.

Byleth screamed, her sword falling to the floor as she fell to her knees clutching her head in pain, her chest heaving and spasming, jerking as though a fish hook had lodged itself in her heart and was trying to yank it out of her ribs and tear it out of her body. Dimitri let out just as bone-chilling a scream, almost a bestial howl, and began tearing off his armor. His hands, with bloodied fingers curled into talons, scrabbled against his body, his fingernails latching on his skin and carving bloody furrows into his body. The Hurricane King screamed as well and fell to the floor, clutching his helmet and struggling to tear it from his head as he writhed in agony, choking on his screams of pain and terror.

The resonance of the Crest of Flames, multiplied threefold and threefold and threefold again, grew stronger and stronger until Edelgard felt as though it was going to shake her apart and reduce her to dust. The chasm yawned wider, consuming more; she could swear the Sword of the Creator was inching toward its edge of its own accord, as though it had a mind of its own and sought to throw itself into the abyss. Dedue grabbed the sword and pulled it away, holding it with a death grip as it tried to force its way out of his grasp. Raphael clutched it by the blade before it could wrench itself free.

Edelgard’s legs gave out and she collapsed, and as Annette tried to pull her along she stared into the depths of the abyss.

_And something_

_stared_

_back_

_at_

_her._

She felt its eyes before she saw them, and when she saw them, she saw more than she could count, more than there were stars in the sky. The thing was too small to have so many eyes, but it had them all the same. They took up more space on its face than there was to spare. Her eyes watered as she stared into them, burning, unblinking, unable to tear her gaze away. Visions sprang to her mind’s eye of a thousand waves higher than mountains crashing against a thousand shores and scattering gleaming cities like piles of matchsticks, of glittering spires of metal and glass melting under waves of heat and drooping like candles, of desert sands blasted to twisting sheets of glass, of pillars of light tearing themselves free of the ground and stretching to the heavens. She heard a sound in her head that was like the background noise of Vual’s radio, a harsh hiss that kept growing louder and louder and louder and louder and louder—

There was an intelligence deep within the beast that slumbered beneath the abyss, but no mind. A body, but no soul. Desiccated flesh and dried sinew stretched over bones, but no life. A presence that felt at once familiar, like an old friend, and more alien than anything anyone in Fódlan had ever laid eyes on. It was something that did not belong in this world—or perhaps the world did not belong around _it._

She could see faint details of its writhing body as it slithered in the dark.

It looked like a Hero’s Relic.

But it wasn’t the size of a sword or a lance or any other weapon that could be wielded by human hands.

It dwarfed demonic beasts and wyverns by comparison.

_It was bigger than the Immaculate One._

The world flickered and became immaterial, and Edelgard found herself torn between this world and her world, and she could feel the absolute agony coursing through the veins of her other body— _her_ body. In the other world she was screaming as loudly and terribly as Byleth and Dimitri were in this one, and she felt the Crest of Flames within her struggling and burning in her veins as though it wanted to rip itself out of her body in a shower of viscera. Hubert and Ferdinand were at her side, holding her down, trying to tame her flailing limbs as her blood tried to tear her body asunder.

_“Ferdinand, go fetch Manuela! Your M—Your Majesty… Edelgard—”_ Hubert’s face was wrenched in horror the likes of which she hadn’t seen in over ten years, his eyes wide, lips pleading, a patina of sweat glistening on his ashen skin. She could barely hear his voice, hushed with concern and shivering with desperation, over her screams. When her flailing arms struck him despite his best attempts to pin them down, they drew blood, her fingernails tearing skin from his cheeks and brow. _“Lady Edelgard… Manuela is on her way… please…”_

Someone in another world was calling her name. _“El! El! Get away from there!”_ Anselm screamed, his voice hoarse. His entire left arm was painted in blood from the wound in his armored pauldron down to his dripping gauntlet. _“El, please! Come back to me!”_

She could see Rhea standing at the edge of the chasm, staring down into its depths with a blissful smile on her face as scales sprouted from her skin and talons tore themselves free of her fingers, ripping through the frayed and bloodstained regalia she had been wearing. Even as her body contorted and reshaped itself—slowly, deliberately, crafting a new shape of her face like a sculptor’s invisible hands molding clay and drawing wings from her back—she stood and stared into the abyss, transfixed.

_“Lady Rhea!”_ Seteth’s voice bled through the noise. He and Flayn had half-dragged themselves to her side. Edelgard could catch faint and shimmering glimpses of scales and feathers rippling across their skin. _“Lady Rh—Rhea… W-What in heaven’s name—have you done?! What is happening?! Lady Rhea?! Rhea! Stop this! Stop this all at once!”_

There was a cacophony of screams, a chorus of the damned, and then, so abruptly it was as though someone had cut off her ears, it all ceased and Edelgard knew only darkness and silence.

* * *

It was still dark, but no longer silent. For a moment Edelgard could only assume she had fallen into the chasm and was now tumbling endlessly through the darkness down an infinite abyss, so far down that the light of the Holy Tomb had faded away entirely and only the crushing depths, black as a cloudy sky on a moonless night over a wasteland, remained. Perhaps she was sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

The moment came to an end.

She heard a voice.

A worried voice. A fraught voice. Soft, breathy, cracking from anguish mixed with relief.

_“Oh… Oh, my dear… you’re alive… thank goodness…”_

She tried to say something, to ask something—where was she? Who was speaking to her?—but she couldn’t move, not even to part her lips. As she became more and more aware of her body, she became more and more aware of her pain. Pain like she’d never felt since the dungeons, not in magnitude but in scope, because the pain was _everywhere._ Her whole body throbbed from head to toe, from the surface of her skin to the marrow of her bones. And her head hurt worst of all. Every thought was a new lance of pain stabbing into her brain through her eye.

_“The heretics and traitors are gone. That bestial brat… and the wretched thief. They are gone now… but I was able to save_ you.”

She could feel a hand on her chest and tingling waves of light wash through her body, though the world in front of her eyes remained black and insubstantial. She wanted to speak up, to say something, but she was too weak to do so, and the pulsating ripples of healing magic flowing through her aching body only made her feel weaker. Who was healing her? Byleth? Annette? Then who was speaking…? Every thought made her head ache even more intensely.

_“They have fled from the divine judgment their actions call down upon them. They have defiled the Holy Tomb, dishonored the Goddess, and humiliated our brethren. No amount of repentance will bring their wretched souls salvation; I will see to it they burn in the eternal flames and spill every last drop of their blood into the Goddess’ soil._

_“But_ you… _you remain here at my side, ever faithful. I knew it—I_ knew _you were the one.”_

Her consciousness, a bulwark against oblivion, was quickly fading, and with it went her strength to mount any kind of resistance to the dark fog worming its way into every corner of her brain. The softly spoken words gliding gently into her ears seemed to recede farther and farther into the distance.

_“The scales have fallen from my eyes. I know now that the thief was a false prophet—and the fruit of Sitri’s womb, fruit of the poisoned tree.”_

It couldn’t be. That voice… it wasn’t possible…

_“I promise you, I shall rip her chest open with my bare hands and take back the heart she has proven so unworthy to bear.”_

No.

_“Oh… but I am so happy to have you still at my side, Edelgard… You did not mean those things you said to Anselm, did you? No, certainly not… unlike your treacherous friends.”_

No. No…

_“But rest now. Rest_ well. _You shall feel better in the morning.”_

No, no, no. _No!_

_“My child… sleep well and grow healthy… for Mother.”_


	38. Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard is lost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before we jump headlong into this doozy of a chapter I want to show you all some **AMAZING** fanart drawn by [Hawkfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hawkfire/profile) depicting the climax of last week's chapter:  
>   
> Hawkfire also contributed a lovely drawing of Dimitri punching ghosts:  
>   
> Now let's get ready to suffer!
> 
> Content warning: There is a nightmare sequence referencing torture and medical experimentation beginning at the line "Blinding white light flooded the darkness, bright as the sun, white as the snow" and ending with the line "Awake"

He stood in the center of the catacombs, surrounded by the dusty stone tombs of long-dead bishops and cardinals and the tombs of archbishops that he knew to be empty. He saw the world from within the gaping jaws of a steel wolf, its curved fangs encroaching on his vision as though the beast were swallowing him whole.

He held out his glaive and turned the dull back of its single-edged blade against the girl lying on the floor in front of him. She was pale as a ghost; her long emerald hair, pulled out of its ornately styled curls, spilled out in a halo around her head, and when he used the blade to lift up a lock of that shimmering green hair, he could see the delicate point to her ears. When he drew the blade away it left a slender cut on her cheek that let a single droplet of blood ooze out of it.

 _I am the Hurricane King. Count up your sins, for the dead demand their tribute._ His voice came from the wolf’s throat.

 _“Slay the beast,”_ his father commanded. _“Show the world the lengths to which you shall go for our revenge.”_

 _“Plunge your spear into its heart,”_ his mother commanded.

He wasn’t here to kill. The ghosts could howl and bark at him all they liked, but he was here for a purpose. A show of force and nothing more.

There was a flurry of violence; the girl was forgotten. He felt the haft of a lance splinter in his hands, then his fingers curling around a throat. The throat, bruising more every second as his fingers hooked into the flesh and the steel and leather that capped his fingertips burrowed in deeper, belonged to a man with green hair like the girl’s, but darker. The man’s face was turning blue, then purple, eyes bulging as he gasped for breath.

 _“You are the living monument to his sins,”_ his father said.

 _“Make him beg,”_ his mother said.

_I am the living monument to your sins. The storm of reckoning and liberation is nigh; now beg the Goddess for forgiveness and salvation with your last breath…_

A part of him deeper than the ghosts wanted to keep squeezing until the beast before him breathed his last. For the past six months he had wondered, staring at his calm and composed face, what horrors lurked beneath—what role it had played in the twisted experiments that had brought life to these phantoms howling in his head. He wanted to tear that face off and see what secret evils lay beneath. The stench of blood and fear became too strong to resist—even with _her_ in the room, staring at him with her piercing azure eyes, he might not be able to stop himself—

The firm hand of the reaper pulled him away. _Halt, my liege. You are pushing yourself too hard. We have made an impression. Our work here is done._

But their work was not done. There were more people to terrorize, though, infuriatingly, none to kill. The cardinal, for example. He wanted to tear the man’s heart out, but only pursued him as a show of force. No one in the sacrosanct halls of the monastery, which had never seen conflict in all its nearly thousand years of history, could believe that they were safe.

Not even the students.

He attacked one of the houses on an excursion to the ruins. He and the reaper had business there. Their secrets needed to be hidden from those who would uncover them, and to keep those secrets they were prepared to shed blood.

And blood they did shed. But it was the girl with lilac eyes who held the object of his desire. And for once even the ghosts stopped baying for blood like hounds hungry for the hunt.

His voice was the wolf’s voice. _You do not know what you are meddling with. Vengeance comes to those who bring it upon themselves._ His weapon reached for her heart slowly and menacingly.

She stared at him with not a trace of fear in her eyes, her back to the edge of a cliff. If his lance, splattered with the blood of other students, would have frightened her, she would have tumbled to her death. But she was firm and resolute. It was as though nothing in the world could challenge her. Even though she had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, she was utterly unafraid.

If she did not relinquish the book she clutched in her hands, she would have to be killed, and for once the monster inside him and the phantoms which conveyed its will to his ears dreaded the thought of spilling blood.

She slowly crouched down and set the book ablaze. The deed was done. There was no need to kill. _We have done enough,_ he told the reaper, and for once the ghosts agreed.

He was not in the guise of the wolf when the traitor destroyed the village, but he was filled with its lust for blood all the same, and he and his ghosts all howled in one voice for the monster’s perdition. Nor was he in the guise of the wolf when he met the traitor again in the forest.

All he knew then was rage and pain. That which was not stained black was drenched with blood. The sky itself seemed red, the snow on the ground. _Give back my professor! Bring her back! Or I’ll kill you! I’ll rip out your wicked heart and show it to you! I’ll chop you up into little tiny pieces and bury every peace in a different part of Fódlan so that your wretched soul will never know peace! You will know true pain before I finally allow you to die!_ Bestial fury consumed him. The howls of those damned to haunt his mind consumed him.

_“Kill him!”_

_“Kill him!”_

_“Kill him!”_

_“Kill him!”_

_“Kill him!”_

_I’ll kill you… I’ll kill you… I’ll kill you… I’ll kill you… I’ll kill you… I’ll kill you… I’ll kill you… I’ll kill you…_

There was no reaper this time to hold him back.

But there was a star in the sky.

 _I am the Hurricane King,_ he finally said, and when he spoke it, he did not speak from within the jaws of the steel wolf, nor did he wear its trappings.

But his enemy was close at hand, and she had his two most precious people within her clutches.

 _“Tear her wicked head from her shoulders!”_ his father howled.

 _“Rip her heart from her chest!”_ his mother bayed.

He was going to kill her. He was going to free the ghosts whose spectral forms swirled around his heart and mind. He was going to save the girl with the stern violet eyes and the woman with the piercing azure—emerald—stare. He was going to kill the beast. He was going to save everybody.

_Mother… Father… You’re all going home—_

He felt as though his heart had been torn out of his chest. Whatever was beating inside him was something else, something intangible, because he felt as hollow and thin-skinned as a delicate glass vase, one that would shatter at the slightest force.

There was a little light. Faint. Indistinct. The bloody color of light bleeding through the veins in his eyelids.

Thoughts were beyond his grasp, but images and sensations swirled around in his head. He remembered the splitting of glowing jade stone. He remembered the sight of scales sprouting from flesh as wings burst out from the beast’s shoulders and spread their terrible spans from one end of the tomb, it seemed, to another, the sight of fingernails swelling to wicked claws. He remembered the feeling as though every drop of blood in his body was fighting to leap from his veins and drain itself into the chasm; he remembered the compulsive urge to dig his fingernails as deep into his flesh as he could and tear, tear, tear, tear, tear, liberate the blood from its flesh prison, allow it to flow home to where it belonged deep within the bowels of the earth…

He felt a single eyelid just barely crack open, enough for a sliver of light to blind him, and the faint and indistinct murmurs he had heard earlier but had been unable to parse resolved into something intelligible.

_“…of the bones in his right arm were broken, but we’ve reduced it all to a single fracture. It’s a miracle we were able to save his face; those scars were so deep… you say they were self-inflicted? Regardless, right now, all His Majesty needs is rest…”_

His mind remembered words again, and remembered further back. Names, faces.

He opened his eyes. The light flooding them dimmed as the faint blur suspended before him resolved into a face.

A face made entirely of hard angles as though carved from granite, thought softened with concern. It belonged to a man from Duscur, one of the last of his people; his skin was brown and short crew-cut hair so fair it was nearly silver. Some people may have found his face frightening due to its consistent stoicism that threatened a severe personality; some may have found it frightening simply because it was that of a man from Duscur. The face belonged to a man named Dedue Molinaro.

“Your Majesty,” Dedue said. His voice, hardly a whisper, nearly cracked. His eyes, a pale aquamarine, glistened wetly in the light. Next to him was clustered a team of healers clad in white robes.

_His Majesty._

Dimitri remembered. “Dedue,” he whispered, his voice hardly able to drag itself out of his throat. “Where are we?”

“We are in a provisional camp outside of Zanado. As planned, we were able to successfully exfiltrate the Holy Tomb infiltration force and rendezvous with the scouts we sent ahead.”

It took several seconds for the news to register in Dimitri’s brain. “The mission was successful?”

“Our initial goal was successfully achieved,” Dedue said, which hinted to there having been severe setbacks.

Dimitri tried to force himself to sit up. Bruises and fresh scars all across his body ached ferociously. His right arm, bound in a splint and a sling, was pressed to his bare chest. His breath left his mouth in white clouds and the cold air prickled the skin on the back of his neck and stung his lungs. “It’s cold,” he mumbled, shivering.

“Conditions are not ideal.” Dedue turned to one of the healers. “Fetch a cloak for His Majesty.” As the healer hurried off, Dedue unraveled the scarf from around his neck—teal and tan fabric woven into ornate patterns unique to his tribe—and wrapped it snugly around Dimitri’s neck.

Dimitri took his hand and curled it around one of Dedue’s before he could pull it away. It was warm. “Thank you,” he said. “My friend.”

“It is the least I can do. Do you remember what happened?”

Dimitri slowly and hesitantly nodded as his mind gathered up the tiny pieces of his shattered memories and pieced them back together. As he collected his thoughts and gathered his wits about him, he noticed something out of the corner of his eye.

There was another cot beside his own in the tent that served as a makeshift infirmary. A woman lay asleep on the cot. Feathery hair the color of fresh mint leaves, so lustrous it almost seemed to shine with its own light, framed her ashen face with closed eyes and a slack jaw that kept her mouth just barely open as her chest slowly rose and fell. There was a sword resting on the ground at her side, a wicked weapon that seemed to be carved entirely out of the bones of some ancient behemoth, its blade the segmented spiny columns of the beast’s backbone.

“Professor,” Dimitri gasped, recognizing the woman’s face. A flood of memories rushed through him, visions in his mind’s eye. He recalled the first time he’d met her, the way she had thrown herself in front of him when the bandit he’d hired lunged at him with an axe. He remembered seeing her for the first time standing in front of the class in the Blue Lions’ common room, awkwardly struggling through the first lecture she’d ever delivered. He remembered, slowly and over many months, seeing the woman’s oddly icy heart grow warmer and warmer, seeing the rare smile become an occasional smile, and he remembered feeling more and more comfortable in her presence until he realized that he couldn’t live without her.

And when ordered to turn herself and her class against him, she had said no. She had chosen him against all odds, against all reason, and she had saved him yet again from an inevitable fate. He was alive and once again, he owed it all to her.

He forced himself off of his cot and onto his legs, though his knees buckled under his weight; with Dedue propping him up, he crossed the short distance between his cot and his professor’s.

“Byleth,” he said, reaching out and laying a hand on her forehead, brushing aside wisps of hair from her brow. Her skin was still warm. “Is she alright?”

“She has a pulse,” one of the healers said, “but no heartbeat. I don’t understand—that isn’t possible.”

A pulse, but no heartbeat. Something made the blood in her veins flow with a steady rhythm, but whatever it was, it wasn’t her heart. Dimitri recalled that Sylvain had once told him that Byleth had claimed to him that her heart didn’t beat. Sylvain had just assumed she was joking, because hearts were one of those things people just couldn’t live without.

Sylvain. Another face. A mop of red hair. Sylvain, and Felix, too. Felix with his scowl and his deep indigo hair and dark amber eyes. And Ingrid, of course, fair-haired, stern, and strong, who had kept the boys out of trouble since they had all first met over ten years ago (though those early years still eluded Dimitri’s memory). His old friends from Fhirdiad, although to be specific Sylvain lived in Gautier, Felix in Fraldarius, and Ingrid in Galatea and they only visited in the summer or when their parents were on business.

Professor Byleth taught the Blue Lions.

“Is she alive?” Dimitri asked.

The healer shrugged. “Well, _something’s_ keeping her blood pumping. So yes, Your Majesty—I think so.”

Dimitri’s hand lingered on Byleth’s forehead. He didn’t want to pull it away. He wanted to let her warmth soothe his palm until her eyes opened and she greeted him with, perhaps, one of her occasional smiles.

But he could not linger. “The Blue Lions—Dedue, our classmates, are they…?”

“Outside,” Dedue said. “Few sustained any serious injuries; none as serious as yours.”

“Take me to them.”

One of the healers returned with a midnight blue cloak lined with silver wolf’s fur and draped it over his shoulders. With a shield against the cold, he left the tent, though his legs were still weak and struggled to keep him upright.

It was light outside; the cloudy sky was a uniform gray haze. The provisional camp occupied the citadel of an old, long-abandoned garrison perhaps a morning’s march from Zanado and a day or so from Garreg Mach, its crumbling facade open to the elements. The citadel was as vast and open as Garreg Mach’s great hall but far emptier and dilapidated, its roof dotted with holes where stone had crumbled away. Torches guttered in their sconces in the darkest corners and bonfires boiled snow for fresh water. Wind howled and whistled through the citadel.

Dimitri recognized his classmates around one of the more distant fires, huddling around it for warmth. Sylvain, Felix, and Ingrid were there, and Annette—four of the original eight Blue Lions. Annette was either asleep or unconscious and her head had fallen into Felix’s lap, her red hair undone and spilling over his dark cloak in fiery waves as he stared off into the distance as though pointedly refusing to look Dimitri’s way. Ingrid was awake, trembling hands wrapped around a canteen as she shivered from the cold, head bowed, shoulders quivering. Sylvain sat with a grim and pensive look on his face as he conversed in a low voice with the others. There was Raphael Kirsten, a commoner from Leicester whose towering physique and curly golden hair gave him the appearance of some ancient sun god; huddled next to him were Ignatz Victor, another commoner from Leicester whose glasses turned to solid disks in the firelight, and Bernadetta von Varley, a young and skittish noblewoman from the Adrestian Empire. The last three were people who were not subjects of the kingdom, not beholden to its king, and had no reason to follow him. But here they were, huddled around a fire and wrapped in thin blankets to ward off the cold.

That was everyone. Except…

“Edelgard,” he mumbled to himself. There was a hole among his classmates, a palpable absence. An imperious young woman, often stern but often kind, with long brown hair and hard lilac eyes and a resolve as strong as the most valiant knight. A princess from the Adrestian Empire, his step-sister through her mother’s marriage to his father. A mysterious girl who sometimes seemed to know far more than she ought to. A girl who challenged and supported him often in the same breath, who always stood by him, and who, like Byleth, had shown him more love than he had known what to do with no matter what side of himself he had shown to her.

He looked to Dedue. “Dedue, where is she? Was she hurt? Is she in another medical tent? Where’s Edelgard?”

He recalled the Holy Tomb. Edelgard had been in the grip of her older brother Prince Anselm, Archbishop Rhea’s toadying lackey, and he had been ordered to bring her to her for the sake of a monstrous ritual. Though Edelgard had tried to escape, in the chaos when the ground had split open and the dragons had burst free of their human shadows, she must have…

“Tell me she is here, Dedue. Tell me she is here, somewhere, resting…”

“I cannot, Your Majesty,” Dedue said. “I’m sorry.”

“We need to go back,” he said. His fellow Blue Lions took notice of him as his voice rose from a hoarse and weary whisper. “We need to go back! Back to Garreg Mach, back to the church, back to Rhea—We have to save Edelgard! _I_ have to save Edelgard! Now, before it’s too late, El _needs_ us!”

Dedue held him back. “I am sorry, Your Majesty. You are needed at the capital. Your declaration of war cannot be delayed. And this provisional camp lacks the resources to mount a rescue mission.”

“By the time we muster our army it may be too late for her!”

“I am sorry.”

“Do not act as though she is already dead! Imagine the horrors and torture she is being subjected to right now! See the scars on my body and the hair upon my head and imagine them on _her!”_

“Our priorities—”

“To the flames with your priorities! _Edelgard_ is my priority!” He tore himself free of Dedue’s supportive grip and stumbled toward his classmates. “All of you, get up! We are going back to Garreg Mach—”

His legs gave out and he hit the ground with enough force to lose consciousness.

He awakened back in the healers’ tent, back on the cot, back at Byleth’s side while she slept. He could see Dedue speaking in a low voice with one of his soldiers, but he could not hear him.

Instead, he heard Glenn Fraldarius.

 _“Look on the bright side,”_ he sneered, sounding so much like Felix that it hurt. _“At least you’ll be too late to watch_ her _die.”_

Dimitri shook his head.

 _“You really are pathetic. They’re talking about you out there, you know. Your classmates—what’s_ left _of them. They’re all talking about how disgusting you are. They saw Archbishop Rhea kidnap your sister and turn into a great beast and they’re still more afraid of_ you, _you wretch, than they are of her.”_

“Stop it…”

His father came next. King Lambert had been a good and kind man, from what little Dimitri could remember, but he had also been a strict and stern man when the time called for it, and it was that cold and steely voice he’d always had when disciplining him that Dimitri heard in his head. When he closed his eyes he could see his father standing before him in the void with his head in his hands, viscera dripping from the severed stump of his neck and staining the fur-lined collar of his royal cloak and blood oozing from his head and leaving dark stains on his polished silver armor. His cold, pale blue eyes were even colder and paler, sightless, with pupils turned a milky white.

_“You failed in your responsibilities as a king. You were crowned over two months ago, as soon as you came of age, and yet you shirked your duties and returned to Garreg Mach. You were so afraid to become a man that you extended your boyhood as long as possible. Now you are nothing but a man-child, unfit to wear my crown. I am ashamed of you.”_

“You’re not real… let me be…” He’d never spoken that way to his father. No matter how frustrated he’d been with him in life or in death. But right now he couldn’t help himself. Besides, ghosts _weren’t_ real. Edelgard was right. Lambert and Patricia were dead, and Glenn and Emile, too; their graves covered in asphodel; phantoms were just his mind’s own innermost fears taking familiar shapes, and if he saw them or heard them, then it was just a bit of indigestion or a blot of mustard or a lump of underdone potato—

 _“Where is my daughter, dear Dima?”_ His mother Patricia—no, Anselma—was next. For all her kindness, for all the love she had shown Dimitri, he had found her more than once staring wistfully out the window, seemingly blind to his existence as she gazed at the city laid out before the royal palace. Dimitri hadn’t seen her die, only wither away in the dungeons, but imagined her with a pale face and dead eyes and pale lips like fattened worms, her gown stained deep crimson and black all down its front from a gash in her throat that gaped from one side of her neck to the other and seemed to curve like a wicked smile beneath her face.

 _“Where is she, my dear, my darling El?”_ she asked, her long dark hair floating lazily around her face as though she were standing at the bottom of a lake. She had her brother Volkhard’s hair, so dark brown it was nearly black, but she had Edelgard’s face from the slender curve of her brow and jawline to the shape of her lips to the lilac color of her dead eyes. _“Where is she, Dimitri? You knew I always loved her best. You knew I was empty without her, and not even you or your father could fill the void in my heart. You knew that_ you _couldn’t possibly replace the life I brought into this world. And yet you left her behind! You failed to kill Rhea and left my only daughter to rot!”_

His eyes snapped open and he flung himself forward, forcing himself to sit up. _“Shut up, both of you!”_

Dedue and the soldier he’d been conversing with fell silent and stared at him.

“I am sorry,” Dimitri mumbled. “I did not mean to shout.”

Dedue looked to the soldier. “Wait for me outside. We will continue this conversation later.”

The soldier saluted. “Yes, General Molinaro.”

He drew to the side of the cot once the soldier had left. “Was it a nightmare, Your Majesty?”

“Yes,” Dimitri admitted. He felt ashamed of himself. He was the King of Faerghus, not a frightened child. “But no matter. Tell me exactly what happened at the Holy Tomb after I fell unconscious.”

 _“You can’t drown us out so easily,”_ Glenn hissed.

“After you, Professor Byleth, and the second decoy Hurricane King collapsed, we were forced to retreat,” Dedue explained. “The mage corps accompanying our soldiers took the initiative to warp the three of you outside of the tomb while the rest of us fled on foot. Once we reconvened, the mage corps spirited our forces away to this camp.”

“What happened to the decoy Hurricane Kings?”

“I elected to have them remain in the vicinity of Garreg Mach. Their identities have yet to be compromised, so they can come and go as they please within the monastery. They will be an invaluable asset once our army is amassed.”

“The one with the Crest of Flames…”

“…is safe, sir. I assume he remained unconscious at least as long as you did, but he had the other one to look after him.”

“Who is he?”

“That information is confidential.”

“Even from me? I am your king; can you really not tell me?”

“Operational security.”

“What if it _is_ Yuri? Do you truly understand how happy I would be to see him again? It would be as though you could see your—” Sensing Dedue’s intractable recalcitrance, Dimitri sighed and shook his head, choosing not to finish that thought. “Did you see Rhea take Edelgard?”

“When I last saw her, Prince Anselm had retrieved her.”

 _“She’s dead,”_ Glenn said. _“Rhea executed her for heresy in your stead. She let her head roll across the floor, just like your dear old, dead old dad’s. Or maybe she crushed her under her paw in a fit of pique and left her a bloody smear on the floor.”_

“She is _not_ dead,” Dimitri insisted.

“I do not want you to get your hopes up, Your Majesty,” Dedue said.

“She is still alive! Rhea clearly _needed_ her to be alive for that ritual. Please, Dedue, do not act so certain that she is a lost cause.”

 _“She_ is. _She’ll be with us soon,”_ Emile drawled, his long dirty blond hair streaked with silver and white and channels of blood rolling from his hooded eyes down his cheeks like tears.

 _“It’s not so bad here, really,”_ Yuri said. He had once been a handsome boy with soft, almost feminine features, eyes and hair the color of young foxglove blooms and a tongue just as poisonous, and a kind heart that belied his rudeness, but when Dimitri closed his eyes he could see that his hair was stark white, his cheeks were pale and sunken, his fair skin was covered with sores and lesions, his eyes were cold, and he had no kind words to say except in jest. _“At least you’ll get to see her again. It’s more than you deserve.”_

Dimitri shook his head to rid himself of those horrid spirits as a dog might try to dry its fur. Yuri, especially, needed to shut up; he couldn’t be a ghost if he were still alive. And besides, ghosts weren’t real. They were only delusions, reflections of his deepest fears. “I want to gather up the forces for a rescue mission, Dedue. _Now.”_

 _“How pathetic,”_ his father spat. _“You dare put one girl ahead of your people?”_

“We do not have the manpower, and the more we delay in returning to Fhirdiad, the longer it will take to attack Garreg Mach,” Dedue said. “If we go now, we may be able to bring our main forces to bear before the month is through. But if we delay now…”

“I won’t accept that,” Dimitri said. He forced himself off of the cot and onto his feet, feeling slightly less unsteady. “I refuse! We have enough to send a small team into Garreg Mach to rescue Edelgard. We have the Hurricane Kings on the inside still who can aid us. You are our tactician, Dedue! Don’t tell me you cannot think of a plan!”

Dedue shook his head. “First things first, we must issue the call to arms. You have a speech to make at Fhirdiad, and the sooner the better. We must rally the people against the Central Church quickly if we are to have them on our side. Every moment of unnecessary inaction weakens us and strengthens Rhea.”

“I am going to speak to our classmates,” Dimitri said, storming out of the tent. “However they feel about me, I know their hearts are moved by Edelgard’s plight.”

Outside, a bitter wind—the vengeful dying gasp of the Pegasus Moon on the first day of the Lone Moon—howled through the garrison with the sound and fury of a storm, forcing the bonfires and the torches lighting the gloomy citadel to gutter and shrink down as though cowering in fear.

He stalked the camp and found Ingrid bartering with one of the Kingdom soldiers, a satchel of gold coins in her hand. _“This is easily twice what your horse is worth, plus those provisions. Take it.”_

Money changed hands and she began to walk away, tracing a path outside. “Wait! Ingrid!” Dimitri called out, following after her. “What are you doing?”

She froze. “Nothing, Your High—Your Majesty,” she corrected, turning to face him.

“You said something about a horse and provisions.”

Her gaze drifted away from him. Dimitri reflected on the way she had charged at him at the Holy Tomb and realized how easily he could have killed her by accident when he had struck her down. If she had fallen differently, if she had cracked the back of her skull open on the floor…

“Ingrid,” he said, “I apologize sincerely for striking you down. But all I did was defend myself. Why did you attack me?”

 _“Why?”_ There was a flash of anger in her green eyes. “Do you know how much I’ve _hated_ the Hurricane King all these months? After what he did to Seteth and Flayn—was that you, or one of the others?”

“That was me. But if you will let me explain, Seteth and Flayn are the enemy—”

“Was it you in Zanado, when you nearly killed the Golden Deer to a man, or one of the others?”

“That was me. The Death Knight and I did not intend to kill anyone, only to maim—”

“Were you Solon’s ally? Cornelia’s? Did you know about Mercedes? About Remire? Did those other Hurricane Kings try to kill Edelgard on _your_ command? What about the Sealed Forest?”

“Ingrid, you don’t understand; Solon and Cornelia betrayed us, betrayed _Rodrigue—”_

“Was Seteth replaced on your orders?”

“My men moved on my command—”

“Were you the one who stabbed Cardinal Aelfric thirty-seven times in the chest while he slept?”

“No!”

 _“And why should I believe you?”_ she snarled.

“Ingrid, I am your king—”

Ingrid shook her head. Her chest and shoulders were heaving, as though the force of her explosive outburst had been as exhausting as three days’ march. “No. No, Dimitri. You’re—I can’t. I just can’t.”

She hurried away.

“Wait! Ingrid!” Dimitri hurried after her. “I know what I am and what I have done, but—Archbishop Rhea is holding Edelgard prisoner! Be my knight! Be a knight of House Blaiddyd and help me save her! Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?”

“I don’t know anymore,” she spat, teary-eyed, and Dimitri watched her leave.

He remembered little about his childhood, about his time before the Tragedy of Duscur. Vague impressions, mostly, and mostly of his parents and of Glenn, the people he had lost. But when he had been rescued by Rodrigue and returned to Fhirdiad she, along with Felix and Sylvain, had been the first to greet him. She had been the first to step toward the bed in which he had lain, convalescing, with a sad but hopeful smile on her face and a bouquet of bluebell and sage flowers clutched in her hands. When he had looked at her, it had been clear from his expression, or so he supposed, that he had no idea who she was: just a few seconds after their eyes had met she had burst into tears and run out of the room, leaving the flowers behind on the floor. It was the most vivid first memory he had of her; most of the older ones had returned with time, but they still felt as though they had happened to a different person than the Dimitri who recalled them.

 _You are a Blaiddyd. The people of Faerghus will always follow you, wherever you may lead._ Rodrigue had told him that dozens, hundreds of times over the past six years. But Ingrid was not following him. Once again she had turned her back on him with tears in her eyes.

 _“The people of Faerghus will_ never _follow you,”_ his father spat in his ear. _“Rodrigue was a fool to put his faith in you._ I _was a fool. If you had only been strong enough to slay Rhea right then and there, all of our souls could have been laid to rest—but you were weak. How you disappoint me, my son. You will never be rid of us and we will never be rid of_ you.”

Dimitri tried to shut the words out. He tried to recall the sound of Edelgard’s voice amid the din of his inner demons. What was it she had said to him after Ashe’s death?

_“We must not let our mistakes weigh us down. Acknowledge them and take what you have learned to move on. That is a privilege only the living possess.”_

But was he supposed to move on alone? Was he to stand by and watch as those he had once thought of as friends turn their backs on him, or chase hopelessly after them?

Next, he found Felix nearby with a saddlebag slung over his shoulder. “Felix,” he said, “what are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” Felix asked.

“Felix, please. Since the War of Heroes, Blaiddyd and Fraldarius—”

“We’ve known each other since we were unbreeched and you still think I give a _shit_ about tradition?” He chuckled darkly, a mirthless laugh, and brushed away the strands of midnight-blue hair that fell over his brow.

“Ingrid left us, Felix. Please, I need your help. You saw Rhea for the monster she is.”

“And so what? Why should I help you? Why do you think I have _any_ faith in your ability to lead?”

“Don’t you want to save Edelgard?”

 _“Save_ her? Why do you think we _lost_ her in the first place?” Felix snapped.

“Rhea…”

“No, you halfwit. It’s because you got that evil look in your eyes the moment the fighting broke out. Just like all those years ago in the west, when we put down that rebellion. Do you remember that? You didn’t care about protecting people or the common good of the kingdom, just spilling as much blood as it would take to slake your thirst. The same thing happened at the tomb. If you hadn’t been so damn tunnel-visioned, so damn single-minded, you could’ve saved Edelgard yourself with all that hideous strength of yours. This is all because you would have rather trampled Rhea with your hooves and gored her with your tusks than think for one Goddess-damned second.”

 _“No,”_ King Lambert retorted. _“This is all because you did not kill her when you had the chance! Go back to Garreg Mach, Dimitri! Go back there and slay the witch! Save her—and put our souls to rest!”_

“I _do_ care about protecting people,” Dimitri insisted to Felix. “I care about you, and Edelgard and all of us, but—”

He had always known, ever since his hair had turned white, that he was a monster. He knew that he had lost his mind on that day when he and Felix had been fifteen and had gone out to put down a ragtag band of peasants who had taken up arms against Count Rowe. Just as he had lost his mind when Solon had taken Byleth away from him. Just as he had lost his mind at the Holy Tomb.

Whether Felix was right or his father was, it _was_ his fault that Edelgard wasn’t here.

He fell to his knees before Felix and bowed his head. “That is why I need you, Felix. That is why I need you, my friend.”

“We’re not friends.”

“We were once. If you cannot follow me, then please advise me! Be the Kyphon to my Loog! Lead me instead! I’d even give you my crown…”

“Don’t slobber on my boots, boar.” Felix stepped away from him. “Anyway, my father is already holding your leash. Why don’t you beg _him_ to lead you? Give him the damn crown if you want.”

He looked down at Dimitri with contempt in his dark amber eyes and his lip curled in a sneer.

 _“Felix knows what I know now,”_ Glenn whispered in Dimitri’s ear. _“He’s seen you for what you are—a worthless, pitiful monster in human skin. Now he knows that you aren’t just a beast, but a cowardly whelp as well!”_

“Please, Felix.” Dimitri remembered Felix more clearly than the other three. By the time he had been rescued from the experiments, Felix had already changed utterly and completely. In his childhood, Felix had been, for lack of a better word, a crybaby. His skin had been soft and thin, easily bruised by both actions and by words; he had frightened easily and cried freely, especially when Glenn was mean to him the way big brothers could often be. But after the Tragedy of Duscur, Felix had reshaped himself. He had made himself bitter, cold, and hard like his brother. He had been transformed by his hardships almost as much as Dimitri had been, but unlike Dimitri, who had become a wild and raging storm, Felix had become a blade of ice as sharp as a dagger and as bitter as wormwood. “I beg of you, please help me. If not for my sake, then for Edelgard’s and for Byleth’s.”

With a resigned sigh, Felix let the saddlebag’s strap slip from his shoulder into the crook of his elbow. “I’ll think about it,” he decided. “But no more groveling. If you get so much of a drop of spittle on me, I’m leaving.”

Dimitri sighed. “Thank you, Felix.”

“Don’t bother thanking me yet, boar,” Felix said as he stormed off. “I said I’d think about it and I _meant_ it.”

Even Felix’s tentative acquiescence did not lift Dimitri’s spirits. He returned to the healers’ tent, pursued all the while by the mockery of the dead, and kept watch over Byleth. In sleep, she seemed placid, almost serene, in sharp contrast to the tempest whirling and screaming in his head. The faint rise and fall of her chest, barely perceptible, was the only proof that she was still alive; otherwise, she was as still in her repose as a corpse.

“Professor,” he whispered softly, taking her hand in his. Had her hands always been so warm as they were now, or had he only just noticed? “You always seem to have the answers, and I need to know now more than ever what to do. How do I silence the desperate pleas of the dead? Dedue and Rodrigue want me to go to Fhirdiad and start the war. My father and all of the phantoms who follow in his wake—”

_“Stop whining to that woman and kill that wretched Rhea! Go back to the monastery and slay her yourself!”_

“—want nothing but for Rhea to die. I want Edelgard. All I’ve ever wanted has been revenge, but I would give it all up if I could have you and her beside me. So tell me, since you always know… what should I do? Professor, you must have some instructions for me… advice… even just a suggestion.”

He slowly sank to his knees, still shivering from the cold. When he fell, he took Byleth’s hand with him, letting her arm dangle off the side of the cot as he held her hand to his cheek. “What has that witch done to you, Professor? Are you to sleep forever?”

He feared to close his eyes as her knuckles brushed against his skin, fearing the decaying faces that dwelt on the other side of his eyelids, but he couldn’t help but let his leaden eyelids fall over his eyes.

For a moment, there was darkness; for a moment, in the abyss, he could see a lady in red reaching out to him as though to drag him with her to the flames of torment.

He jolted awake at the sensation of Dedue’s hand on his shoulder.

“Your Majesty,” Dedue intoned, rousing him from his slumber. “I said you needed more rest.”

“I will never get used to you calling me that,” Dimitri said. “Nor that epithet, coming from you.” How many times had he asked, no, _begged_ Dedue to call him by his name, like a friend and not a vassal? “But tell me what you have to say.”

Dedue’s fingers nervously traveled across the hem of his scarf. “Ingrid is gone. For security, she should be… neutralized,” Dedue added.

“Can you really bring yourself to do that?” Dimitri asked.

“Were Ingrid in my position and I in hers,” Dedue said, “she would not hesitate to find me and cut me down.”

“I thought you two were finally getting along.”

“So did I.”

What was left of Dimitri’s heart sank into his gut like a stone into a bottomless mire. “Do not kill her. Do not order her killed. She is—she _was_ my friend.”

“And if you must someday face her on the battlefield?”

“I know this is unwise. I know that Rodrigue would tell me the same thing as you. But Professor Byleth tried to save _all_ of us. I do not want that to be for naught.”

Dedue looked forlorn.

“Could you have brought yourself to kill her?” Dimitri asked him.

“If I had to, Your Majesty. Only if I had to. My purpose is to stain my hands with blood when you cannot.”

“No,” Dimitri said. He let out a heavy sigh. “You can leave as well, Dedue, if you wish. There is nothing for you at my side.”

“There is nothing for me without you at my side, Your Majesty.”

Dimitri knew he was right. Dedue had nothing. His family had been lynched, his village slaughtered to a man and set ablaze, just like every other town in Duscur. Duscurite men, women, and children outside of their homeland, scattered across Faerghus, survived on the margins of society. They kept out of sight and resigned themselves to a life within the shadows, never speaking their native tongues, nor cooking their native food or praying to their native gods. For all Dimitri had lost, Dedue had still lost more than he could fathom.

“I wish you had someone better than me at your side, Dedue,” he said. “I have failed you so utterly. Everything has fallen apart. First Ingrid has left, Felix is bound to leave as well, and I fear whoever may be next. How could I have deluded myself into thinking our class would follow wherever we led? How can I bring justice to your people when my closest friends cannot even stand the sight of me?”

“You still have an army. You still have a kingdom. You still have Rodrigue. You still have me.” Dedue took him by the hand. “Your Majesty, that was all you ever needed. Together we will destroy the church, with or without our classmates.”

Dimitri looked to Byleth as she slept. “Do you think she will leave us as well?”

“Sir, please, rest,” Dedue said. “We must decide on a course of action soon, and the sooner you are fit to pursue it, the better.”

The two of them remained still and silent for a while.

“So,” Dimitri said, desperate to ease the tension, “General Molinaro… congratulations on your promotion.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty.”

“I wonder how my soldiers feel about it. No one from Duscur has ever been a general in the Kingdom army before.”

“Of course they do not mind. I am ‘one of the good ones.’”

“I hope things change when we reveal the truth. I hope my people realize how stupid and cruel they have been to yours. I hope they begin to make amends.”

It was then that Byleth stirred, let a low and soft sound escape from her gently parted lips, and opened her eyes.

 _“Professor!”_ Dimitri cried out, relief washing the fear and stench of sin from his mind and soul. He leaped to his feet and stood over her as her emerald eyes, hazy and unfocused, slowly regained their spark and their vitality.

“Professor… you are awake. Finally…”

Byleth looked at him, blinking bemusedly. “How long have I been out?” she mumbled blearily. “You look so worried… Five years? More? Less?”

Dimitri couldn’t help but laugh. “The better part of a day, Professor,” he said.

“Do you recall the events in the Holy Tomb, Professor?” Dedue asked, and Dimitri’s blood ran cold. Would Professor Byleth change her mind about choosing not to kill him now that the battle was ended? Was she regretting not siding with Rhea?

“I remember telling you all to save Edelgard,” Byleth said. She sat up, running a hand through her messy mint-green hair to flatten her more unruly locks. “Everything after that is hazy. Did you save Edelgard?”

She studied Dimitri’s face, then Dedue’s. Her own face fell soon afterward.

“I am sorry, Professor,” Dimitri said. “I wish I could have said I tried my best, but I fear I did not even do that. I allowed the madness to take me again.”

“No need to fear that,” Byleth said. She slid off of the cot and picked up the Sword of the Creator, slotting it into the sword belt at her hip. “Your arm…”

“Every bone in it was broken, apparently,” Dimitri explained as Byleth laid her hands on the sling that held his broken arm, “but the healers here managed to reduce it to a single fracture—”

A greenish glow surrounded Byleth’s hands and bled into his arm.

“Professor, you don’t have to—You just woke up; you must be weak yourself,” Dimitri sputtered as the warmth dulled the throbbing ache running through the bone until it had vanished completely.

“It’s fine,” Byleth said. “Let’s not keep the rest of your class waiting, Dimitri.”

After Dedue had filled Byleth in, the three of them left the tent. However, they did not get far before they were flagged down by a pair of soldiers and brought out of the citadel. The sun was invisible against the slate-gray ceiling of clouds that stretched from horizon to horizon, but the darkening of the sky made it clear that sunset was fast approaching. Outside, a wyvern sat on the field, tended to by its rider. Dimitri could tell that the beast had recently landed from the irritable twitching of its tail and wingtips.

“Your Majesty,” the rider cried out as they approached. “King Dimitri, General Molinaro, I bring word from Garreg Mach.” He panted breathlessly, as though he had flown all the way from the monastery himself and not on the back of his wyvern.

Byleth raised her eyebrows at Dedue. “You’re a general now?”

“Yes,” Dedue said. “On the orders of Lord Fraldarius. The documents were unsealed a week before the attack on the Holy Tomb.”

“Congratulations. I’m proud of you.”

Dimitri might have just imagined it, but it seemed Dedue was trying hard not to smile. “What is the word?” he asked the soldier. “Is it about El—Princess Edelgard?”

“There is a strike force headed our way, sir,” the soldier replied. “They have already set out from Garreg Mach. If they march through the night, they will be here before dawn.”

“How can they know where we are?” Dedue inquired.

“I don’t doubt they’ll find us, sir,” the soldier answered. “Captain Catherine and Lieutenant Shamir are both at the front of the strike force. Shamir can track anything, and we don’t have the strength to repel an assault led by Thunder Catherine… What do we do, sir?”

 _“Stand and fight,”_ King Lambert hissed in Dimitri’s ear. _“Slay them to a man with the strength that will burn even the gods. Tear Catherine’s head from her shoulders in Rhea’s stead, mount it on a pike, and fly it like a banner at the gates of Garreg Mach to show that monster a vision of her own fate!”_

“No,” Dimitri said. “I mean, no, we do not have the strength.” He looked to Byleth. “Unless… What do you suggest, Professor?”

Byleth thought for an agonizingly long moment. “You need to get to Fhirdiad, right? We should head that way anyway; this attack just means we have to leave in more of a hurry.”

“But Edelgard…”

“…can take care of herself,” she finished, and it was more of a relief than Dimitri had expected to hear someone finally refuse to see Edelgard’s plight as a lost cause. “For now, anyway. If we take the same route we took from Fhirdiad a few months ago, we can arrive in three days or so. If you and Dedue fly on that wyvern, you could even get there ahead of us. The sooner you can make your speech against the church and declare war, the sooner we can attack Garreg Mach, and the sooner we can rescue her.”

“You seem surprisingly cavalier about attacking the monastery, Professor,” Dimitri said. He couldn’t quite believe it. Garreg Mach had been her home for nearly a year; was she already resigned to the thought of bringing an army against it? Had she really decided to stay at his side so easily?

Byleth shrugged. “I want to save Edelgard, too. If she’s being kept at Rhea’s side, the only way we’ll have a shot at retrieving her is with a really big diversion. Like an army.”

“Very well. I, King Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, give the order to mobilize our forces and retreat to Fhirdiad along the shortest possible route at sunset tonight. See to it the order is carried out, De—General Molinaro.”

Dedue opened his mouth and Dimitri, knowing what he was going to say, cut him off. “I will use our remaining hours of daylight to get some rest, General.” He turned to the pilot who was still standing at attention before them. “Is your wyvern the only one in this camp?”

“Yes, sir.”

“General Molinaro and I will take it.”

“Yes, sir!” the soldier said with a sharp salute. “It is an honor, sir!”

 _“You’re a coward, Dima,”_ Glenn whispered. _“Coward, coward, coward! Cowardly little swine rolling in the mud, acting so confident and authoritative when you’re tucking your tail between your legs and running away!”_

“Professor, General,” Dimitri said, ignoring the phantom as best he could.

Dedue bowed. “Dedue is fine, Your Majesty.”

“As long as you call me by my title, I shall call you by yours. You two, gather our class. I need to speak to all of them.”

 _“So, the great boar king is finally ready to make his grand proclamation?”_ Glenn sneered. _“Are you going to squeal and snort at them for five minutes?”_

Dimitri forced the voices out of his head. They weren’t real.

 _“We’re as real as the_ other _voice in your head,”_ Emile said. _“You can’t push us away.”_

He couldn’t, but he could drown them out. He only had to focus on his classmates and the sneers, jeers, taunts, and insults faded to a dull, throbbing, incomprehensible roar.

He only had to focus on his classmates.

 _Former_ classmates.

While Dedue saw to the soldiers, Byleth gathered all of the Blue Lions before him, save for Ingrid and Edelgard. And Ashe, of course, who’d been lost months ago—or, more accurately, four hundred years ago—and Mercedes, the Death Knight, who had not been at Dimitri’s side for months now.

Dimitri wondered about Ashe. The humble commoner boy who had become one of Faerghus’ most enigmatic heroes, the Undesiring Tactician. What would Ashe say to him if he were here today? He had become one of the paragons of knighthood, part of a trio with the founding heroes Loog and Kyphon. If ever there was a model of virtue to strive toward, it had been him. And then there was Dimitri, the wild boar, the werewolf, the devil among demons, as wicked an icon of villainy as Ashe had been a virtuous icon of chivalry.

They were all gathered there before him. Sylvain, whose roguish ruffling of his bright red hair seemed more nervous now than dashing and whose devil-may-care swagger seemed more like an anxious fidgeting. Felix, whose crossed arms over his chest and skeptical scowl presented a hardened heart. Annette, whose kneading hands perhaps wished that she was in a kitchen working pastry dough into pleasant shapes rather than here in a crumbling fortress. Ignatz, who shivered from the cold and whose eyes behind the lenses of his glasses occasionally found themselves turning hard as he tried to put on a brave face. Raphael, whose sunny disposition finally seemed clouded. Bernadetta, who clutched her bow with a death grip and quivered like a nervous hare as thousands of possibilities, each worse than the last, ran through her mind. Only Professor Byleth, and of course Dedue, seemed calm and composed, their serenity almost saintlike in its grace.

“I know you have your misgivings about me,” Dimitri said, surveying his classmates’ faces, “and I cannot begrudge you for that. I have done wretched things as the Hurricane King, and I was foolish enough to think that an alliance with the likes of Solon and Cornelia could have proved advantageous without knowing the full extent of their wickedness. But you have all seen the enemy I face. For one thousand years the beast known as the Immaculate One, who has hidden behind the guise of Archbishop Rhea and every archbishop in her wake, has controlled the Central Church and thus controlled Fódlan, taking advantage of our faith in the Goddess to commit unspeakable atrocities hidden from the light of day. You have all seen one such atrocity in the ritual Rhea had planned for our friend and classmate Edelgard and for our professor Byleth. I will save Edelgard and cast down this false prophet, and I ask you not as the Hurricane King but as myself to join me in my crusade.”

“Well, we all _did_ see Rhea turn into a dragon,” Sylvain said. “It’s not like we can go running back to her.”

“The Knights of Seiros are marching on this garrison,” Dimitri continued. “They will arrive no later than dawn; we will have to leave for Fhirdiad by sunset today if we are to have any hope of shaking them off. If any of you should choose not to leave with us, you should hope that you can convince the knights that you were dragged here against your will. But now that you have all seen Lady Rhea’s true nature, I doubt any of you will have any faith in her mercy.”

The remaining Blue Lions shared worried and skeptical looks, though Felix uncrossed his arms.

“You have until our caravan leaves to make your decisions,” he concluded, and with that he returned to his tent to rest.

The voices of the damned bothered him less now. They had little else to say now that few of their prophecies of doom and abandonment had failed to come to pass. It was because Byleth was here now and supporting him, he supposed: she had always soothed the phantoms, somehow, just like Edelgard had. Just like—

He became aware of something in his pocket and felt ashamed he’d forgotten it. He pulled it out and let it sit in his hand. It was a string of hardy twine connected to firm wire that bound a sealed crystal bottle, and suspended within the bottle was a preserved aster blossom and a small sprig of myrtle.

The day before the incident in the Holy Tomb—had that really been _yesterday?—_ Marianne had given it to him for luck. She had said for luck, at least, and as Dimitri clenched his fist around it he wondered if it was the reason he was still alive now.

Yesterday, he realized, all of his classmates had been worried about nothing more than next week’s final exams. Now they were worried with the imminent prospect of war against the Church of Seiros and whichever parts of Fódlan allied themselves with them over the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus.

The Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, which, he mused with the barest hint of an amused chuckle slipping from his lips, was no longer so holy anymore. From now on it would have to be just the Kingdom of Faerghus.

_“Excuse me, Dimitri? Or, uh, I mean, sir?”_

It was Annette’s voice outside the tent.

“Come in,” Dimitri said, returning the necklace to his pocket.

Annette stepped inside. She’d worn mages’ robes to the Holy Tomb with steel gauntlets in case she had needed to use the brawling and grappling techniques she had been so diligently practicing, and she still wore them now, though now she wore a spare cloak from the military’s supplies over and had a pack of provisions slung over her shoulder along with the gauntlets.

“Dimitri—er, Your Majesty,” Annette said. “I… A part of me wanted… to leave with Felix if he decided to leave.” She took a deep breath and set her face sternly, planting a serious frown between her round and rosy cheeks. “You knew Mercie was the Death Knight all along, didn’t you?” Her voice was colder now, her tone indignant and accusing.

“Yes, Annette,” he said. “I did. It was always her in the suit.”

 _“Why?_ All this time, you _knew_ and… Why is she the Death Knight, Dimitri? Just tell me that much.”

“That suit was created to keep her alive, Annette. Mercedes and I underwent the same twisted experiments long ago,” he explained, “and they dramatically shortened our lifespans—hers far more than mine. I am told I am unlikely to live past thirty, but without that suit Mercedes is likely to die within the next two years, if not earlier.”

Annette’s face crumpled; tears shimmered in her eyes. “That’s what she meant… when she said she couldn’t live outside the suit?”

“Yes, Annette.”

“And she works for Cornelia now.”

“Cornelia stole her from us,” Dimitri said. He had assumed, along with Rodrigue, that Cornelia had only had altruistic reasons for building the life-sustaining armor for Mercedes, but her appearance at Castle Gaspard had taken both him and Rodrigue completely by surprise. Cornelia had taken her to use as her own weapon when she had broken ranks with the Men in Black; now the terrifying strength the Death Knight possessed belonged solely to her. “She stole her away when she betrayed Rodrigue and me.”

Annette silently buried her face in her hands and exhaled loudly into them.

“You can leave,” Dimitri told her. “Stay here and wait for the knights to come; return with them to Garreg Mach if you want. I know your father is among the Knights of Seiros. I won’t ask you to stand against him. I know that when I bring war to the monastery, he will be among those fighting to defend it.”

She pulled her hands from her face and let them fall to her sides. “If we save Edelgard… can we save Mercie, too?”

Dimitri was taken aback. “Annette… what about your father?”

“I don’t want to fight him,” she said. “I don’t want to see him get hurt again, not like what happened in the Sealed Forest. Even after everything he put my mother and me through. But there is something wrong with the church. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I believe in the Goddess, but someone has to fight them and… I want to rescue Edelgard, too. And I believe in our professor, and she believes in you.”

“Thank you, Annette.”

“Just promise me one thing, Your Majesty. When Edelgard’s back, we’ll go after Cornelia and rescue Mercie.”

“I promise,” Dimitri said. He didn’t even need to hesitate. Cornelia was already marked for death in his eyes. He would kill her himself for his own reasons, but if that was what it took to liberate Mercedes from her control, then so be it. “Will you stay, then?”

Annette nodded. “We’re staying,” she said. A shaky half-smile tugged up the corners of her mouth. “If Mercie can’t leave that suit… sorry, but I’m picturing us baking together like old times, and her in that big suit of spiky armor…”

“You won’t have to imagine it,” Dimitri said. “We will save her, Annette. I promise you as your king.”

In lighter spirits, she left the tent and left him to rest. Weariness settled into his bones as he laid down. If he didn’t try to regain at least some of his strength, he was certain Dedue wouldn’t allow him to fly.

For the first time since he’d woken up, he felt less like a monster pretending to be a person, like Rhea, and more like merely a person with monstrous qualities. His heart beat, and the soul within was as human as anyone else’s; he was not a beast, a monster, or a wild boar.

If only El could be here… but all he had were her lingering words in his memories.

As he laid back and rested, he took out the necklace and lifted his arm, letting the crystal bottle dangle from his hand over his face. He had never heard back from Margrave Edmund about his adopted daughter, and now he doubted he ever would.

He tried to recall the feeling of Marianne’s lips against his, knowing he would never feel them again. The effort made him feel hollow again. They had both been survivors—Dimitri had been able to tell at a glance from the guilt in her soft, doelike brown eyes—and were both cursed with an inner beastliness deep within that, they feared, would consume what little remained of their humanity and the lives of those around them. Doubtless she was lost to him, and he to her; when next they met, they would meet not as lovers but enemies.

How many times had he asked Marianne to transfer into the Blue Lions since they had first met in the month leading up to the winter ball? She’d always said it was just too late in the term; there wasn’t any point in changing houses and changing professors with less than three months left. If she had been there in the Holy Tomb, perhaps she would be with him right now.

Or perhaps, he thought as he recalled the sight of Ingrid turning her back to him, not.

There was no point dwelling on it; it was just hard _not_ to. He studied the starburst pattern of the aster blossom’s petals. Why hadn’t he given her flowers, too? What had he been thinking, giving her a _dagger?_

Dedue came to collect him far too soon—was it so close to nightfall already?—and the two of them made their last preparations to depart. They would fly above the caravan by wyvern; a carriage that had been prepared for Dimitri would serve as a decoy, carrying only Professor Byleth and several soldiers. Flanking the carriage were covered wagons which would contain the rest of the Blue Lions and the spoils from the Holy Tomb, as well as any soldiers who would not be traveling by horseback ahead of and behind the convoy.

Dimitri approached Raphael, Ignatz, and Bernadetta as they loaded what little they had onto the back of one of the wagons. “You three,” he said.

“W-We’re not running away!” Bernadetta stammered, panicking.

“If anybody has the right to do so, it would be you,” he said to them all. “None of you are my subjects. Raphael, Ignatz—the Alliance may not commit to allying itself with either the Church or the Kingdom for a while. You could be safe in your homes for some time if you do not wish to fight.”

“Well, I’m assuming your friend Rodrigue’s offer to be a Knight of Fraldarius is still good,” Raphael said, jovial as always, “so I’m kinda stuck on your side whether I like it or not. Anyway, as long as my sister’s safe, I’ve got no complaints.”

“I wouldn’t dare let any of you down,” Ignatz said. “Edelgard was a friend to all of us, and whatever I can do to help you save her, I’ll do. I can’t promise I’ll be of any use to you, but I’m not running away.”

To say Dimitri was taken aback was an understatement. “And you, Bernadetta?” he asked her next. “If anybody in the Empire takes Rhea’s side, it will be your fiance—”

“Right!” Bernadetta exclaimed. “Th-The… The fiance… whom I, uh… sh-shot in the shoulder with an arrow… Oh, Bernie, there’s no way he’ll believe you did it on accident—because you, uh, k-kinda didn’t…”

“It was a really good shot, Bernie,” Ignatz complimented her. “Sorry about your fiance, though…”

Bernadetta shook her fists. “Bernie’s gonna go wherever you want Bernie to go as long as it’s far away from Prince Anselm, Your Majesty!” she shouted at Dimitri. “I don’t care if you’re the Hurricane King; you and Dedue are still way less scary than him and my father!” She took a deep breath. “S-Sorry for raising my voice; I—I didn’t mean to shout.”

“I like your enthusiasm,” Dedue told her. “Safe travels.”

“Thanks, Dedue,” Bernadetta said as Raphael helped her and Ignatz up onto the back of the wagon. “I’ll, uh… I’ll see you whenever we stop, I guess.” She sighed. “Oh, but I left all of my stuff in my room… What’s Anselm gonna think of you if he finds all those stories you wrote, Bernie? What if he sends them to Father? Your Majesty, a-are you sure we can’t go back to Garreg Mach?!”

Dimitri found himself stunned; his thoughts returned to last night with Edelgard.

_If anything happens to me, there’s something I want you to have. In my desk drawer, there’s a journal I’ve hidden away. I want you to take it. Wherever you go that I can’t follow, it will be there for you. The truth is in there. And I want you to know it, if I’m not there when the time is right to tell you._

The ‘truth’ she had kept obliquely referring to but had never been able to speak openly about—the mystery of Thales to which she alone had seemed especially privy. He remembered it for the first time since he’d woken up in this camp.

“It is too late for that now,” Dedue told Bernadetta, speaking up to fill his liege’s silence. “When we return, we will have an army behind us.”

“W-Will my stories still be there?”

“I hope so.” Dedue took Dimitri aside. “Your Majesty. Is something wrong?”

“I just—” Dimitri fought to find his voice and gather his wits. “El, last night, promised me… she said she wanted me to have something she kept hidden in her room.”

Dedue’s eyebrows arched. “Something she kept hidden, sir?”

“Yes, a journal of some sort. She said the truth is in there.”

“The truth about what?”

“She did not say. Perhaps the truth about Thales and his connection to Solon and Cornelia.”

Dimitri watched Dedue’s eyes narrow. The darkening sky and dying light was making it harder to read his face; only the lanterns lit on the carriage and wagons remained to cast light on the area. “How would she know such a thing, Your Majesty?”

“I do not know, but all the same, it seemed important to her that I have it.” He sighed. “I should have asked her to give it to me this morning, before we went to the Holy Tomb. If the worst happens to her, and the journal falls into the wrong hands…”

“I hope she hid it well,” Dedue said. “It is likely that the Knights of Seiros will tear our bedrooms apart in search of whatever evidence of our schemes we have left behind.”

“Will they find anything?”

“Of course not. I have even already had my Enigma machine destroyed.”

“Of course, Dedue, my consummately professional spymaster. I’m sorry—I mean, General Molinaro.”

“It is getting old, Your Maj— _Dimitri.”_

Dimitri couldn’t help but smile.

“Lady Edelgard was— _is_ an intelligent woman. I am certain she would not have left the fate of such an important item to chance,” Dedue assured him. “Whatever happens, the journal will find its way to you.”

“Thank you, Dedue, my friend.” Dimitri put a hand on his shoulder. “Your allies within the monastery—Vual, the other Hurricane Kings—if they confirm Edelgard’s status and whereabouts, they will surely send a coded message to you, will they not?”

“I am certain they would,” Dedue answered. “I will keep you apprised of anything they find out, for better or for worse.”

Dimitri nodded, his mind put more at ease at least by a little. “See to my wyvern; we will be taking off soon,” he said, and he made for the carriage Professor Byleth was about to climb into. She’d been staring at him and Dedue with her piercing emerald eyes while they had spoken.

As he drew closer, Dimitri noticed the sad, somehow regretful look on Byleth’s face. “You are not regretting siding with me already, are you, Professor?”

Byleth took notice of his observation and shook her head. “No. No, I can’t ever regret choosing not to kill one of my own. When Sothis disa—when the Goddess granted me her power in the Sealed Forest, she told me to look after the little ones. That’s what I’m doing right now. That’s why I’m here with you, and that’s why I’m going to help you save Edelgard, even if it means attacking the monastery.”

“I have not believed in the Goddess for nearly seven years,” Dimitri confessed. “I mean… looking at you and seeing the power you have been bestowed, I know that in some form she exists. I do not mean that you are lying, but that I cannot believe you. The existence of a deity who loves all people unconditionally just does not seem possible… yet you and Edelgard, apparently, have both literally spoken to her.”

“Knowing something and believing it aren’t the same thing?”

“No,” he said. “Because I can know something is true while not believing it is true. I am sure many of your other students now know that I am the Hurricane King while struggling to believe it.”

Byleth was silent, but her eyes were sympathetic. She may have had Rhea’s eyes in her head and Rhea’s hair sprouting from her scalp, but the initial fears Dimitri had had after her transfiguration had been unfounded. Her face, even with those foreign eyes, was still that of his precious teacher.

“They are here because of you, Professor,” he added. Byleth cocked her head to one side, as though she didn’t quite understand what he’d said. “What I mean is that… everyone here believes in you. I think that because they cannot believe in me, they believe in your belief in me instead. They all would have left, as Ingrid had, if not for you standing by my side.”

Byleth wrapped one of her hands around his and held the other to his cheek. “I said something like that to my dad once.”

“What did he tell you?” Dimitri asked, basking if only for a moment in the warmth of her touch.

“Don’t sell yourself short, kid,” she said, patting him on the cheek, and with an enigmatic smile she retreated into the carriage.

“Do you truly wish to follow this path with me, Professor?” he asked. “Even after all I have done? Even if it means fighting and killing your father’s friends among the knights, or even former students?”

She closed the carriage door without another word, but not because she had no easy answer to that question but because she didn’t need one. She had already answered that question, quite easily, when she had turned her blade on the Archbishop this morning.

And so Dimitri was satisfied, and as he returned to Dedue’s side and the two of them mounted their wyvern he realized that for now, at least, the ghosts had finally fallen silent as a tomb.

* * *

It took about three days, traveling through the night when possible and resting only when necessary, to reach Fhirdiad. As it had turned out, Dimitri’s plan to fly ahead on the wyvern had not worked out; he had simply been too fatigued, and so he and Dedue had ridden the rest of the way in one of the wagons while the wyvern glided overhead.

As the sun fell low in the sky and the clouds painted themselves with dusky overtones, Fhirdiad drew near. The fields outside of the city’s walls already held the beginnings of an army, Rodrigue Fraldarius’ own forces mingled with Blaiddyd territory’s regiments and soldiers under Duke Rufus of Itha. Ignatz gawped at the masses of infantry, cavalry, knights mounted on pegasus and wyverns, mages and archers and soldiers of all kinds, as the carriage passed them by. “There’s so many of them… we’re bringing _this_ back with us to Garreg Mach?” he gasped.

“And more,” Dimitri said. “These are only Rodrigue’s men; about a fifth of our forces. The others will not join them until the war declaration has gone out. Faerghus does not have the largest or strongest army in all of Fódlan, but we can take advantage of how spread thin the Knights of Seiros are and how divided Adrestia is.”

“If the Knights of Seiros are still stretched thin, they might not even have an army half that size at the monastery,” Ignatz said.

“Yeah; if we outnumber them two to one,” Raphael said, “they might just surrender and save us the trouble!”

“Would that it could be so easy,” Dimitri said as he struggled with his crocheting. He couldn’t thank Bernadetta enough for teaching him this skill to manage his temper and anxiety; at least when he was ruining a skein of yarn, he couldn’t dwell on Edelgard’s fate or the ghosts demanding he turn around and go kill Rhea himself. He wished he could ask Bernadetta for help—he didn’t quite _get_ mittens yet—but she was sound asleep, it seemed, and curled up in Dedue’s lap like a violet-furred cat.

“When the church discovers our army’s objective,” Dedue said as he sat perfectly still, “they will concentrate as many of their forces as they can toward Garreg Mach. If we move swiftly, we may be able to arrive before their reinforcements do. However, that poses its own risk—their reinforcements may be able to trap us in a pincer movement while we strike at the main force.”

“Have you been talking tactics with Professor Byleth while I slept, Dedue?” Dimitri asked him.

“Yes.”

He stared out at the fields of soldiers awaiting his orders as the wagon passed them by. Did he deserve to send so many of them to their certain deaths? Did they deserve to die for his whims? Byleth would happily advise him on the subject, but leading her students and a few of the small battalions the Officer’s Academy kept on reserve for house missions and training exercises in small-scale conflicts was different from waging war. Edelgard might have had something to say about that as well, but would her advice be useful as well? She, after all, had never waged a war either.

“I guess we’ve just gotta think of _this_ as our final exam,” Raphael said. “Kinda makes our certifications feel pretty small and useless, huh?”

The convoy passed through the gates of Fhirdiad and into the beautiful city hidden behind the fortress-scale walls, and Dimitri felt anxiety seize him anew. What if the war went poorly? What if Rhea and the Knights of Seiros beat his army all the way back to the gates of Fhirdiad? What if the walls were breached and Rhea took her revenge on his kingdom in a blaze of dragon fire? What if Fhirdiad burned to the ground?

He would have to trust in his strength. In the hideous strength of his Crests, the Crest of Blaiddyd and the Crest of Flames. He would have to trust in Byleth’s strength, the strength of Nemesis reborn; Dedue’s strength; Rodrigue’s strength.

At last, they reached the royal palace, and as the gates to the palace grounds closed behind them, Dimitri, Byleth, and the Blue Lions disembarked.

Rodrigue was already rushing across the courtyard to meet them, pausing only to direct the Hurricane King’s soldiers to bring the Crest Stones into the vaults deep beneath the palace’s deepest dungeons. His face brightened at the sight of Dimitri, though his brow furrowed as his gaze slid from him and Dedue to Professor Byleth and to each of the Blue Lions.

“Rodrigue!” Dimitri cried out, overjoyed at the sight of him. Rodrigue had always been a bastion of strength for him, moreso after the Tragedy of Duscur. Even though, with Solon and Cornelia’s betrayal, their relationship had been strained, Dimitri had always returned to the love he felt for his surrogate father. He offered Rodrigue a polite bow. “Rodrigue, I am so pleased to see you.”

Rodrigue forced the bemused look from his face. “Your Majesty…” He dropped to his knees. “You bow to no one.”

“Ah. Y-Yes, of course,” Dimitri stammered, righting himself as he recalled Felix’s words. “Is something wrong? You seemed perturbed just a moment ago.”

“Wrong? Oh, no, no, nothing is _wrong,”_ Rodrigue said, resting his hands on Dimitri’s shoulders. “I was just… surprised to see your fellow classmates and your professor here.”

“I could hardly believe it myself, but when they saw Rhea’s true form, they decided to join me,” Dimitri told him. “Although Ingrid chose to leave us…”

“I’m sorry.” Rodrigue peered over his shoulder at the gathered class. “You seem to be short one mo—” He pulled away from Dimitri, a look of shock on his face. “Oh… Oh, dear. What happened to Edelgard?”

“You have not heard anything about her? She was captured by Rhea when we tried to escape. Have none of Dedue’s agents within the monastery told you?”

“I have yet to hear a word from them,” Rodrigue said, carefully returning his hands to Dimitri’s shoulders and pulling him into a gentle and reassuring embrace. “I’m… terribly sorry, Dimitri,” he said, his voice a gentle whisper in his ear. “I know how important she was to you.”

“But we still have a chance to rescue her. With Professor Byleth and the Blue Lions on our side, we cannot fail.”

“I do hope so. Well, Your Majesty, why don’t I let you and your friends from school settle in? You’ve been traveling long and hard to get here so soon, and you have your speech to make. We can have it as soon as tomorrow evening.”

“Would that I could do it now, but it has indeed been an exhausting few days.” Dimitri returned Rodrigue’s hug. “Thank you so much for being such an attentive steward of the throne for all these years. I can never repay the debt of gratitude I owe you.”

“Oh, I am certain you’ll repay it all in full soon enough.” Rodrigue released him and barked orders to the palace attendants, and that evening Dimitri and his fellow travelers found rest and respite in the seat of the kingdom’s power.

“W-We all g-g-get our own r-rooms, right?” Bernadetta asked, her teeth chattering from the cold, as Rodrigue led the Blue Lions—Dimitri still couldn’t help but think of them as that, even though their academy days were already long behind them—into the palace.

“Of course,” Rodrigue said to her. “And every room has its own hearth.”

Dimitri wondered what was going through her head as she eyed the palace’s furnishings. He didn’t know Adrestian palaces or manors as well as his own home, but he knew that Faerghus’ architectural styles were not quite the same as elsewhere in Fódlan. Every manor, palace, and indeed every major city was like a fortress with thick stone walls, a fortress guarded against both enemy invaders and the chill of winter. There were great sculptures, masterful paintings, ornate suits of armor. Nothing was dainty or delicate; where fragile ceramic artworks might have been displayed in a palace south of the Oghma Mountains, ornamental daggers, spears, and swords with silver-etched blades and gold adornments occupied the walls. To him it was home, but to an outsider it must have all felt very martial and austere.

“Your home must not be as gloomy,” he remarked to Bernadetta.

“A-Are you k-kidding?” Bernadetta shot back. “Bernie’s home is a prison.”

“It really is,” Sylvain said. “You should’ve been there, Your Majesty. You and Dedue would’ve made her dad shit himself.”

“Language, young Gautier,” Rodrigue chided him. “Professor Eisner,” he said to Byleth, “or I suppose now you are just Miss Eisner—I must say I am surprised to see you here again. As a professor at the Officer’s Academy you were employed by the Central Church itself. I wouldn’t think you would so easily choose to bite the hand that fed you.”

“I handed in my resignation early,” Byleth replied. Perhaps it was just Dimitri’s imagination, but she seemed far colder and frostier to Rodrigue than she once had been, as though she could hardly stand being around him. Perhaps she hadn’t forgiven him for his doomed alliances with Solon and Cornelia? After all, she lacked Dimitri’s history with him. Even though Dimitri had been furious with Rodrigue after Ashe had been lost, he’d eventually remembered who had saved him, nursed him back to health, and brought him back to the light.

“The guest rooms are in this wing of the palace,” Rodrigue told the Blue Lions, gesturing with his hand up the staircase to his right. “I see that you have all come with little more than the clothes off your backs, though, so you have little to unpack. What do you all say to a hot bath before supper while the servants ready your rooms?”

“We say yes,” Sylvain said before anyone could manage any objections. “C’mon, Your Majesty. You owe us. Remember how we were all going to unwind at the hot springs after exams?” he asked Dimitri. He looked to his former classmates. “Listen, the Royal Palace has the best and most luxurious bathhouse in all of Fódlan. Felix knows what I’m talking about. Don’t you, Felix?”

Felix grumbled something under his breath and crossed his arms.

“We wouldn’t want to impose—” Ignatz said.

“I mean, when Sylvain puts it like that, you _do_ kinda owe us, Your Majesty,” Raphael said.

“I suppose I do,” Dimitri said. “We say yes,” he told Rodrigue.

Rodrigue smiled. “Excellent. Right this way. Oh, and Felix—”

Felix glowered at him. “Yes, old man?”

“Dimitri has told me you have been on your best behavior since I took my leave of Garreg Mach,” he said. “I admit, perhaps I should apologize for having been so hard on you, my son. Now that I have had time to think and reflect, I suppose I reacted too strongly to being accused of treason by my own flesh and blood and held prisoner by the Knights of Seiros under baseless suspicions. You were only doing what you thought was right.”

Dimitri wondered why Rodrigue kept glancing to Byleth, as though gauging her reaction to monitor his tone. “Felix has always had a strong and uncompromising sense of justice, hasn’t he, Rodrigue?” he asked.

“That he does, and woe betide anyone who ends up on the wrong side of that justice,” Rodrigue said, offering his son a warm smile. “An admirable quality for a knight, perhaps…”

“This again…” Felix rolled his eyes. “Listen, old man. I still think you’re guilty as sin—”

“—Of being a wonderful father,” Sylvain finished, throwing an arm around Felix’s shoulders. “Couldn’t ask for a better one. Really. I mean, _I’d_ like to. Bernie would love a dad like you, too. You should meet hers: he’s a real piece of work—”

“Get the fuck off me,” Felix said, jostling him aside.

“Thank you for welcoming us home, Rodrigue,” Dimitri said, trying to deescalate the situation. “Please, pay us no mind. We will be headed to the bathhouse now.”

Rodrigue bowed to him. “I shall see you again for dinner. I know these are stressful times for all of you, so please do try to enjoy yourselves for at least tonight.”

He parted ways with the others, and Dimitri led his friends and teacher down the familiar halls of his home to the bathhouse. A heated bath was one of the greatest pleasures one could ask for, especially with the lingering cold of the Pegasus Moon remaining well into the Lone Moon, as it often did in the frigid north. Adrestia’s southern peninsulas may have already received the first breaths of warm springtime air from over the ocean, but in Faerghus the bitter cold and howling winds would last well into the month and would perhaps even carry over into the beginning of the new year.

How did the old saying go, again? The Lone Moon came in like a lion…

Once they had reached the entrance to the massive chamber which held the heated communal bath, Dimitri took Felix aside. “Felix,” he whispered, drawing him away from the others with a hand on his shoulder, “what was that about? You know about the Hurricane King; you know now that the church and the very same knights you gave Rodrigue over to are the enemy. Can you really not apologize to anybody, even to him?”

Felix gave him a sullen look. “You know the saying about the enemy of one’s enemy?”

“Yes. The enemy of one’s enemy is one’s friend. But I don’t see—”

“No. The enemy of one’s enemy is a _useful_ enemy.” His eyes narrowed, a stern curve knitting his eyebrows. “What do you think is going to happen to us when we’re not _useful_ to him anymore?”

“How can you say that?”

“I have a feeling that this ‘Men in Black’ conspiracy you and Dedue had been a part of goes deeper than either of you think. I don’t think what my old man is doing is all for your benefit, Your Majesty. He’s plotting something, so keep both your eyes open around him. Use him all you’d like, boar, but don’t mistake his fatherly act for genuine affection. Whichever side he serves, my father is an evil man.”

Felix pulled himself out of Dimitri’s grasp and rejoined the others.

* * *

Dimitri slept fitfully that night, even after a long, hot bath and the first filling meal he’d had in days. It was not the oncoming war that bothered him—tomorrow, it would all begin tomorrow—but rather the ghosts, who had returned with a vengeance.

He felt the spirits swirl around him and howl in his ears as he laid awake, paralyzed, struggling even to draw breath. His eyes wide open, he saw the shapes of the dead congeal out of the writhing shadows.

 _“You are a coward, my son,”_ his father roared, drawing nearer, the decapitated head in his hands leering at him and dripping spectral gore up and down his chest. _“You have fled as far away from my murderer as you could go. For all your strength, you are a slave to your fear. You are no true king!”_

His mother was there, too. _“You abandoned El,”_ she said, her deathly visage frozen in rage. _“You left her with the enemy. Now see what has become of her!”_

He tried to speak, but he couldn’t muster even the slightest noise from his throat. There was a weight on his chest squeezing all of the air from his lungs.

And that weight took shape. The shape of a lady in red, a young woman with long, silken light chestnut hair tied back with violet ribbons, her lilac eyes stern and piercing. She knelt on his chest, and as she leaned in to show her spectral face Dimitri watched with horror as the roots of her hair turned as white as snow and the color bled from her long brown locks; a red blossom bloomed on her white blouse over her heart and blood dripped from the saturated fabric onto his bedsheets.

He managed to make a sound, the slightest of sounds. _“No… El,”_ he gasped, _“you can’t—You said ghosts weren’t real…”_

 _“I was wrong, Dimitri,”_ Edelgard’s spirit said, her eyes growing wide as fear wrenched her face into a mask of terror. Tears covered her eyes in a glistening film and rolled down her cheeks. _“I was wrong about everything, Dimitri!”_ she sobbed. _“Ghosts_ are _real; they are the dead made manifest! You left me to die, Dimitri! Rhea has killed me, and now my spirit is bound to yours forever!”_

He tried to shake his head, no, no. It was just a nightmare. It wasn’t real. Edelgard was still alive and he was going to save her—he was going to save her with an entire army at his back!

_“Please help me, Dimitri! Help me! Save me! I beg of you!”_

_“No!”_ he cried out, finding his voice at last. _“You are_ not _Edelgard! The real El would never_ beg _for a savior! She would find one or make her own!”_

The cold hands of Edelgard’s phantom curled around his neck. He could feel himself starting to suffocate. The shadows grew darker, darker, yet darker still. Black spots danced before his eyes as the phantoms swirled around him. Lambert with his severed head, Patricia with her gore-stained throat; Yuri with sores plaguing his fair, porcelain-peach skin and Emile with bloody tears staining his cheeks, Glenn with livid empty eye sockets in his face so it could be worn like a mask, and a half dozen other children with them. Shadow people shuffled into the room behind them, flickering in and out of Dimitri’s peripheral vision as they congealed out of the darkness in the forms of indistinct humanoids as black as pitch. For a moment, he thought they all wore the wolf’s-head helmet of the Hurricane King; they had all been consumed by wolves, just as he had let himself be consumed whenever he had donned that villainous guise. Yuri wore it, his lavender eyes peering from between the wolf’s fangs; Emile, his bloody tears trickling down its metal jaws; Glenn, an amber wolf’s eye flickering past the cavernous hole of each empty socket.

 _“Then give me your life, Dimitri!”_ Edelgard pleaded as her hands gripped tighter and tighter. _“I was always stronger than you. I was always braver than you. I was always smarter than you! Give me your body, your power, your throne, and I will do what you lacked the_ courage _to do!”_

For a moment he saw her in a red battle dress, crimson from head to toe, draped in a red and white cape; red leather coated her hands. Her hair spilled out from around a horned crown and her eyes were cold and vengeful in a hard and stern face. Bloody talons ripped themselves free of her gloves; voluminous leathery wings tore themselves free of her back and shredded her cape to tatters of scarlet and silver; the golden horns protruding from her crown turned chitinous as bloody scales blossomed across her skin.

There was a flicker and for a moment her face became Rodrigue’s, then Solon’s, then another face with pale skin and blind white eyes. Blinding white light flooded the darkness, bright as the sun, white as the snow, blacking out the faces of the damned, before fading into a misty blue that filled the room like smothering miasma.

Dimitri felt himself lifted into the air above his bed. His sheets clung to him like a second skin, swaddling him, suffocating him. For a moment he saw a thousand million eyes in a halo and felt needles drive themselves into his skin and fire surge through his veins. Small, slim surgical knives that hurt far worse than any dagger carved him up, tracing neat, orderly, symmetrical lines of blood through his flesh that would harden to become scars like seams in fabric. Something cold and hard like metal held his head in place, held his jaw open in a silent scream, held his eyes open, dry and unblinking, held his spine straight, as a machine lowered itself into his gaping mouth and began boring a hole into one of his teeth with a shrill and keening whine so piercing that he felt as though his ears were bleeding. His blood rebelled, struggling to leap out of his veins and drain him dry; his bones wanted to tear themselves from his flesh through the deep slits the knives had made in his skin. He felt more bare metal against bare skin creeping across his body, poking, prodding, pressing, tearing. Needles forced their way into his spine, and he wanted to twist and writhe in some futile attempt to escape the pain but couldn’t move so much as a single muscle. Beyond the blinding white light were more eyes than there were stars in the sky or grains of sand in the desert, an abyssal watcher piercing him with an eldritch gaze. He wanted to cry out to no avail. His lungs were empty. He was drowning on dry land. He was going to die. He was dying. He was—

Awake.

Sunlight was streaming into the window of his bedroom, bleeding through the curtains around his bed. He laid in bed, his body no longer rigid and paralyzed, but for a long while all he could do was lie there and take breath after breath, watching his chest rise and fall. It had only been a dream. A sleep paralysis goblin, wholly imaginary, sitting on his chest.

He pulled himself out of bed and stood at the window. The sun shone brightly in a cloudless periwinkle sky outside, making the old snow coating the roofs of the palace and the icicles hanging from the eaves sparkle like diamonds that had caught the light. It shone so merrily, it was as though it didn’t know that a war would begin today. Because of course, it did not; its brightness and warmth was always indifferent to the suffering under its watchful eye… just like the all-merciful Goddess Sothis.

He placed his hand on the window and felt the cold through the glass, then rested his forehead against it. The sunlight could not warm the frigid and frost-caked surface of the glass, and neither could it warm his skin. He wondered, if Sothis had come from the Blue Sea Star, millions upon millions of miles away, then did all stars have gods and goddesses of their own? Was there a silent god dwelling in the sun, too?

A knock on his door interrupted his reverie. He expected to find Rodrigue or some attendant of his on the other side, ready to spend the whole day making him look presentable to the masses just as they had done for his clandestine coronation ceremony at the end of the Ethereal Moon. But when he opened the door, he found Byleth.

Byleth stood at the threshold, her hair a wild bird’s-nest of fresh mint leaves that fell over her brow. The nightgown that had been given to her was loose and ill-fitting, and her shoulder threatened to fall out of the collar. The soft pastel fabric, the color of fresh salmon, could not hide the contours of her muscular form, and the skin the nightgown showed revealed old scars.

“Hi,” she said.

“G-Good morning, Professor,” he said, taken aback by her sudden appearance. “I hope you slept well.”

She nodded. “Did you?”

“Would that I had. It is going to be a long and busy day for me. I suppose Rodrigue might want you and my classmates—former classmates—to have you in attendance as well.”

“Will I have to wear something fancy?”

“I am certain the tailors will find you something agreeable to wear.”

Byleth frowned. “I hope so.”

“Would you, er… Would you like to take a walk with me before breakfast?” Dimitri asked her. “I need to clear my head, if only for a moment.”

“Sure.”

Dimitri excused himself to get dressed, and he and Byleth reconvened in the courtyard. Byleth had returned to the same clothes she had been wearing since the Holy Tomb, only with the armor discarded save for a sheathed dagger strapped to her thigh.

“Are you cold?” Dimitri asked her as a gust of wind blew through the courtyard and made her shiver. “I wish we could have had time to collect our belongings before we fled.”

Byleth nodded. “That nice fur cloak you got for me…” she murmured.

Dimitri sloughed off the cloak he’d donned and offered it to her. “Please, take this. I am quite used to the cold.”

“I’m _from_ Faerghus,” Byleth reminded him with a faint smile gracing her face. “I suppose. We were all over, but I think I spent most of my time up north.”

“Well, nevertheless, please have it. You do not even have that old gray jacket you used to wear anymore… What happened to that? Did you lose it?”

Byleth shrugged and accepted his cloak, tossing it over her shoulders. “I did.”

“It was a gift from your father, was it not? It sounds like it will not be easy to replace.”

The two of them made small talk for a while, awkward as it was, while Dimitri trod the palace’s familiar paths and led Byleth in his wake. Messenger owls fluttered overhead from the palace rookery as they walked. They both had little to talk about, or rather, they both avoided anything big they had to discuss with each other. All he wanted right now was to speak with her, even if their words were meaningless.

Before he knew it, Dimitri found that his feet had led him to a secluded place on the palace’s grounds, hidden by a small copse of frost-dusted fir trees that circled around two headstones.

He felt his heart leap into his throat at the sight of the granite slabs and the beds of long-stalked asphodel that grew before them, scattered like the ghosts of young beseeching hands. How the flowers could be here at this time of year, he did not know; perhaps it was something in the soil.

“Should we leave?” Byleth asked him, her voice small.

“No. It is fine.” Dimitri stepped forward and knelt upon the snowy earth. “It has been a while since I last visited my parents.”

“They’re buried here? I thought there would be a crypt somewhere in the palace.”

“There is. But only my father is there, with his first wife—my birth mother. They never found Patricia’s body. These graves are both empty, but this way the two of them can be together.”

“I see,” Byleth said.

The two of them were silent for a long while. It was funny, but somehow the voices of Lambert and Patricia’s ghosts were always completely and utterly silent here, no matter how loud they could be elsewhere.

“Professor… are you still certain you wish to walk this path with me?” Dimitri asked. “You know what I am. The Hurricane King, the devil among demons. If you bring my classmates with you, you may all be demons as well.”

“I’m already a demon, Dimitri,” Byleth answered softly.

“Professor…”

“They called me the Ashen Demon. I fought with grown men since I was about eleven. I may have been eleven—Dad had to hide my age from me to keep me safe from the church. All I knew was that I was young when I made my first kill. I felt nothing. I never felt anything at all. I never laughed or cried or even smiled. When I got hurt, I barely reacted. Taking life meant nothing to me. I would simply kill who I was told to kill. I wouldn’t feel rage or sadness or anything. The only feeling I ever felt was… contentment, and I only ever felt it when I was fishing or playing chess with Dad.”

Dimitri knew about Byleth’s past from the background check Dedue had done on her at the beginning of the term. He knew about the Ashen Demon and her fearsome reputation as a dispassionate butcher child, but he had never given it so much thought or dwelt upon the implications. “Jeralt is a nice man, and I mean no disrespect… but that sounds like a horrible way to raise a child, Professor.”

“He did his best. I wasn’t a normal child. I was barely a child at all. I was a vessel. I didn’t know it then. But that was what I was. I didn’t have emotions. I don’t mean to say I was repressed—just that there was nothing there to repress. It wasn’t until I started meeting… normal people that I started… feeling.”

“When you leaped in front of me to save me from Kostas.”

Byleth nodded. “I was used to protecting people. When a mercenary’s job is to guard a certain person, putting their life ahead of yours is just as much a part of the job as taking the lives of your enemies. The only thing that determined for me which lives were important and which could be decided was money and my dad’s arbitrary sense of morality. But saving you felt… _good,_ Dimitri.”

“Thank you, Professor.”

“Every day when I was with your class, I felt more and more,” Byleth said. “When Ashe… when we lost Ashe, it was the first time in my life that I had ever cried. I’d seen Dad cry before, or one of the other Blade Breakers, and sometimes I tried to imitate it when I felt it would be appropriate, but I’d never actually _done_ it before.” She paused. “That was the first time… the first time I really realized that life had inherent meaning. You and your classmates weren’t just people I liked and that I felt obligated to look after. Your lives… they were more precious than anything in the world. All of them.”

“Even mine?”

 _“All_ of them.” Byleth sighed. “It took me twenty years to learn that. Twenty years to learn that people’s lives meant something.” She knelt down beside him. “Some teacher I am, huh?”

“You taught yourself the hardest lesson of all, I suppose,” Dimitri answered, soberly reflecting on his teacher’s testimony. The inhuman life she had led… this was what happened when people were turned into vessels for other people’s ideals, weapons for other people’s goals—just as Edelgard had once said to him.

“Professor,” he said, “when you turned on Rhea in the Holy Tomb… you were no longer a vessel. You were a sword that could grasp its own hilt. I want to be that, too. I want to make a world where no one has to be someone else’s blade.”

He didn’t want to live for the vengeance of the dead anymore. The only thing the phantoms, the delusions of his deepest and innermost mind, had to offer him was self-destruction. In truth, the dead were silent… like his parents here.

“Fighting is the only thing I’ve ever been good at,” Byleth said. “So I want to fight for what I believe in.”

“So do I.” Dimitri raised himself to his feet. “I wish I could say something to Edelgard now.”

“Me, too,” Byleth said, joining him.

“If she were here, I would say to her: I am coming for you, El,” he said. “Wherever you are, whatever is being done to you, stay strong. I’m trusting you to take care of yourself until I arrive. I won’t let the church take anyone else away from me. I won’t let anything take you away from me. I won’t let you be a phantom of my mind. I will show you that I can grasp my own hilt and wield myself for my own goals.” He felt tears spring to his eyes. “I swear it to you, Edelgard. I swear it.”

* * *

That evening, he declared war.

The speech was prepared ahead of time; Rodrigue had written it, copyists had copied it, and a well-known artist in the city had been commissioned to create a woodcut of the moment he and Dimitri had rehearsed that could be printed on each copy. Every noble in Fódlan would receive a copy of the declaration, and every noble in Faerghus would be expected to bend the knee and send their men to Garreg Mach. Those who wouldn’t… Dedue would replace. He had not been training to be an assassin for naught.

Dimitri stood on the balcony of the Royal Palace, the nobles from across Faerghus gathered in the courtyard below with their attendants and vassals along with Byleth and the Blue Lions. Many of the city’s citizens had gathered just outside the gates, too, to hear him speak. He only hoped his voice would carry so far.

The kingdom wanted for a king. It had needed one ever since the death of its beloved Lambert. Dimitri could see it in the massed faces down below, even at a distance from them. They were so desperate for one that they would even accept him, bloodstained and bestial as he was. The heavy gold crown nestled in his silver hair, much heavier than it had been at his coronation, wanted to bend his neck and bow his head in penance and humility; Areadbhar’s weight threatened to force itself from his hand; the sumptuous and velvety fur-lined cloak he wore weighed him down like heavy armor. How could people wear these things and feel worthy of the authority they bestowed? How could corrupt rulers exist when these burdens reminded them so readily of their flaws and their obligations?

It only served to remind him of Rhea’s evil. She wore that heavy headdress, so ornate and splendid, a halo she carried with her in a mockery of sainthood, but refused to allow its weight to stay her sinful hand.

Dimitri may not have been a righteous man, but this war would be a righteous crusade against evil.

 _“It has been a long time,”_ he called out, his voice carrying through the crisp air, _“since a king last stood here to address you. It has been too long since my father, King Lambert, a man beloved by his people who loved his people equally in return, was taken from us. Now I am here, and with the consent of the noble houses of Faerghus and the lord regent Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius, I stand before you with diadem and spear as king, like my father before me—no longer the crown prince, but King Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd of the Kingdom of Faerghus!”_

A cheer and applause rippled through the crowd. Dimitri waited for them to fall silent before moving on.

_“Years ago, in the Imperial Era 1174, our homeland was torn apart by an act of violence and brutality so terrible it could only be called a tragedy. The Tragedy of Duscur… a day which marked all of us and made of us all survivors of a shared trauma beyond words, beyond memories… especially those of Duscur who were faced with the ultimate punishment over the actions of a few._

_“As king, I take to the throne to seek justice. And justice means, at last, revealing the_ true _culprits behind that terrible day and the monstrosity which followed in its wake!”_ He pulled aside the cloak draped over his shoulders and let it fall, revealing in the sun’s dying light his body wracked with scars: from the waist up, he was completely bare save for the adornment of his torture. _“Look upon this form, the result of years’ imprisonment! Those who inflicted this pain upon me chose a scapegoat for their evil deeds, one we were all too happy to seize upon and force to feel our wrath and grief—but it was not the people of Duscur at all!”_

The cold stung his bare skin, mingling with phantom pain from scars that should have, by all rights, stopped hurting years ago. _“Those who knew the truth were forced by the hand of the true perpetrators of the Tragedy to remain silent, and I am here now with my supreme authority as king to finally break that silence! The day our carriages were attacked in the mountains, we were assaulted not by brigands from Duscur but by the Knights of Seiros themselves. It was they who slew our king, and they who imprisoned me in the dungeons to rot._

 _“And for what? Why was this horrible crime perpetrated? To silence my father’s reforms? To foil our attempts to make lasting peace with our neighbors in Duscur? Perhaps, but first and foremost, their goal was…”_ He flung out his hand, called upon the power of the hated Crest of Flames, and conjured its shape in a seal that hung in front of him writ large, traced in frost-blue light. He could hear the gasps of the crowd below. A single intake of breath, almost in unison, split between hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. _“…to bring a new Nemesis upon this world, a new King of Liberation, only to chain him to their will and their purposes and trade his crown for shackles! And the mastermind behind this heinous plot to destroy our kingdom and make of its crown prince a puppet is none other than the archbishop of the Central Church of Seiros, Archbishop Rhea herself!”_

Shouts came from the crowd. Whether from anger or disbelief, he couldn’t quite tell, but he had no choice but to press onward. _“Think upon the evil of the Central Church and how they have perverted the word of the Goddess! One hundred sixty years ago, in the Adrestian Empire, they used the Southern Church to incite a revolt against the emperor. And just in the past years, since the Tragedy of Duscur, they have used conspiracy and plot to destroy both our former king, my father, and our faith._

 _“Recall the fate of Lord Lonato Leonas Gaspard. He was not the wealthiest or most powerful of nobles, but in generosity and kindheartedness and piety he was without equal, and all who knew him loved him! Yet the Church repaid his faith by accusing his son of carrying out the Tragedy of Duscur and had him executed to cover up their own crime. And when Lonato raised up the Western Church and fomented a rebellion—though his grief was noble and his cause was just—Archbishop Rhea sent his own adopted son with the Knights of Seiros to see him and the men who had believed in his cause murdered and used that as cause to abolish the Western Church—_ our _church! These are only a few of the grievances we can name against the Central Church, which has used the Knights of Seiros and its continent-spanning political influence to control us._

_“Archbishop Rhea created me to be a weapon in service of the long and tyrannical arm of the Central Church. But instead, I am here to carry on the work of my father, the great, kind, godly and noble King Lambert Egitte Blaiddyd, and of Lonato, and the Western Church! We will repay the church in kind for what it has done to us, for what it has tricked us into doing to the good and innocent people of Duscur, and for what it threatens to do to the rest of Fódlan! Even now, Archbishop Rhea holds the ninth daughter of the late Emperor Ionius von Hresvelg IX, Princess Edelgard, hostage to extract concessions from the Adrestian Empire!_

_“And so I announce my first act as king and ask not only you, the people of Faerghus, but all people of Fódlan, to follow me against the wicked and corrupt Central Church of Seiros! This is our declaration of independence from Archbishop Rhea; but it is not enough to simply sever ties. Rhea is vengeful and evil, and will attempt to crush us just as she crushed Lonato—which leaves us no choice but to declare war!”_

Dimitri occasionally looked down at the pages which held his speech as he read. He’d kept his voice strong, or as strong as he could, but tears had still made the ink run in places. He reached the end, or what was meant to be the end, but more words kept pouring from his throat.

_“Together, we will cast down the wicked Central Church and its monstrous leader, Archbishop Rhea, and out of its ashes we will work to create the world it has denied us—a world where all have the freedom to follow their own paths and choose their own destinies, where those who have power do not wield it at the expense of those who do not, where no one is the vessel for another’s ends! Together, we will create the world the Church of Seiros does not allow us to dream of! That dream begins today, people of Faerghus! Goddess save Faerghus, Goddess save Fódlan, and Goddess damn the Archbishop!”_

By the time he was finished, he felt as though he had run to the peak of a mountain and back in plate armor. His legs felt weak, his shoulders bowed with invisible weights, his head light save for the leaden weight of its crown.

He left the balcony feeling broken, weak, and hollow, even though the cheers from the people down below were so loud and raucous that he could hardly even hear himself think. As soon as he was out of sight, he removed his crown from his head, and set Areadbhar aside.

“An excellent speech, my boy,” Rodrigue said, greeting him with a warm smile. He placed his hands on Dimitri’s shoulder and drew him toward him. “Masterfully delivered. Though I do not recall composing that last part…”

“It just came to me,” Dimitri said. His voice came out a hoarse croak. “I… wished to pay some tribute to El. It is what she would have wanted.”

Rodrigue patted him on the back. “She would have gotten along well with Lambert. You sounded just like him.”

“Did I?” He smiled. “I can scarcely remember him.” If not for his ghost, he might have forgotten entirely the shape of his face or the sound of his voice.

“But still… you must have cared quite deeply for Lady Edelgard to devote yourself to her ideals like that.”

“I do.” Dimitri shuddered. “I… I love her, Rodrigue.”

“Of course. She was family, after all. I am sorry for what happened and I think she would be proud to know that her ideals live on in you.”

“She is not dead. She is _not._ When we march on Garreg Mach, I will find her and save her, and we can make that new world together. She is strong in body and mind; she can take care of herself until then.”

There was a flicker of emotion across Rodrigue’s face that, in the darkness, seemed almost amused, but only for a second. “Our forces will not reach the monastery for quite some time—perhaps even the end of the month. It may be New Year’s Eve by the time we launch our assault. Your Majesty, my dear Dimitri, I admire your optimism but I want you to be pragmatic as well: by that time, I fear she will be either dead or transformed into something unrecognizable.”

“I was transformed into something unrecognizable once, too, Rodrigue,” Dimitri reminded him. “But thanks to you, and my classmates, and Professor Byleth, I am Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd once more, am I not?”

“I suppose you are.”

“By the way… how did you place that line about Edelgard into the speech? I only told you yesterday evening.” The words had sounded wrong when he had read them aloud, and now that the thought occurred to him he finally realized _why._

 _He’s plotting something, so keep both your eyes open around him,_ Felix had said last night. Could it be that Edelgard’s capture had somehow been arranged beforehand with Rodrigue’s foreknowledge?

“Well,” Rodrigue said, “it was only a single sentence.”

“But what about all the copies you had to send out? That must have made things difficult for the copyists.”

“There were a few cramped hands among them, but thankfully many hands still made light work. And we still had the woodcut illustration of you baring your scars and showing the Crest of Flames and ink for printing it, so that was no problem. The messenger owls were sent out this morning.”

“Ah, I see.” Dimitri relaxed. There was a perfectly rational and sensible explanation after all; Felix’s paranoia had been for naught.

“Are we to have this dance forevermore, Your Majesty?” Rodrigue asked, frowning slightly. “You suspect me of something, I explain to you the truth, you apologize for disrespecting me, I forgive you, we go about our merry ways… I must say, I am growing tired of it.”

“I understand. I did not mean to offend you by any means, Rodrigue. I was just curious as to how you managed to update the speech so quickly. But I digress. I intend to do everything in my power to save Edelgard, no matter how likely it is that she is beyond saving. I’ve no room in my heart for fear anymore. Either I have hope, or I have nothing. Either way, Rhea dies. And after that, we free Mercedes from that dastard Cornelia… and then we find Thales, wherever he has hidden himself and whatever guise he has taken, and see to it he never harms another soul.”

Rodrigue smiled. “I couldn’t ask for anything more from you, my king. Now go and get some rest. Tomorrow is a busy day. And the tomorrow after that. And the tomorrow after that. War tends to be like that, my boy. From now on, until the Immaculate One lies dead at our feet… we shall not know a moment’s peace.”

The rest of the Blue Lions hurried up the stairs and converged on Dimitri, many of them still visibly awestruck by the contents of his speech. Dimitri hurriedly threw a cloak back on over his bare shoulders to at least show some modicum of modesty, even though all of them had seen his naked chest and more at the bathhouse last night.

Byleth, though, had a strange, sad look in her eyes again, and Dimitri had no choice but to doubt yet again if she really wanted to walk beside him.

“Professor,” he asked her, “are you alright?”

She gave him a perfunctory nod. “Yes,” she said. “It’s just that… I’ve never been part of a war before.”

“This will be the first war within Fódlan’s borders since the Crescent Moon War,” Ignatz said. “We’re striking at the heart of Fódlan itself. No one has ever done it before. No one in history has _ever_ tried to attack Garreg Mach.”

“Which means it’s going to be either impossible,” Felix muttered, “or easy.”

“So, Rhea tried to turn you into Nemesis the Second,” Sylvain said to Dimitri, stroking his chin thoughtfully, “but gave _you_ the Sword of the Creator?” he asked Byleth. “How does that work?”

“Maybe it means we have two Nemesises on our side,” Raphael said.

“Or three,” Bernadetta added, “if you count that other Hurricane King.”

“Does that make Mercie a Nemesis, too?” Annette wondered.

Felix let out a bitter laugh. “Well, this changes everything. With two Nemesises, how can we lose?” he muttered sarcastically. The rest of the Blue Lions laughed nonetheless, even though he’d clearly been mocking them.

Recalling Rodrigue’s words, Dimitri tried to hold onto this moment of levity while it lasted. But within his heart, even without the ghosts screaming in his ears, he felt only dread.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What was supposed to be a short interlude chapter about Dimitri ended up into a twenty-thousand-word character study because I just couldn't fucking help myself. My poor baby boy, Mayo Dimitri. Or perhaps now he's grown and evolved into Cool Ranch Dimitri? 
> 
> Anyway, we'll get back to Edelgard next week, I promise. I really struggled with whether or not I should break the one-narrative-POV format of the fic for even a single chapter, since so much of this fic's atmosphere is the result of the reader not being allowed into anybody's head but Edelgard's, but I hope it works out as long as I don't make a habit out of it.


	39. Tyranny and Mutation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Edelgard gets sent to lizard boot camp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ooh boy, this is the body horror chapter I've been wanting to write ever since Rhea decided that Edelgard could be her mommy. Don't worry if you're squeamish, it's not "An American Werewolf in London" gory or grotesque, but that doesn't make it any less of a nightmare for poor Edelgard. Pack your bags and get ready for scales, feathers, Mad Scientist Mommy Rhea, necromancy, and a few tidbits of Nabatean Lore!
> 
> If you need something to lift your spirits after this chapter, please read my wholesome trans girl Hubert headcanon fic [The Girl Who Prayed For Wings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29639469) as a palate cleanser.

The crown of the emperor had always been heavy—far heavier than Edelgard had ever expected. And she had expected it to be heavy. Heavy, uncomfortable, weighted with twin burdens like the golden horns that curled around the sides of her head which she normally styled her buns around. The first burden, her father had once told her (and she had soon found out), was the responsibility of having so much power at her disposal. The second was the burden of knowing that however _much_ power she had had, there would still be things—and people—far beyond her reach. Her father’s words, as much as she had heeded them, hadn’t prepared her for the moment he had set the crown upon her head, the moment she had felt the cold metal pressing against her brow send a jolt down her spine, the moment she had felt her neck bend as though an invisible hand had grabbed her by the hair and yanked her head downward. Though soon enough she had known firsthand both of those burdens, she had never gotten used to them.

She felt that weight again when she awoke, and thus had to wonder what she was doing in her own world. Memories trickled sluggishly through her head. The sight of those eyes, that writhing beast-corpse formed of fossilized bone and petrified sinew, still haunted her mind’s eye, and with that sight came memories of the pain she had felt in both worlds.

When her eyes opened, they found themselves studying the ornate furnishings of Archbishop Rhea’s bedchambers, and Edelgard found herself lying on the archbishop’s luxurious bed and swaddled in its silken bedsheets as dusk light—at least, she thought it was dusk—filtered through the windows.

If she was in the archbishop’s quarters, then she was in Ellie’s world—the world she’d been forced to call home for almost six months now. But why, then, was she wearing her crown? Perhaps, if she were in her own world, she had been unconscious long enough for herself to be brought to Garreg Mach for whatever nebulous reason. She remembered feeling her counterpart’s agony as the Crest of Flames had forcibly activated itself and felt a pang of empathy for the poor girl. It had felt in that moment like a fraction of those heinous Crest experiments—only a fraction, but still far more than anybody deserved to endure.

But why? What in the world had that unliving creature _done?_ Was Byleth safe? Or Dimitri? What about the rest of the Blue Lions?

It hurt to think, though, even to so much as ponder her current circumstances. Her head throbbed as though it were about to burst open with every thought that crawled sluggishly through her head.

_“Ellie?”_ she called out quietly, her voice a hoarse rasp. She waited for a response.

Nothing.

Edelgard eased herself out of bed and immediately found herself regretting it. Her entire body, her head most of all, ached in a way it hadn’t since the day after the battle of Fhirdiad. It felt as though every part of her had been beaten and battered with a sack full of rocks, but when she looked down at herself, she didn’t see any bruises or wounds—not even bandages over healed wounds or splints for broken bones.

What she _did_ see was a nightgown draped over her body made from flowing white silk brocade and gold thread. It was noticeably too big for her; the hem pooled around her ankles. Shuddering, Edelgard realized that Rhea had dressed her in _her_ clothes.

Damn the pain and soreness—she had to get out of here. The prospect of being Rhea’s prisoner, especially now that all hell had broken loose, was not one she wished to fathom any longer than necessary. Dimitri and Byleth were out there and they needed her. Or, at least, she hoped they were out there.

The bedroom had windows that opened onto a three-story drop straight down to the ground and one door, which Edelgard hoped wouldn’t be locked from the inside. As she drew nearer to the door, she could hear muffled voices from the other side. She pressed her ear to the door to hear better.

_“I do not see_ why _we cannot see her!”_ one voice said. It was Hubert’s.

_“If only for a moment,”_ another voice—Ferdinand’s—added.

_“Look, I get it, guys,”_ said another voice—Biggs’ voice.

_“Isn’t it enough that Archbishop Rhea says she’s okay?”_ Wedge asked.

_“I suppose, but even so,”_ Ferdinand said. _“I am her fiance and son of the Prime Minister, Ferdinand von Aegir! Surely Her Holiness would understand!”_

Edelgard took the doorknob and gave it an experimental twist, finding it remarkably easy to turn. So Rhea hadn’t locked her in after all—perhaps she thought a pair of guards would be enough. She pulled on the knob and cracked the door open. “Ferdinand? Hubert?”

The two of them were standing in the hall before her. “Edelgard, darling,” Ferdinand gasped. “Wh… What in the Goddess’ name has happened to you?”

Hubert was silent for a moment, managing only to blink in shock as his jaw hung slack. “Er… th—thank heavens you are okay, Lady Edelgard,” he stammered once he had regained his voice, cracking a relieved, yet strained smile that didn’t quite counteract his ashen complexion. “Y-You… You _are_ okay, are you not?”

“Your Highness! You’re awake!” Wedge exclaimed. “One of us should go tell Lady Rhea,” he said to Biggs.

“You just sit tight there and go back to sleep while I go fetch her,” Biggs said, pressing against the door to close it.

“Wait,” Edelgard said, pressing back with what little strength she could muster. “Can I please speak to Hubert and Ferdinand? Just for a minute?”

“You’re not meant to have any visitors,” Wedge said. “Lady Rhea’s orders.”

“Surely you can at _least_ make an exception for my retainer,” Edelgard argued. “It is Hubert’s job to worry about me.”

“Sorry, Princess—orders are orders,” Biggs said.

Edelgard forced her foot into the door before it could close in her face. “Wait. Hubert, Ferdinand, how many days has it been since the Holy Tomb?”

_“Days?_ Um—i-it was this morning,” Ferdinand stammered, his eyes darting to and fro as though afraid to meet hers. “The Hurricane Kings attacked the tomb and the entire Blue Lions house fled with them…”

Wedge tried to nudge Edelgard’s foot out from between the door and the frame. “You’ve got to get your rest, Your Highness—”

“Hubert, I need you to go to my room and take an inventory of all of my belongings,” she said as she began to lose the battle against the door. “Take anything that looks like it shouldn’t fall into the wrong hands.” She thought about the journal she’d promised Dimitri—dangerous in _anybody’s_ hands—and the brick of semtex that was probably still in her satchel somewhere, provided the Knights of Seiros hadn’t already turned her room upside down. “Especially anything I have in my desk.”

“Yes, of course, Lady Edelgard. What should I do if something is missing?”

_“Find_ it. And Ferdinand, what color is my hair?”

She wasn’t quite sure why she’d asked that question, but it had slipped from the tip of her tongue as naturally as breathing. Surely something must have been wrong with her, though, for them to act so strangely around her and stare at her so bemusedly; she dreaded the idea that her hair might have turned white, or Goddess forbid that particular shade of mint-green.

Ferdinand blinked, bemused. “Er… I beg your pardon?”

“What color is it? Tell me!”

“Brown, darling. Same as it ever was. But you _do_ have—”

A third voice joined the fray.

_“Ferdinand von Aegir? Hubert von Vestra? How_ dare _you show your faces here!”_

It was Anselm’s, and he seemed to have dispensed with all of his false pleasantries. He strode down the hall with fury etched in his face, and though his tongue was as sharp as a lance, he looked much worse for the wear than Edelgard did; though his clothes were fresh and clean, he wore bloody bandages underneath them where Edelgard’s axe and the Hurricane King’s sword—not to mention a stray arrow from Bernadetta—had found their marks. No longer neatly tied back, his hair fell in a lank and disheveled mop over his brow as he scowled at the two of them.

“Your Highness,” Ferdinand said, offering him a hasty bow.

“That shall be ‘Your Majesty’ soon enough. You two have got quite the nerve showing up here after failing her so utterly!”

“Anselm, there’s no need to snap at them,” Edelgard said, taking advantage of the momentary confusion to wedge her foot more firmly in the door.

“Lie down and rest, El; you’ve had a very traumatic day,” he said curtly before turning his indignation back onto Ferdinand and Hubert. “Ferdinand, how dare you call yourself her fiance! And you, Hubert, how dare you call yourself her retainer! Did either of you have even the _slightest_ idea what a den of heresy and perversion the Blue Lions house had become? Did either of you realize how much they had radicalized my dear, sweet El?” Every biting word from his mouth struck the two of them like slaps to the face and made them flinch.

“Anselm, that’s enough,” Edelgard snapped at him. “What’s going on here?”

“I will have words with you two later. But if I ever see you in this hallway again, you’ll live to regret it! Now get out of my sight!” Anselm turned to Biggs and Wedge. “And you two,” he said, softening his voice, “I am sorry you had to see that. May I speak to Lady Edelgard? I can assure you Lady Rhea _will_ allow it.”

“Uh… sure, Your Highness,” Wedge said, and he let the door swing open just long enough for Anselm to stride into the bedroom and wrap his arms around Edelgard. The door swung shut with unnerving finality behind the two of them as he pressed her close to his chest.

_“I forgive you,”_ Anselm whispered to her, gently rocking her to and fro as he tightened his grasp on her. _“I forgive you, El. I forgive you for all of it. The things you said… the things you did…_ all _of it.”_

“Ansy—”

_“I can’t imagine how you must have felt back there,”_ he said, stroking her hair as he guided her head to rest against his collar. _“How difficult it must have been. The pressure you must have been under from those monsters you called classmates to say such horrible things, to commit such heinous acts…”_

“What? What do you think _happened_ there?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Prince Dimitri was the Hurricane King all along. And all this time—this entire term—that dastard had been brainwashing his house, and even that professor of yours, to follow his sick, heretical ways. You must have felt you had no choice but to go along with them; I can’t imagine how terrified you must have been.”

Edelgard nearly burst out laughing. _“Brainwashing?”_

“Yes, brainwashing! How else can you explain how readily so many of your classmates swore fealty to that monster and his minions?” He put a hand to her cheek and lifted her head so that their eyes met. His brow was furrowed in concern. “If I had known, I would have moved heaven and earth to return you to the Black Eagles where you could be safe. But all I can do for now is thank my lucky stars you are still here and pray to the Goddess that Lady Rhea and I can restore your sanity.”

Edelgard didn’t know how to respond. A part of her wanted to simply laugh in his face, or remind him that the two of them witnessed Rhea fly into a homicidal rage and turn into a dragon, or that they both saw the ground burst open and reveal the animate corpse of a long-dead being resting beneath the monastery, or any number of the ridiculous and horrifying events that had occurred that very morning.

Had anyone _but_ her seen that undead creature? Had they seen the scales spreading across Rhea’s flesh, the wings bursting from her back? She had even seen Seteth and Flayn undergoing some kind of similar metamorphosis… had it all been a delusion brought on by that monstrous corpse’s assault on her mind?

“We are not going to give up on you, El. Rhea was even kind enough to give you her very blood to heal your wounds; you owe her your life, and neither she nor I will let the gift she has given you go to waste.”

Edelgard felt sick to her stomach. Rhea had _forced_ her to drink her blood while she’d been unconscious? She retched and choked down a mouthful of bile. Her head kept pounding; her neck still wanted to bend under an invisible weight.

“I am just so glad you’re still with us,” Anselm whispered. “I shudder to think of what those Hurricane Kings would have done to someone as blessed by the Goddess as you. How many people in the past thousand years have been marked by her divine grace as much as you’ve been?” His hands slid up her cheeks, his fingers burrowing into her hair, and as his fingertips drifted further back she felt the throbbing pain in her head grow stronger.

That was when she felt them. First with the gentlest accidental brush of her fingertips as they passed over his hands; then, with a more conscious and aware touch, she gently traced the contours of a pair of _things_ that curved just over the tips of her ears forward, then upward and slightly inward before terminating at blunt points. They felt hard, solid, smooth, like bone… or antlers. With mounting horror she followed their curves backward to the sides of her head, just above and behind her ears, and where they parted her hair and joined her skull the skin around them was so intensely sensitive and raw that it screamed and burned from just a gentle touch.

_Horns._

She had _horns._

* * *

Edelgard didn’t remember passing out, but she must have—because when she awoke, she found herself back in Rhea’s bed under a shaft of bright morning sunlight. A strong, savory smell and the light of the sun had roused from her slumber. She could feel the sun’s warmth on her face, its light boring through her eyelids.

She opened her eyes slowly, seeing the blurred and indistinct shapes of Rhea’s bedroom from behind a cage of eyelashes slowly coalesce. There was less of an ache permeating her body, save for the sides of her head just behind and above her ears that hurt more than ever and a new sharp, throbbing pain localized to the tips of her fingers and toes and an area just beneath the small of her back.

It took her too long to realize, as the world came into focus, that the soft, firm, warm thing cushioning her head was not a pillow, and when she looked straight up she could see Rhea’s emerald eyes, sparkling like gemstones in the dawn light, staring back at her.

“Are we awake?” Rhea asked, her voice as sweet as syrup, quiet as a mouse, and soft as the bed’s lush and luxurious duvet. She was kneeling at the head of the bed and Edelgard’s head was resting on her lap, cushioned between her thighs. Before Edelgard could answer, she gently teased her hands through her hair and brought her fingertips down to the base of her—

She didn’t want to think about it.

A very small, weak, yet sharp sound escaped her lips.

“Oh… I do apologize. They must be terribly sensitive, aren’t they?” Healing magic pulsed through Rhea’s fingertips, numbing the raw, chafed skin they brushed against. Edelgard felt the ripples reverberate through her skull in a way she hated to admit was pleasant. She didn’t want to think about the _things_ there. “But the pain will fade. The skin will heal. And, my child, you wear them _beautifully.”_

“What have you done to me?” Edelgard asked.

“I have saved you from those monsters who had wished to claim you. You were so badly injured; even my healing magic was not enough to keep you alive. It has been so, so very long since I had to use my blood to save somebody’s life… ah, but how poetic it is. I remember Wilhelm… my dear Wilhelm. When I first met him, he had lost so much blood that he had gone into shock. He said I looked like a being of pure light.”

Rhea did _not_ look like a being of pure light right now. Edelgard could only look upon her with dread mounting in her heart.

“That is why the Hresvelg line bears its Crest,” Rhea added. “Yes, my child, my dear Edelgard… it was I, at the dawn of Adrestia…”

“Seiros,” Edelgard gasped.

“Yes… I was once Seiros herself. I hardly remember those days. His face, his eyes… But when I look upon you… oh, Edelgard… I remember the color of his hair. That wonderful soft, light chestnut, still running so strongly through your bloodline through all these generations…” Rhea lifted one hand, fanning locks of Edelgard’s hair through her fingers. “I was expecting your quickening to change it, as it had changed for _that thief.”_ As soft as her tone was, she couldn’t help but spit out that epithet as though it was a slur. “But I find myself glad it has not yet. How nostalgic I always felt, whenever I met a Hresvelg with his beautiful hair.”

Edelgard felt her pulse hasten. She wanted to pull herself away from Rhea, fling herself across the room, and bolt out the door, but she could hardly even wiggle her toes, let alone move her legs or lift an arm.

“Your quickening, dear, is such a welcome surprise—more than I could have expected, more than I had dared to dream. I remember… Mother’s horns had the same shape to them. One pair of them, at least. I wonder if any more pairs will grow in? Your little head may be too small to fit all of them… for now,” Rhea said to her, an almost playful tone to her voice. The smile on her face was so simple, so earnest, so bright, so… _happy_ that it was terrifying. Edelgard tried to ignore her words; the cost of parsing them was too high.

“Oh, but you need to eat,” Rhea said, pulling away her hands and reaching across the side of the bed. “How foolish of me to forget. Yes, yes, you need plenty of food to feed all these wonderful changes.”

Edelgard felt a plate rest itself atop her chest and looked down to see a full breakfast laid out before her. Fried eggs with ever-so-slightly runny yolks begging to burst open, crisp rashers of bacon with perfectly blackened edges, a mound of cubed potatoes that had been fried golden brown in oil, and a freshly baked pastry with braids of crisp dough laid intricately over a center of oozing violet jelly. The food was warm enough, though it had sat waiting at the bedside, that some of it still steamed.

“Well, my child?” Rhea asked her. “Is it to your liking? I do beg your pardon… I did not know how you liked your eggs done, or how crispy you preferred your bacon.”

“I’m not hungry,” Edelgard managed to say as her stomach, which had not been given anything except Rhea’s blood since yesterday morning, squealed and whined in protest and wrapped itself around her spine.

“Oh, but you _must_ be,” Rhea said. “It has been a full day since you have eaten. Oh… you are too weak to move, is that it? How foolish of me. I ought to have realized that.” Her hands crept to the plate and picked up the knife and fork set upon it, piercing one of the egg yolks and letting it spill its golden-yellow liquid into the whites. “Do not despair; I will feed you myself. Open wide…”

Edelgard did not. If these changes to her body needed to be fed, then she would starve them. The smell, though, of all that wonderful food made her stomach wrench itself so violently, so needily, that she felt nauseous nearly to the point of vomiting. She’d gone on hunger strikes in the dungeons long, long ago, but it had been easier then—Thales and Duke Aegir had only ever served their prisoners thin and revoltingly foul gruel, and barely enough for basic subsistence at that.

“Please, Edelgard. Dear, you _must_ eat. Oh… do you think it is poisoned? Such paranoia. You poor girl… I can only imagine how much that brat and that thief have twisted your poor little mind. Do not worry.” Rhea lifted the fork away and took a bite herself, chewed thoroughly, and swallowed. “See? It is normal food and nothing more, my child. I only want you to be well-fed and happy.”

Edelgard kept her mouth shut and would have done so indefinitely until Rhea, frustrated, set down her knife and clamped her forefinger and thumb firmly down over Edelgard’s nose. Edelgard made a valiant effort of holding her breath until she felt close to passing out, like a child throwing a tantrum, but as soon as she opened her mouth to expel the breath growing stale in her lungs Rhea swiftly shoveled a forkful of food into it.

Before Edelgard could spit the mouthful out, Rhea clamped a hand over her mouth. “Chew it,” she said sternly. “Swallow it.”

Edelgard did so almost involuntarily, all at the whims of her protesting stomach. At least it was better than having a metal vise placed in her mouth and a tube shoved down her throat.

“There we go,” Rhea said, releasing her and letting her catch her breath. “Isn’t it delicious? Now, don’t be so obstinate anymore. You, more than anybody else, need a full belly.”

Being treated like a child and an invalid was almost more than Edelgard could bear. But the scent of all that delicious food was maddening. “Fine,” she snapped. After all, if she ate, then she could regain her strength, and if she could regain her strength, then perhaps she could escape and find her way back to Byleth and Dimitri.

Dimitri… poor Dimitri. Edelgard could imagine how lost he must have felt at this moment. The pain in her heart when she had lost Byleth to Rhea had been so great that at times she had felt she would die of heartbreak alone like the heroine in some sappy tragedy, and she knew that Dimitri feared losing those closest to him to Rhea more than anything else. And how would he react at the sight of her now, or in the future when this so-called ‘quickening’ had inflicted more of its transfigurations upon her?

She considered asking Rhea what had happened to the two of them, and the rest of the Blue Lions, but doubted that she would receive an unbiased answer.

Having breakfast with Rhea was, to say the least, a humiliating experience, and as soon as there was just barely enough food in her stomach to make it stop hurting, Edelgard feigned fullness. The plate was only half-empty.

“Full already?” Rhea wondered. “You haven’t even gotten to the pastry. I know how much you love sweets.”

Edelgard shook her head.

“Oh. I see. You wish to save it for me. That is so very thoughtful and kind of you, but I have already eaten. Please, Edelgard, this is all for you.”

“It’s more than enough,” she insisted. “Thank you for the food, Lady Rhea.”

“Oh, please.” Rhea patted her softly on the forehead. “There need be no more secrets between us now. Call me Seiros. Simply Seiros.”

Mercifully, eventually she grew tired of badgering Edelgard to eat, and when someone knocked on her door to summon her for urgent business, Edelgard was spared any further embarrassment and finally left to her own devices.

A pity, then, that she was still so weak she could barely move.

* * *

Thankfully, Edelgard found that she had at least regained her strength in her arms by the time Rhea returned with lunch, so she was at least spared the indignity of being unable to feed herself. She hated it, though. Her thoughts kept spiraling to her first month outside of the dungeons when she had been hardly able to do anything but convalesce. Hubert, whom she had not seen in nearly four years at that point, had been her caretaker, but even his comforting presence could not have made her forget that she had traded one prison for another, and for years until she had met Byleth she had always seen the invisible stone walls and barred partitions surrounding her wherever she went.

She could see them again here.

It wasn’t long after lunch that she finally felt well enough to drag herself out of Rhea’s bed and try to take a few hesitant steps. Why she was so weak now, when she’d been able to stand and walk around yesterday during her short period of consciousness, she couldn’t fathom. The localized aches were stronger, though; her fingers and toes felt so cold that they burned, and the throbbing pressure at the base of her spine kept getting worse. At the very least, she had one small mercy in that her head didn’t hurt so much.

As she slid off the side of the bed and stumbled forward, struggling to keep her balance, she heard a distinct set of sharp tapping sounds following her, like the tips of claws clacking against stone. And part of the duvet came with her, falling to the floor behind her with a soft thump. One of her hands, she realized, had somehow adhered to it; frustrated, she gave it a yank and tore it free. There was a sound of ripping fabric; as her fingertips pulled away from the sheet, they left four ragged, parallel furrows.

Edelgard stared at her hand, dumbstruck and aghast. Protruding no less than half an inch from each fingertip, her fingernails had grown, sharpened, and thickened into something more closely resembling claws… or talons.

This wasn’t happening. For a long while, that was all she could think. _This was not happening._

The bottom seemed to drop out of her stomach; her thoughts orbited each other in free-fall as her mind sank into an abyss. Her breath became short and shallow, her pulse quickening. She felt faint and lightheaded; even though it had only been a short time since lunch she felt as though she hadn’t eaten in days.

The walls of the archbishop’s bedchambers seemed to draw closer, inch by imperceptible inch, the ceiling lowering itself to meet her. Bit by bit, piece by piece, something monstrous within her, more monstrous even than the Crest of Flames, had taken root within her and now its seeds were sprouting from her flesh, consuming her, in the form of monstrous horns and claws and Goddess knew what else would follow.

She had no choice but to escape before things got worse. She clenched her fist, the better to hide those terrible things—and felt a sharp and stabbing pain in her palm followed by a spreading warmth; blood oozed out from between her knuckles.

With a frustrated sigh, she tore a strip from the silken bedsheets—at least that was easier—and wrapped it tightly around the self-inflicted wounds she’d made in her hand, then made her way to the door.

She knocked on it. “Um… Excuse me? Biggs? Wedge?”

The door opened just a sliver. _“What is it, Your Highness?”_ Biggs asked from the other side.

For a moment, Edelgard considered telling them that Rhea was turning her into a monster and that she needed to be let out before it was too late. But no—they’d seen her yesterday with the horns upon her head and hadn’t even commented on it. They knew and didn’t care at all.

“I’m sorry to trouble you two,” she said, “but, um… this is embarrassing, but I need to, well, _you know,_ and the chamber pot is full… would you two please have it replaced?”

_“Oh, sure, yeah, we’ll get right on that,”_ Wedge said. _“Stand to the side; we’re opening the door.”_

Edelgard stood back, but not to the side, as the door opened; as soon as Wedge came through, she flew out of the room like a bat out of hell, running past both of her guards into the hall.

_“Hey! What the hell are you doing?!”_ Biggs cried out, his hand clamping onto her shoulder and sliding off. _“Your Highness!”_

She left them both behind, placing out of her mind as best she could the sound of claws scraping and scratching against the stone tile floor as she ran to the staircase. Every step she took threatened to throw her off-balance, when her foot hit the first step, she nearly fell head over heels and tumbled all the way down the staircase.

Only by keeping a hand pressed to the side of the wall could she keep herself upright. As soon as she hit the foot of the staircase, though, and stepped out into the second floor hallway she lost that support and collapsed to her hands and knees.

The second floor. Faculty offices. Her mind raced with the pounding of her pulse. Who down here could help her? Vual, perhaps, if he was in that broom closet he called an office. Or maybe Hanneman would be sympathetic. It was a weekday, Edelgard thought—it was either Thursday or Friday—and it was the afternoon soon after lunch, so he would be in his office.

No time to deliberate, only to decide. Biggs and Wedge were already coming down the staircase after her, their heavy boots stomping down step after step. She picked herself up and ran down the hall to Hanneman’s office and banged on the door with all her might.

_“If I have told you once I have told you a thousand times this past year, Arcturus, there is no need to bang on my door so violently, and it is good manners to introduce yourself—”_ Hanneman opened the door and lost his voice, staring down at her with eyes so wide his monocle fell to the floor. “Er… Lady Edelgard, is that _you?”_

She glanced down the hall and heard the guards clamber to the foot of the stairs. In just a second they would round the corner and spot her, so without a moment’s haste she threw herself into Hanneman’s office and slammed the door shut behind her with enough force to rattle the glassware sitting on the professor’s desk.

“Careful, careful!” he chided her. “The Crest Analyzer’s position is extremely sensitive to sudden—Edelgard, good heavens, what has _happened_ to you?”

“I need you to hide me,” she gasped, falling into his arms and grabbing fistfuls of his overcoat’s lapels. “Rhea… she’s… she’s _done_ something to me. You need to hide me from her!”

“I can see that _something_ has been done to you, certainly. Those horns… when Hubert and Ferdinand told me, I had thought they were both just imagining it from stress. You say _Rhea_ is responsible?”

“Who else would be?” she snapped. “Hide me! _Now!”_

Hanneman glanced around his office. “Excuse me? Do you expect me to have a trapdoor in the floor or a hidden panel in the wall?” he scoffed.

There was a knock on the door. _“Hey, Professor Hanneman?”_ Wedge called out. _“Can you help us out with something?”_

_“Just a minute!”_ Hanneman called back. “Crawl under the desk. You’ll be out of sight, at least,” he said, ushering her to the back of the room and lowering her to the floor. Edelgard curled up out of sight underneath the desk as he made his way to the door. The front and sides of the desk went all the way down to the floor, creating a hiding place enclosed on three sides directly under it. It was cramped, but it would hide her from nearly every angle when she pressed herself as close to the front as possible.

_“Ah, Sir Biggs, Sir Wedge. What can I help you with?”_

_“Well it’s just that—don’t tell Rhea about this—”_

“Definitely _don’t tell Rhea about this; she’s been in a_ really _scary mood ever since the incident yesterday morning—”_

Edelgard wondered if she was breathing too loudly. The heaving of her chest and the pounding of her pulse in her ears felt as loud to her as the hammer in a blacksmith’s forge. She tucked her knees into her chest and wrapped her arms around herself, feeling her claws dig into her nightgown and prick her skin. Her eye throbbed as though reacting to her stress.

_“We, uh, kinda lost Edelgard. She left Rhea’s room and we couldn’t catch up with her.”_

_“She’s really sick and shouldn’t be allowed outside. We heard someone knocking on a door and think it might’ve been her. Is she, uh… Did she run in here?”_

_“I’m sorry, but I don’t recall anybody knocking on my door until you two came along. Perhaps it was Manuela’s office? If Lady Edelgard is in pain, the infirmary would seem like a logical choice.”_

_“Can we have a look around?”_

_“Just to be sure?”_

Hanneman laughed. _“A look around, just to be sure? Surely you don’t think my eyesight could be_ that _bad. But do go on ahead, have a peek. But please take care: my equipment is in a_ very _sensitive configuration right now and the slightest disturbance could ruin hours of work.”_

Edelgard could hear Biggs’ and Wedge’s boots stomp across the floor as they entered the office. She tried to slow her breathing, steady her pulse, recalling everything Shamir had once taught her about masking her presence to make herself silent and undetectable. The pattern of breathing—once in through the nose, twice out through the mouth…

_“Careful, careful!”_ Hanneman said to them as he circled around his desk. Edelgard saw his shoes step into view and then slip out of sight. _“I_ said _I have a very delicate setup here!”_

_“Sorry.”_

_“Our mistake, Professor. We’ll be more careful.”_

The knights’ voices kept drawing closer only to retreat just as suddenly, spiraling ever nearer and farther in a maddening dance.

_“Huh. You’ve got some scratch marks on the floor, Professor.”_

_“Yeah… you bring one of the dogs in here or something?”_

Edelgard looked down at her bare feet and realized for the first time that her toenails had also transformed into long, sharp talons. That explained the noise. Was she really leaving marks on the floor wherever she went?

_“I… do believe I did, actually, just the other day. Entirely inadvertently, of course; the poor thing was obsessed with a biscuit I had accidentally left in my coat pocket and followed me around all day.”_

_“Ha! Dogs. Gotta love ‘em.”_

_“I have always preferred cats, but yes, I do agree. They are such lovable creatures.”_

_“Well, looks like that’s it. Sorry for bothering you, Professor,”_ Wedge said.

_“We’ll check the infirmary next. You’ve been a great help,”_ Biggs said.

_“It was the least I could do,”_ Hanneman said, ushering them both out.

_“Oh, hey—what’s your monocle doing here?”_

A chill ran down Edelgard’s spine. It ran _too_ far down her spine, in fact, farther than it ought to go, and when it hit the throbbing ache just beneath the small of her back it was as though someone had jabbed a knife into it. With a jolt, she lifted her head and cracked it against the top of the desk.

Hanneman let out a loud, extremely forced cough and stomped his foot on the floor. _“Ah… pardon me, sirs. Excuse me. A tickle in the back of my throat. Ah, is—is_ that _what happened to my monocle? I have been looking for it all morning! I suppose it really_ is _always in the last place you looked. Thank you so much.”_

_“No problem. Good luck with your research. Have a nice day, Professor.”_

_“Or, well, as nice as you can with the mess everything’s turned into.”_

_“You two as well. I hope you find Lady Edelgard soon.”_

Thank the Goddess Biggs and Wedge hardly had half a brain to spare between the two of them.

The door swung shut and Hanneman returned to the desk. “There. They’ve left,” he sighed. He crouched down, helped Edelgard out from under the desk, and guided her to his chair. “Are you hurt? It sounded as though you hit your head. I was certain they would have suspected something.”

“It’s nothing; just a bump,” Edelgard said, easing her way into the seat. The base of her spine still ached terribly, making it hard to sit. “It’s fine. Thank you, Professor.”

“You have put me in quite a bind, though; what am I to do with you?” Hanneman asked, thoughtfully tweaking one end of his mustache. “Are you certain you know where those horns came from? When Lady Rhea asked me to test a sample of your blood yesterday, all I could discern was that your Crest had been changed from a minor one to a major one. I saw nothing to indicate the sort of corruption we saw with Hapi’s Crest, or any other reason why you might… er…”

“…I have a major Crest of Seiros now?”

“Yes. Lady Rhea seemed oddly disappointed when I told her this morning. As though she had expected more. Tell me, do they hurt? Those horns, that is—”

“Not as much as they once did,” Edelgard said, frustrated at his line of questioning. “I don’t know what I am or what I’m becoming, but I don’t like it. Rhea, on the other hand, _does._ And that should terrify you as much as it does me.”

She shivered. Those Who Slither in the Dark had failed to turn her into a monster. But now it was Rhea’s turn, and Edelgard couldn’t be so sure that she wouldn’t succeed where Thales had failed; she had made such visible progress already.

Hanneman sloughed off his tweed overcoat and draped it over her shoulders, offering her its weight and warmth. “There, there. Perhaps I allowed my inquisitive nature to get away from me. But surely you do not mean to suggest that Lady Rhea is dabbling in the same work as Cornelia?”

“You should consider the possibility.”

He gasped, scandalized. “She is the Archbishop—”

“—of the same church whose dogma turned your sister into a brood mare,” Edelgard snapped at him. “Is it so hard to believe that she can make monsters out of people as well?”

Hanneman was silent.

“I know why you’re so obsessed with Crests, Hanneman,” she said. “You told me yourself. You don’t want people to be harmed because of the Crests they bear, or the lack thereof. If I may hazard a guess, the true purpose of your research here is to find a way to give and take away Crests as one sees fit, so that they can no longer be used to prop up the aristocracy.”

He took a step back. “H—How did you…”

“How else would you prevent anyone else from meeting your sister’s fate? But you know that the Church of Seiros would never allow such a thing. It would undermine the social order they have claimed for a thousand years is ordained by the Goddess herself. You would be branded a heretic and made an example of the moment it became known what you were trying to do. You know full well that the church is evil, Hanneman. I need your help. You need to help me escape Garreg Mach.”

Hanneman opened his mouth, but no sound came out. “I—” he croaked. “I… Lady Edelgard, I do not even know where to begin. What do you expect me to do? I cannot keep you in my office indefinitely.”

“Go find Albus,” she said.

“Albus? Seteth’s new assistant?”

“He’ll know what to do. I cannot stay here. If I allow these changes to continue—”

Thales’ voice rang in her ears, stabbing into her brain like icy needles. _You are our greatest creation. We used the defiled beast’s blood as the fuel to your flame, that you may burn even the gods._ She could only ever be someone else’s creation, someone else’s pet monster. No matter how far away she ran, no matter how she tried to escape…

“—I don’t know what will be left of me.” Her voice cracked. She stared down at her monstrous hands and realized that she had crossed the final boundary. The one thing that Ellie had been allowed to keep in this world had now been taken from her.

Hanneman laid a hand on her shoulder, but just as he opened his mouth to speak some word of comfort, the door to his office swung open and Rhea stepped into his office, her nostrils flaring as she sniffed the air.

He all but leaped away from Edelgard. “L-Lady Rhea,” he stammered, his face turning as white as snow and his monocle leaping once again from his eye. “My goodness, it is, er… n-not like you to forego knocking. It is not what it looks like—I swear!”

“It looks to me,” she said, her gossamer gown making her seem to glide into the room, “as though poor Edelgard was in such terrible pain and was so frightened by it that she fled to the comfort of her old professor, who always seemed to have all the answers.” She wore a smile too saccharine to be genuine.

“Er… well… I, er, I suppose…” Hanneman glanced helplessly at Edelgard. “I suppose that is quite astute of you, Lady Rhea. That is exactly what it is. I am humbled she came to me first. I assure you, I took good care of her.”

Rhea was upon Edelgard before she could even think about running or hiding, resting gentle hands on her shoulders. “I am so terribly sorry, my dear. I ought to have been there for you; even in these perilous times, you are my guest and my first priority should be to see to your needs… _all_ of your needs. Come along.” Her hands slipped off of her shoulders, slithered down her arms, and curled around her hands. Edelgard felt herself lifted up from the chair and dragged closer into Rhea’s embrace. Her heart leaped into her throat; she felt like a mouse being toyed with by a cat—far beyond escape now.

“Lady Rhea,” Hanneman said as Rhea gently dragged Edelgard with her to the door, “if I may—I would be happy to conduct any further tests you require, but I might ask if, beyond that, I might be able to visit her and study the progression of…” He trailed off.

“…Of what?” Rhea asked sweetly. “Hanneman, I admire your scientific mind. But this is the realm of miracles, not science. Leave it all to me.”

She took Edelgard out of the room, brought her upstairs, and returned her to the bedroom.

“You poor thing…” Rhea said to her, inhaling deeply through her nostrils as she held her head to her bosom and stroked her hair, “I ought to have known that you would hurt yourself. I was so wrapped up in my work that it simply did not occur to me that I still needed to teach you to clip and file your new talons. Do your horns at least feel better?”

Edelgard tried to keep pushing the words out of her mind. Talons. Horns. What was next? Fangs? A scaly hide? A tail? She didn’t want to fathom the answers to those questions.

“Or perhaps you simply wished to run away. I suppose a little rebellion is only to be expected, given the lies those ‘friends’ of yours filled your head with.”

The door to the bedroom creaked open.

“But you are not a prisoner here, Edelgard,” Rhea said, holding her tighter and pressing two fingers to the base of her spine. “I do not want you to use that word, ‘prisoner,’ no matter how appropriate you may think it is. Instead, please begin thinking of yourself as… an honored, esteemed guest. A guest who, _for her own safety,_ cannot be allowed to leave.”

Edelgard felt dread seize her. “What are you—”

“I am simply going to see to it that you do not try anything foolish again,” Rhea said.

A thousand horrifying possibilities for what torture Rhea might inflict on her ran through Edelgard’s mind, but all she felt when Rhea jabbed her fingers into the spot directly above the ache at the base of her spine were her legs crumpling beneath her as though every muscle in them had instantly and painlessly atrophied.

Waves of numbing, stifling healing magic surged through Edelgard’s body. It was warm, overwhelmingly warm, as though she’d been plunged into a hot bath and completely submerged. She felt for a moment as though her entire body was stuffed head to toe with cotton, and what might have been a scream only came out as a muffled, weakening moan that trailed off into silence.

Of course. Rhea would never hurt her. Not physically, anyway.

_“This will only last the night,”_ Rhea hissed in her ear, her voice as soft as ever. _“But please do not make me do it again.”_

* * *

The next day passed with horrible monotony. Edelgard was hardly aware of time’s passage at all. When she wasn’t alone, either Rhea was there to feed her or coo over her, or Anselm was there to watch over her. No one else was allowed to visit. Mercifully, she didn’t notice any more changes, though she feared every time she felt sleep take her that there would be more upon waking. The parts of her that hurt still hurt, and every once in a while she thought she imagined new parts hurting.

Another mortifying dinner with Rhea, thankfully, was interrupted when Byleth stopped time. Edelgard had often been relieved to find herself in her world, but she had never been _this_ relieved.

The scenery hardly changed, though; Edelgard found herself taken from one bed to another. At least now she was in her own bedroom. And she was not alone. Mercedes, Linhardt, and Marianne were there with her; Marianne was kneeling at the bedside with her arm in her hand and—she turned her head away at the sight of it—a needle and long, clear tube protruding from the inside of her elbow. She’d had blood samples taken out of her before, but the last time she had seen a needle and tube like that had been in the hands of Those Who Slither in the Dark all those years ago. And her current situation did nothing to make the sight of one of those horrid things in her skin more palatable.

She took a deep breath, steeled herself, and focused on Marianne’s face. Edelgard had nearly forgotten how much she’d grown over the years since she’d joined the Black Eagles. In the academy, she’d had so little to live for, and it had showed itself in the hunch of her shoulders, the pallor of her face, the dark shadows under her eyes, the learned hopelessness that kept her head bowed and her hands clasped in an eternal prayer to deliver her from her suffering. But under Edelgard’s wing, she had found her own reason to live, and though she was as quiet and soft-spoken as ever, her head was always held high and her doelike brown eyes were bright and clear.

The other world’s Marianne had been looking brighter and happier, too, thanks to Dimitri. Edelgard had to wonder how she was taking the Hurricane King’s revelation. It had to be common knowledge by now.

“Is the device working properly?” Marianne asked Linhardt with her soft, whisper-quiet voice.

“Looks like it,” he said. The clear tube, which was filled with blood, traveled to a strange-shaped glass vial he held in his hand. He was clearly forcing himself to look at it, and in his momentary lapses his eyes met Edelgard’s. “Huh. Ellie’s not usually squeamish about needles,” he added, “I wonder, is Her Majesty back?”

Edelgard cleared her throat. “She is,” she said. “What happened? What exactly are you doing to me?”

“Oh, no need to sound accusing, Your Majesty,” Mercedes said with a smile. “We just need to take a closer look at your blood, that’s all.”

“We’ve sent an urgent message to Hanneman and Manuela in Ordelia asking them to return as soon as possible. After… what happened the other day,” Linhardt said.

“Weren’t you in Shambhala with Byleth?” Edelgard asked him.

“Oh, we were well on our way back again when your seizure happened. About two day’s travel, but after what happened to Byleth, we had one of the caravan’s wyverns take us back here as quickly as we could. That… ugh… should be enough, Marianne. Pinch the tube shut and let me handle it.” The blood stopped flowing and Linhardt removed the tube from the vial. “This thing sure is useful. If… unpleasant.”

Mercifully, Marianne withdrew the needle and healed the tiny exit wound before even a droplet of blood could well up. “There.”

“All done, Your Majesty!” Mercedes said with a cheerful smile. “Here,” she said, handing Edelgard a platter laden with cookies. “Have a cookie.”

Edelgard felt herself involuntarily grab two off the plate and shove them into her mouth. Or, rather, she felt Ellie do it voluntarily. “Is there any reason I _had_ to fast for half a day before we did that?” she snapped.

“Yes,” Linhardt said. “I’m just going by what the instructions said.” He slotted the vial into a larger device.

“What happened to Byleth?” Edelgard asked once she’d finished eating, gingerly pulling the sleeve of her nightshirt down over her arm. Now that that unpleasantness had passed, she could finally allow herself to feel at ease. This body did not feel the weight of horns upon her head, or even her crown, and nor were the tips of her fingers weighed down by the alien weight of her new talons.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Linhardt said. “Whatever it is, apparently, it happened at about the same time whatever happened to you happened. What… _did_ happen to you, anyway, Your Majesty? Ellie said she could feel herself torn between the two worlds while her Crests activated, and won’t say a word about what she saw.”

“That’s because I can’t describe it with words,” Ellie said. “It was terrifying. There were so many eyes…”

“It was something like a giant Hero’s Relic,” Edelgard said, “buried underneath the Holy Tomb. Somehow, it… came to life.”

“Like the Lance of Ruin did with Miklan, all those years ago? Did it turn someone into a monster?”

“No, it _was_ the monster. It was shaped like… not a sword or a spear or a hammer, but a creature. It was bigger than the Immaculate One. Somehow, having three people with the Crest of Flames down there brought it to life, or summoned it, and triggered those seizures.”

“A creature buried under the Holy Tomb…” Linhardt stroked his chin. “That’s interesting. I’d always wanted to go back there. Shame we could never get past that platform ourselves.”

“Well, it _is_ a tomb, right?” Mercedes asked. “If there’s a corpse in the tomb, then do you think it could be…”

Her conclusion didn’t have to be said. The Goddess Sothis was real. She existed. And she was also dead.

Edelgard, of course, knew that Sothis existed, or at least a being calling itself Sothis, but try as she might, she couldn’t reconcile the skeletal beast she had seen in the tomb with the woman-child who had haunted her professor.

Her professor. No, her _wife._

She pulled herself out of bed, forcing herself to remember that her legs worked in this world. “Where’s Byleth?” she asked.

The question hadn’t fully left her mouth before she had caught sight of a cot placed at the other side of her bed, and on that cot was Byleth. She was sleeping peacefully, lying in placid repose with her feathery dark hair messily framing her face and her hands folded over her chest.

“Careful,” Mercedes cautioned Edelgard as she circled the bed. “She is still quite worn out from the trip back, on top of whatever happened the other day…”

Edelgard fell to her knees and drank in the sight of her love’s face the way a wanderer in the desert would drink from a long sought-after oasis. Her heart just may have exploded right then and there. There were so many differences between the other world’s Byleth and her own, beyond obvious ones like a few fresh scars here and there or the murky seaweed-blue color of her hair. There were so many subtle things.

It was really her. It was really _her._ Edelgard studied her hands and searched for the silver ring on her finger just to make sure. Yes, it was there, a ring of perfect and unmarred gleaming light set against the beautifully-scarred skin of a mercenary’s rough hand, a complement to the ring that sat on Edelgard’s own finger.

She could cry at the sight of it.

Byleth’s eyes cracked open, and they were the wonderful azure eyes Edelgard remembered. The eyes that meant the world to her. A smile crossed her face. The warm, rich, full smile of a woman who had earned her humanity.

“Only one person stares at me like that,” she murmured in a soft voice, weakly lifting one hand to lay it upon Edelgard’s cheek. No one could replace _this_ Byleth. The firm gentleness of her touch was something no one else could manage.

Edelgard felt herself overwhelmed with emotion. “My love…” she whispered, scarcely managing even that much as she rested her hand atop her wife’s.

“Hi, El,” she said, carding her fingers through Edelgard’s hair like she always did. “Kept you waiting, huh?”

Edelgard wrapped her up in an embrace and sobbed into the pillow of her chest, shivering and shaking like a newborn deer. She could hear Byleth’s heartbeat again, the wonderful constant rhythm more beautiful than the most heartstring-plucking melodies.

It was as though this moment was a prize for enduring Rhea’s captivity.

Byleth raised herself up and Edelgard with her. “So… any idea what’s going on?”

Edelgard was in no condition to compose herself, so Ellie composed herself for her and she and Linhardt repeated what they’d just spoken about.

“Oh. Huh.” Byleth’s brow furrowed darkly.

“Something wrong, Professor?” Mercedes asked.

“When the seizure happened, it felt like… like every part of my body was being dragged somewhere.”

“To another world?” Ellie asked.

“No, not quite. Not how you describe it. It was… Where were we when it happened, Linhardt?”

“We were a ways past Gronder Field, I think,” Linhardt said.

“I felt like I was being dragged, hmm… uh… north? Roughly north. Maybe a bit west, too.”

“North…” Edelgard gathered her wits about her, her lovesick fervor momentarily dissipated. Back at the Holy Tomb, she recalled, the eldritch resonance of the Crest of Flames in concert with Sothis’ corpse seemed to have been trying to pull Byleth toward the chasm, along with the Sword of the Creator; she recalled that Dedue and Raphael had both had to grasp the sword with all their strength to keep it from flying off. “Is the Sword of the Creator still being kept in the vault with Aymr?” she asked.

“It should be,” Ellie said. “I haven’t told anyone to put the Hero’s Relics anywhere else.”

“Count Boramas asked if they could be put in a museum,” Mercedes said, “but you said you couldn’t be bothered with such a dumb request.”

“Not to his face, I hope,” Edelgard said. Count Boramas was one of the less terrible nobles.

“Um,” Ellie said. “I was in a bad mood that day, and he caught me at a bad time…”

“Well… I suppose I can hardly get upset at you. Let’s go down to the vault. And somebody get a compass.”

Byleth nodded, and together with Linhardt, Mercedes, and Marianne, she and Edelgard left the bedroom and descended deep into the palace. Edelgard felt dark thoughts fill her mind. The dungeons, not just the vaults, were down here, and somewhere in them was Thales. A part of her wanted to confront him, but showing herself to him would simply reveal that Vepar hadn’t replaced her after all, and Edelgard couldn’t see a tactical advantage in that. Her position was bad enough as it was; no need to make it worse.

They came to the vault and Edelgard found there exactly what she’d expected. But seeing it was no less shocking.

The Sword of the Creator, like Aymr, had been mounted to the wall with thick iron bars bored into thicker stone. _Had_ been—because the bars no longer pinned the sword to the stone, having been ripped from the wall and thrown across the room. The sword itself had stuck itself in the opposite wall like an arrow protruding from a target.

Edelgard and the others stared at it, dumbfounded.

“What the fuck,” Byleth said.

“What direction did the sword travel in?” Edelgard asked, regaining her power of speech before everyone else.

Linhardt took the compass he’d grabbed and held it to the sword, lining it up to the blade. “Uh… north-northeast, looks like. Why?”

“What’s north-northeast of Enbarr?”

“Garreg Mach,” Byleth said without missing a beat.

The Sword of the Creator had been trying to travel across Fódlan to the Holy Tomb. Byleth’s body, too, even though her chest no longer contained a Crest Stone. Did that mean Sothis’ corpse had been trying to gather those things to itself in this world, too? Had its strange awakening in one world awakened the Sothis in this world as well? Perhaps it had seized onto particles of dust from the stone that were still present within Byleth’s body…

Edelgard relayed her ideas to the others.

“Sothis…” Byleth murmured, her gaze fixed on the floor.

Edelgard addressed the others. “Linhardt, Mercedes, Marianne, I would like a moment alone with my wife.” Then an idea struck her. “Marianne, are Hilda and Claude still here?”

“Th-They never left, Your Majesty.”

“Good. Find Hilda and tell her that in the other world, I’ve been taken prisoner by Archbishop Rhea and am being held in her bedroom.” In the other world, Byleth had either used her power to escape a dangerous situation or so that Edelgard could communicate, no matter where she was, with somebody outside her gilded prison of Rhea’s bedroom; whichever it was, there was no sense in letting the opportunity of the latter pass her by. “Have her pass it onto the other world’s Claude when we go back; he’ll know what to—”

“Wait, I’ve been taken prisoner by _what?!”_ Ellie squawked. The others stared at her, eyes wide and jaws slack.

“Are you okay?” Byleth gasped.

Edelgard tried not to think about the horns and talons, thankful that she and Ellie could only read each other’s emotional states, not their thoughts. “My life isn’t in danger,” she answered evasively. She could at least be certain of that for now.

Satisfied, the others left her and Byleth alone in the vault.

“I know about Sothis,” Edelgard said while Byleth glumly studied the sword embedded in the wall.

Byleth looked up at her with an innocent look on her face.

“I could see her. I could even hear and speak to her. Hilda and I both,” she said. “I… never knew about her before. I suppose it’s my fault for never giving you the opportunity to tell me.”

Byleth smiled. Her smile was so much warmer and richer now than it had been back then. It was completely different from the way her counterpart in the other world smiled. Edelgard had almost forgotten _how_ different. “I never knew how you’d react to it, anyway.”

“I’m sorry you lost her,” Edelgard said. “She was a good friend.”

“Yeah.” Byleth nodded and placed a hand over her heart. “But she’s still around. In here. Last time I heard her voice was when I woke up from that five-year sleep. I thought after the Crest Stone dissolved, there’d be nothing left of her in here, until I used that power again… I guess part of her is still here, then. She said our souls would be one.”

“I wonder,” Edelgard suggested, “if it is because you still have some part of Sothis within your soul that you were affected.”

“Sounds about right.” Byleth’s glum look returned. “The thing you saw in the tomb, though… sounds scary. Do you think that was Sothis? The _real_ Sothis?”

“I don’t quite understand it, either,” Edelgard said. “We knew that the Immaculate One—Seiros, Rhea—could contain her true form within a human shell. Perhaps Sothis could contain her true form within one as well.”

“You think the Sothis we knew was just… a human shell?”

“I suppose something like that. I could feel that creature’s mind, even though it was dead, and it was bottomless. I could have gotten lost in it and never found my way back out. I’d never gotten that sense from Sothis. Perhaps she was only…” Edelgard tried to put her thoughts into words. “A painting of you can be beautiful, but it can only capture a small portion of what makes you _you._ Perhaps the Sothis we knew was like a painting. It doesn’t mean she wasn’t our friend or that however she felt about us was false, but merely that she was a fragment of a much greater whole.”

“Hmm…” Byleth scratched her chin. “That sounds almost religious, El.”

Edelgard couldn’t help but laugh. “I would say it is quite scientific, actually. Faith ceases to be so when you can know something with your own eyes. I am only drawing conclusions from what I have objectively observed—”

Before she could finish, Byleth drew herself toward her, grabbed her, yanked her closer, and planted a long, passionate kiss squarely on her lips. Edelgard was unable to breathe for what felt like an eternity, and it was only the tickling sensation of breath ghosting across her cheek from Byleth’s nostrils that she remembered she herself _could_ still breathe. There was nothing conceivably stopping them from remaining like this forever, or at least until Edelgard found herself dragged back to the other world. She felt Byleth’s fingers crawl through her hair and felt her own do the same. She felt Byleth’s tongue, her teeth; she felt the two of them becoming one again after so, so long… Tears sprang to her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.

Finally—but far too soon—Byleth pulled away from her. For a few seconds a single thread stretched from one pair of lips to another. She and Edelgard stared at one another, warmed within and without, their chests steadily heaving. They still grasped each other by the hands.

“Byleth,” Edelgard gasped. “I…”

“Now we’re even,” Ellie told her.

“Huh?” Byleth asked, cocking her head ever so slightly in a way that just made Edelgard want to kiss her again.

“Just a little something between Ellie and myself,” Edelgard said. “Never mind.”

“That was a good kiss, though,” Ellie said, making both Edelgard and Byleth blush twice as strongly.

“Yeah, a great kiss,” Byleth mumbled, dazed. “Um… I need to confess something to you, El. A few weeks ago, when we were on our way back to Garreg Mach, I went to bed with Ellie. Just for company, not to do anything. It was cold. I woke up in the middle of the night and I could’ve sworn it was you, so, um… yeah.”

“It was,” Edelgard said. “Well, if we are confessing our infidelities, a few months ago I almost kissed Ingrid.”

Byleth thought for a moment, reminding herself who Ingrid was. “I didn’t know she liked girls.”

“I don’t think she does.”

“Ouch. Well, I guess we’re even,” she said with a shrug.

It was then, at the worst possible time—but when was it ever a _good_ time?—that Edelgard felt the familiar fishhook sensation threaten to tear her away. “I think I need to go,” she said.

Byleth frowned.

“I’m sorry.”

“We need to fix this.”

“I know.”

“Work on saving yourself from Rhea first. Then let’s put things right. It hurts to be apart from you.”

Edelgard held Byleth’s hand all the tighter, as though she could anchor herself here by nothing but the power of love, feeling the cold silver of her wedding ring against her warm skin like a talisman. “It hurts me, too. It was nice to see you again, my love, though,” she said to her. “If only for a moment. My dear Byleth. I love you, By…” Her heart was full to bursting. She could feel the heat of fresh tears against her eyes. After all this time, _finally—_

Byleth held her tight, one hand curled around the back of her head, and kissed her again. “Stay strong, El. I know you can do it.”

Edelgard could still feel that tingling warmth on her lips when she awoke in Archbishop Rhea’s bed, six years into another world’s past. Her heart was fluttering. It could have all been a dream for all she knew; her dreams, when she had them, had been strange and vivid since she had been taken captive.

The phantom sensation of Byleth’s kiss could not hold her worries or the strange aches throbbing all over her body at bay for long, though, and under the dusky light streaming through the window she saw something writhe like a snake underneath the bedsheets.

Rhea was sitting on the bedside next to her, staring at the writhing thing with a look of hungry, almost frenzied excitement in her eyes. “You’re awake,” she breathed, finally taking notice of Edelgard’s open eyes. “You are just in time, dear. I believe it has finally finished growing in!”

“…What has?” Edelgard asked, immediately wishing she hadn’t.

Smiling as though quite pleased with herself, Rhea pulled aside the bedsheets and then pulled up the hem of Edelgard’s gown just enough so that she could see, between her bare legs, a long and tapered tail covered in alabaster white scales with a plume of black feathers sprouting down its sides and blossoming from its tip.

“Oh, isn’t it adorable?” Rhea cooed, tickling its scaly underside with her fingertip as Edelgard felt the strength and fortitude her time with Byleth had given her drain from her body.

* * *

Ostensibly, Rhea was the kindest captor Edelgard had ever had. She kept her in a comfortable bed and a clean room, fed her good and filling food, and never threatened her with violence or physical abuse. But she was also cruel in a way Thales could never hope to be. After all, _he_ had never been so sadistic as to give her a mirror until after she had been released from her captivity.

The next morning after breakfast and before she had to leave Edelgard to her own devices, Rhea had brought a mirror into the room. One large enough that if Edelgard stood before it (it was difficult to stand with the way the tail threw off her balance, but with some practice and effort she had learned to manage it), she could see herself in its entirety and everything Rhea had done to her. She could see the pair of ivory horns that curled around her head in a mockery of the imperial crown, the talons—neatly filed and blunted for her own safety—on her hands and feet, and—the newest addition—the long feathered tail that twitched lazily behind her as though it had a mind of its own. The skin on her hands and feet had turned the off-white color of bleached bone and its texture had become harder, firmer, and scaly, like the skin of a bird’s foot.

At least her hair hadn’t turned white. It was still the soft, light chestnut it always had been. At least _that_ hadn’t been taken away again.

She steeled herself at the sight that greeted her in the mirror of her own humanity slowly, piece by piece, drifting away from her. She didn’t feel numb, the way she’d had when she had first seen herself with stark white hair framing her face; she only felt her resolve strengthen. She had fought hard to be a human being once before, and it was a battle she could fight again if she had to, no matter what Rhea turned her into.

Then, suddenly, she faltered.

_“What the fuck is that?!”_ she blurted out against her will, and just as forcefully a flood of emotions—fear, horror, bewilderment—poured into her from an unknown source and she fell to her knees in front of the mirror, no longer able to devote her focus toward balancing on unsteady feet and an ungainly tail.

It didn’t take her long to realize what had happened. She was sharing a body now, and that body was now feeling two sets of feelings, just as it did when she visited her world and shared her body with Ellie.

“Calm down,” she told herself, trying to steady her breathing and her pulse for her counterpart’s sake as much as her own. “Calm down, Ellie. It’s alright. It’s not so bad, it’s just—it’s… I’m…” It was no use. Ellie’s horror and confusion was racing through her body like a river overflowing its banks, growing far too rapidly and swiftly outpacing any platitudes or comforting lies Edelgard could think of.

“What’s happening to us?” Ellie cried out, forcing Edelgard to examine the scales growing from her hands, to poke and prod at her horns, to study with mounting horror the lethargic twitching of her tail in detail far greater than Edelgard had been willing to commit. “Oh—Oh, Goddess… That’s a… Is that a…”

“Ellie, try to calm yourself. Breathe,” Edelgard said, willing her chest to heave when Ellie was too stricken with fear to do so. “For both of our sake, please. What are you doing here?”

“What am I _doing_ here?! I’m checking to see if you’re okay! I was so worried, I asked your Byleth to send me—Why didn’t you _tell_ us?!”

“What would I have _said?!_ That I’ve lost…” Edelgard gasped. She could barely stay coherent. The pain she was being forced to feel was that of a girl who’d never felt her pain before suddenly being forced to feel _all_ of it at once, and it flooded every inch of her mind. “I’ve lost… the one thing _you_ never lost. I’m sorry—I’m so, so sorry, Ellie… With me, I—I used to be El, but that little girl died when I was twelve—” She swallowed a lump in her throat, but another came to replace it as soon as she’d done so. “It took me twelve more years until I could be her again, and—until then, I was a monster, I was nothing. But _you,_ Ellie, you—you never _stopped_ being El. You never lost that. You never lost your humanity. Until now. And—it’s all my fault. Look at me. Look at us. Look at what I’ve done to you. I’m so sorry,” she sobbed, burying her face in her hands.

“S-Sorry,” Ellie choked, wiping her tears on the sleeve of Edelgard’s nightgown as the rising tide finally began to ebb. “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to overwhelm you like that. You’re the mature one, right? So, um… I think I should just back away a bit and let you feel… mature. For the both of us.”

Eventually, when their shared tears had slowed, Edelgard began to feel herself hum something. It was difficult—her voice kept breaking at first through the melody’s first few bars—but it wasn’t herself exerting the effort. It was a familiar tune, but from where…?

“What are you doing?” she asked Ellie after the humming had petered out.

“Remember the night we went to the opera with Uncle Volkhard?”

Edelgard remembered, but only faintly. It had been the night he had taken her and her mother to Faerghus. She hadn’t known at that moment that she wasn’t going home again. She had hummed that aria all the way back to the carriage.

“It was so much fun. We got to see Manuela herself as Maria. The whole time we were in Faerghus, whenever we felt homesick, we’d just hum that tune to ourselves and hope that Draco would come and sweep us off our feet, and it would make us feel better.”

That, Edelgard didn’t remember at all, but Ellie’s recollection brought a warm and pleasant feeling to her chest. “Might I ask what your point is?”

“Did it work?”

“Does it feel like it worked?”

Ellie shrugged. “Maybe a little. What you just said… is it really what you think, or did how I felt _make_ you say that?”

“I would have expressed that sentiment more calmly if you hadn’t been flooding my mind with hysteria,” Edelgard said. “But yes, I do believe it.” She let out a mirthless chuckle. “You had a charmed life compared to mine, and now I’ve spoiled it for you in every way mine was. Six months ago I pretended to have a revelation from the Goddess so that I could spare Flayn a few days’ suffering, and now Rhea is trying to turn me into a dragon… and, from the looks of it, succeeding quite handily. By comparison, you’re muddling through my life as best you can and only making a few minor mistakes here and there.”

Ellie sucked air through her teeth. “Um… Well, uh… you can be the judge of how minor the mistakes I’ve made are whenever this whole thing gets fixed,” she said cryptically. “So… You turn me into a dragon, I cause a little bit of, er, _damage_ to your empire… Why don’t we call it even?”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. Nothing Ferdinand couldn’t fix.” Ellie sighed. “Oh, that Ferdinand. Is there any way we can trade Ferdies? I like yours a lot better than mine. I wouldn’t be against marrying _him.”_

In spite of her terrible mood, Edelgard laughed. “You’d have to fight your way past my Hubert if you wanted to take him.”

Ellie stiffened. “Never mind. But you know, I… I deserve some blame for this as well. I still remember what I did the night before this whole thing happened and we traded places. I wished my life could be interesting. The next morning, I was emperor and Hubert was interrogating me within an inch of my life.”

Edelgard felt herself laugh. “You wished upon a star, perhaps?”

“I wished upon a star. Exactly. Isn’t that silly? The next morning, I thought it’d _worked.”_

“Well, I did the same, in a way. The night before we traded places, I wished next morning would never come. And when I woke up, I was six years younger, and so was everybody else. I highly doubt simply _wishing_ made it so, Ellie.”

“I know, I know.” Ellie picked Edelgard off the floor for her, stood up, and immediately collapsed. “Ow! What the—How do you _walk_ with this thing?!”

“I’m still trying to figure that out.”

Simply trying to walk was like balancing on a tight-rope for Ellie, who had just discovered that she had a tail now. But she tried, despite Edelgard’s protestations.

“No, let—let _me_ do it, Ellie. I’ve had all morning to get some experience—no, don’t just crawl on all fours like an animal! Have some dignity. Give me control. Here, I’ve found it helps a little if you walk on the balls of your feet instead of heel-to-toe and sort of lean forward just a bit so that the tail acts like a counterweight…”

It took quite a bit of wrangling, but the two of them sharing an increasingly alien body finally made it to Rhea’s bed.

“Who’d have figured,” Ellie sighed, wrapping herself up in the duvet. “If I’d wanted my life to be exciting, I could’ve just stayed home.”

There was a knock on the door.

Ellie let out a long, loud groan. “Uuuuuuugghhhhh. Do we _have_ to get up and get that, Edelgard?”

“If it’s Rhea, she’ll simply walk in whether we want to or not; knocking is just a courtesy,” Edelgard said. “Stay quiet and give me control.”

When the door opened, it was not Rhea who strolled into the room, thankfully, but Seteth. His stern and severe expression slackened, and as soon as the door had been shut securely behind him, his image rippled and replaced itself with the form of Albus Duerr. “Hello, Edelgard,” Vual said. “I do hope Rhea isn’t doing anything too heinous to you—” His speech came to a halt as he stared at her, eye bulging and jaw hanging slack.

“Yes, I know,” Edelgard sighed, feeling Ellie trying _very hard_ not to react to the sight of Seteth transforming into a completely different person. “Hello, Vual.”

“Hanneman told me about the horns. Thankfully, that seems to be the worst of it.”

Edelgard let the duvet slough off of her and let her tail curl around her waist and rest itself in her lap, shuddering at the sensation of its smooth, scaly flesh—like snakeskin, only warm—and its ebony plumage slithering against her thighs and tickling her skin.

Vual was speechless.

“My shoulders are starting to ache, too. I think I might have wings coming in soon.”

“May I… examine?” he asked.

“I’d rather you don’t do any sort of poking or prodding.”

“Of course. Visual inspection should suffice.” Vual removed the eyepatch he’d been using to disguise himself as Seteth. Edelgard could practically _feel_ Ellie struggling to hold back a question about _why_ Seteth wore an eyepatch now. He drew closer, peering at her with an analytical gaze and stroking his chin thoughtfully. The thought occurred to Edelgard that he and Hanneman might get along fairly well.

“A heteromorphic vessel…?” he murmured. “Do you mind if I pluck just _one_ feather?”

“No!” Ellie cried out on Edelgard’s behalf. “Have you ever _tried_ plucking a live chicken before? It _hurts.”_

Edelgard wondered how Ellie had learned that from, it seemed, firsthand experience.

“You’re right—it would be easier if you were molting.”

“What is a heteromorphic vessel?” Edelgard asked Vual while he studied her. She had to admit, his gaze was more unnerving than she’d expected—a strange mix of curiosity, pity, and a hint of revulsion. It was the same gaze she had felt through the smoked glass eyeholes of all of those mages’ beaked facemasks all those years ago.

“A Nabatean quirk of biology. Their race—the Fell Star and her spawn—aren’t made of normal matter like you or the next person, but rather from polymimetic quantum matter.”

Edelgard knew what a few of those words meant. Ellie was completely lost.

“It’s a selectively weakly interacting substance capable of altering its nature as the result of conscious thought. In other words, it’s how Rhea is able to change her shape from a human form to a beast. All Nabateans possessed such duality—hence the term heteromorphic, life occurring in two or more forms.”

“So…” Edelgard studied the scales forming on the back of her hand. “If I am understanding you correctly, my flesh is slowly altering itself into this… heteromorphic state.”

“Yes, or so it appears. The normal baryonic matter that comprises your cells is being transmuted. I am simply amazed you are still alive. One would think a piecemeal conversion would lead to immediate multiple organ failure and, er… death.”

“Polymimetic quantum matter…” Once Edelgard had let the word roll around in her brain, much to Ellie’s growing bewilderment, she found that she recognized it. “You’ve used that term before. Isn’t that what you ‘replicants’ are made from?”

“Yes,” Vual said. “Replicants are the result of Agartha’s attempt to create artificial beings matching the Nabateans in strength, longevity, and ability.”

As Vual had lived at least four hundred years without becoming as visibly aged as Solon, Edelgard concluded that replicants had very long lives indeed, though they didn’t seem noticeably stronger than humans and she had never seen any of them transform into enormous beasts.

“I take it you haven’t quite gotten the formula down,” Edelgard said.

“Whatever would have given you that idea?” Vual’s eyes once again scanned the alterations to her body. There was a faint disgusted curl of his upper lip. “I worry there’s still a good chance this could kill you. I can’t decide which disturbs me more—the idea that Rhea has experimented on countless others to ensure it is safe, or that she’s winging it. If you’ll pardon the pun.”

Edelgard’s mind considered the possibility that Rhea might have carried out human experiments to prepare for this. It would have explained what she had been doing with Aelfric in the Holy Tomb during her mysterious absence in the middle of the Guardian Moon. And the Church of Seiros would have no problems finding prisoners to experiment on… heretics, dissidents, people nobody would lament if they were to disappear…

The alternative, that Rhea had no idea what she was doing, was just as disturbing in its own way. The occasional twitch of the tip of her tail or the faint aches blossoming in her shoulders took on a far more threatening significance—these things might not simply transform her, but _kill_ her.

“On a lighter note, I had no idea you had another, just as interesting, journal in your bedroom.”

“You kept it?” Edelgard asked. Thank goodness it was in safe hands… though she couldn’t say she relished the thought that Vual had read it. Entrusting _all_ of her secrets to an Agarthan gave her an uncomfortable, foreboding feeling.

“It seemed only sensible to do so. I invited myself into your room as soon as I heard what had happened to your class—just in case.” Vual smiled. “Quite crafty of you, too, stealing one of the bricks of semtex behind my back like that. You’re lucky the right person found it. If Rhea ever found Agarthan technology among your possessions, I’m certain she would kill you on the spot.”

There was a commotion outside. _“What in the world do you mean, ‘you just let me in?’”_ Seteth said from outside the bedroom.

“Oh, shit,” Vual said, and as the door creaked open once again he scurried under the bed like a rat scampering to the darkness and safety of its hole.

Biggs and Wedge peered into the room while Seteth—the _real_ Seteth—stood behind them, fuming.

“Uh… Lady Edelgard?” Wedge asked, looking around the bedroom and spying nobody but her. “Did we just let Seteth in a few minutes ago?”

Edelgard gave him a bemused stare. “What in the world are you talking about?” she asked, furrowing her brow and looking at him as though he were mad.

“Huh. We couldn’t have _both_ just hallucinated it,” Biggs said.

“Maybe it was a, uh, what’s it called, shared delusion,” Wedge offered.

“I think I will need to speak to Lady Rhea about taking you two off-duty,” Seteth said to the guards. “It is clear you have spent far too long at your posts without rest.”

“Yeah,” Wedge said.

“I guess so,” Biggs said.

“Or maybe,” Wedge added, “we’re having precognitions, too! Like Lady Edelgard did!”

“Premonitions,” Biggs corrected under his breath.

“Mister Seteth, if we have premonitions too, will Lady Rhea—”

“I doubt it,” Seteth said. “I will be out in a minute,” he added curtly, striding past them into the bedroom and shutting the door firmly behind him. “Good heavens, Edelgard.”

“Yes,” Edelgard sighed, “I know.”

He chuckled. “Although I must admit it brings back memories. You are starting to look like Flayn when she was little.”

“I’m starting to _what?”_ cried out poor Ellie, now hopelessly lost.

“Oh, those first few years are always awkward… one simply cannot decide what shape one wishes to be in. But I digress.” He looked around the room. “Vual. I know you are in here.”

Vual poked his head out from under the bed and offered Seteth a tentative smile. “What, pray tell, gave me away?” he asked innocently.

“I was under the impression that the two of us agreed that you would never wear my face again.”

“It was a gentlemen’s agreement,” Vual said, slithering out and rising to his feet. He brushed the dust off his shoulders and the front of his shirt.

“Tha—Y—You know that makes it _worse,_ do you not?” Seteth spluttered, aghast. “Tell me you _do_ understand how that is worse.”

“I was well aware of the risks,” Vual said. “But how else would I have been able to get into Rhea’s little birdcage?”

“You could have _asked_ for my help,” Seteth seethed. “I do not know why I had even considered that your kind might be trustworthy.”

“All the same,” Vual retorted, “I do not know why I had bothered to hope that your kind would have any respect for humanity.”

Edelgard cleared her throat. Men were men, it seemed, whether they were humans or Agarthans or Nabateans. “Is this _really_ the time and place for bickering?”

“No,” Vual said. “Most certainly not. Now, we should let bygones be bygones—”

“We shall discuss this later,” Seteth said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Edelgard, I have some idea what has happened to you.”

“Tell me,” Edelgard said, wondering if his explanation would be at all comprehensible to poor Ellie, who’d already been in over her head a few minutes ago and had likely already suffered the mental equivalent of drowning from Vual’s incomprehensible jargon.

“She’s becoming a heteromorphic vessel, Seteth,” Vual said.

Seteth glared at him as though the term he had used was extremely uncouth. “Shortly after the incident in the Holy Tomb, Edelgard, Rhea fed you a fragment of a Crest Stone and her own blood. This is not uncommon—it is a ritual all cardinals undergo—but what _is_ uncommon is the vessel she used. It was the Chalice of Beginnings, an ancient relic originally devised as part of a ritual to revive the Goddess from her… slumber.”

“Death,” Vual finished, prompting another glare from Seteth. He shrugged. “A type of slumber, I suppose.”

“So Rhea is trying to revive the Goddess within me,” Edelgard said. “I had supposed as much.”

“Yes. And it is by far the worst idea she has ever had. The Rite of Rising was a failure from the very beginning.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“And for good reason. The church has buried it. Before Garreg Mach was built, four of Seiros’ apostles—Noa, Aubin, Chevalier, and Timotheos—conducted in the Holy Tomb a ritual using their blood to restore life to the Goddess’ body. Instead, though, a small portion of her body bonded with the clerics in attendance and created a pack of strong monsters. In shame, the apostles had themselves stricken from history. In so many words, the Chalice of Beginnings joins together living flesh and dead flesh to grant life to the dead, but not in a way anybody would want.”

“Sometimes dead is better,” Vual murmured.

“The Chalice,” Seteth continued, “has caused Rhea’s blood and the Crest Stone fragment, the blood and flesh of a Nabatean, to alter your body in an unprecedented way.”

“I’m… becoming a Nabatean,” she concluded. Saying it so plainly didn’t make it any less terrifying to know that her body as she knew it was slowly being erased, leaving her mind as a prisoner within it.

“It seems so. But if Rhea is expecting you to become another Sothis, she is bound to be disappointed… and I shudder to think about how she will react to failure. She has pinned so much of her hope on you.” Seteth sighed and shook his head sadly, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I am afraid I do not understand Rhea. This sort of necromancy is simply beyond the pale.”

“Then what are you going to do about it?” Edelgard asked him. “Seteth, in all the time you’ve known her, how many things has Rhea done that are ‘beyond the pale’ while you stood by and watched? How many bridges need to burn before it’s finally a bridge too far? Is this the one? Or, like everything else, are you simply going to shake your head and cluck your tongue and pity the poor humans caught up in her madness?”

Seteth was taken aback. He wasn’t used to hearing justified criticism from somebody a dozen centuries younger than him. “I understand if you are upset, but there is no need to be snippy with me, young lady,” he chastised her. “Suffice to say, _this_ madness certainly cannot continue. I do not know if there is any way to halt or reverse these changes, but if I can at least talk some sense into Rhea, then…”

“Oh, she’s far beyond sense, Seteth,” Vual said. “Your first clue as to that should have been the mere fact that she has spent a thousand years trying to resurrect a beast capable of devouring entire worlds.”

“‘Beast?’” Seteth spat. “Watch your tongue, Vual. I have extended to you my respect and my tolerance as thanks for your good deeds, but I will not brook such insults.”

“Do you have any idea what Sothis did to the planet?”

“Do _you_ have any idea how the Red Canyon received its name?”

“Shut up, _both_ of you,” Edelgard snapped. “Your old grudges are hardly relevant here. Seteth, if I am indeed, as you say, becoming one of your kind, then it stands to reason that…”

“You can turn into a _dragon?”_ Ellie interjected, no longer able to keep quiet.

“Well… I _could,”_ he said. “Flayn and I lost the ability to shift between forms at will quite a long time ago. Should a Nabatean remain in a single form for too long, the other form becomes lost to them. There are—there _may be_ some of us still out there in the world,” he added, “who have spent so long as dragons that their human forms are no more. And, like Flayn and myself, vise versa, perhaps.”

Edelgard gestured to her tail. “So, then, I can make this go away.”

“Once the quickening is complete, yes. However, you cannot exert conscious control over either form until it is fully developed.”

The mental image struck Edelgard, much to her welcome amusement, of an extremely young Seteth or Flayn involuntarily sprouting scales the way one might develop a bad rash of acne in one’s adolescence, or dealing with the sudden emergence of wings or a tail the way one might deal with a growth spurt. Come to think of it, there _had_ been times when she had seen flashes of their bestial forms roiling beneath their skin despite Seteth’s claim that they could no longer transform willingly—the latest of which had been in the Holy Tomb, when it had seemed the corpse of Sothis had been triggering a forced metamorphosis in them.

“Who knows if it _will_ even fully develop?” Vual pointed out. “This is uncharted territory. The Agarthans have spent two thousand years trying to create artificial Nabateans, but even with real Crest Stones as an energy source we have never developed a replicant capable of fully transforming into a beast at that scale, let alone transforming back at will.”

“The Agarthans have _what?”_ Seteth asked sharply, the color draining from his face.

“I suppose that makes us cousins of a sort,” Vual said to him.

“You and I need to talk,” he replied curtly, grabbing him by the arm and hauling him out the room.

Edelgard was left alone again.

“You know,” Ellie said to her, “beat yourself up about this all you want, but I’m glad _you’re_ dealing with all of this instead of me.”

* * *

If Seteth did manage to have a talk with Rhea, it did nothing to change things, which didn’t surprise Edelgard in the slightest. If anything, Rhea was intractable in a way that even Edelgard, who considered herself to be one of the most stubborn people she knew, found frustrating. And so it continued. For the next few days Edelgard remained shut in Rhea’s bedchamber, which, spacious as it was, began to grate on her nerves. Rhea continued to feed her, caress her as though she were some beloved pet, and guide her through the process of maintaining the newest additions to her body. Once more, no visitors were permitted except for Anselm, who drank in the changes afflicting his dearest sister’s body with horrifying awe and fascination.

Edelgard had often heard stories of prisoners growing to love their captors. On her own experience, she tended to dismiss the idea as hogwash. But an idea began to grow in her mind. She was neither totally helpless nor totally powerless here: there was still one way she could exert some control over her situation.

As terrifying and domineering as Rhea was, she also in her own sick way wanted to _help_ her, even if it was for her own selfish, delusional benefit. Edelgard could exploit that. There were so many things she could ask Rhea about—and the next time she was sent back to her world, she could pass it on to Hilda, who would pass it on to Claude, who would see to it that Dedue knew about it…

In other words, she was the perfect spy. Why not be Rhea’s friend? She could engineer her downfall with no one being any the wiser, as long as Rhea kept doting on her… provided she didn’t lose herself first.

“Is the food not to your liking, my child?” Rhea asked as the two of them shared dinner.

Tonight, Rhea had brought her sauteed pheasant sliced thin and served on a bed of scrambled eggs and cabbage, a bowl of trout and chickpea soup, and a small plate of saghert and cream set aside for dessert. Edelgard most certainly didn’t relish sharing all her meals with her, though she’d been granted one small mercy in that Rhea had brought a table into the room so that Edelgard was spared the indignity of being served every meal in bed.

Edelgard found it hard to focus on the food, even though Rhea had taken great pains over the past few days to procure her favorite meals. It was hard to focus on the dining experience when the ache in her shoulderblades had gotten so much worse. If she were being honest, she would prefer if the wings that were threatening to burst out of her did so already—that way they could either kill her or they would stop hurting so terribly.

Worse, the tip of her nose itched from time to time, which Edelgard found especially maddening now that her increasing paranoia foresaw every passing twinge that came and went through her body as a harbinger of further transfiguration. Her face had been spared for now, just as the Agarthans had never let their surgical tools stray above her collar, but she dreaded the day she would wake up with a snout.

“It is very nice, Rh—Seiros,” Edelgard said. Rhea’s smile always shone brighter when Edelgard called her that. “I especially appreciate that you’ve been picking out my favorite foods.”

“But you are only picking at it, dear. Are your shoulders still bothering you?”

“A little,” she confessed. “But it’s nothing you need to concern yourself with,” she hastily added to stop Rhea from rising from her chair and administering healing magic to her. Rhea was very good at numbing pain. _Too_ good. So frighteningly good at soothing a body nearly to the point of unconsciousness that Edelgard had decided she would rather endure the pain than the intoxicating bliss.

“What is it, then?”

“This food is so lovely,” Edelgard said. She halfheartedly took a forkful of pheasant and eggs and chewed and swallowed it as best she could. “But it would be lovelier if… well, if I could share it with my friends.”

“Your friends abandoned you, my dear. They turned their backs on everything that was precious to them to pursue the whims of a madman.”

“Not _those_ friends,” she said. “I know Hubert and Ferdinand must be worried about me. And there are the rest of the Black Eagles who must be as well—Dorothea and Petra, or Caspar and Linhardt. It might be nice if I could leave this room and see them, or merely if they could come here—”

“Looking the way you do? I’m afraid you cannot. The world is a cruel place to us, and as long as you cannot hide your wonderful new shape, you are better off in here. If humans knew what we truly were, then the only value we would have to them is what horrible tools they could fashion from our bones and our hearts.” Rhea sighed. “More of my brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, were killed for their horns alone than I care to count. A handful of metatarsals, a scapula here, a femur there, the occasional spine or jawbone, the rest discarded… Long ago, they called our bones umbral steel. The last thing I want is to see you made into a weapon, Edelgard.”

Edelgard suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. Still, though, Rhea’s words sparked something within her. A recollection. _Umbral steel._ The metal that composed each and every Heroes’ Relic. She had always thought their designs had seemed eerily organic, and she’d noticed the relics, even Aymr, often twitching and pulsating as though they had minds of their own. _That_ was what they had been built from? And that meant the Crest Stones had to be some part of Nabatean biology as well. The heart, perhaps, judging from how Seteth and Vual both spoke of it.

A slow and chilling horror wormed its way into her mind. She’d always been unnerved by those relics, but now more so than she’d ever been since the day she had seen one consume its wielder alive. Those things were more ghoulish and ghastly than she had thought.

“I see you understand,” Rhea said.

“Does that mean the Sword of the Creator is Sothis’…”

“A segment of her spine,” Rhea murmured. She set down her fork and knife. It seemed she no longer had an appetite either.

“Then Nemesis was not granted it as a boon from the Goddess.” Edelgard had figured as much long ago.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the impact of Rhea’s fists against the table. The plates and silverware rattled violently. _“He was not!”_ she snarled, flecks of spittle flying from her mouth. _“He stole it like the thief he was, just like your traitorous former professor!”_

She looked down at the table. Her fists had left splintered craters in the table’s polished mahogany surface. “I… Forgive me, my child. I hope I did not… frighten you unduly.”

“No, I’m just… confused,” Edelgard said. “I thought Nemesis was a hero who became corrupted by his power. But if he obtained the sword through such means, then was he never a hero at all?”

Rhea sank back into her chair. “I would rather not discuss such morbid topics over dinner, my child.”

“I understand.” Edelgard went back to forcing herself to eat.

They both picked at their food now; even Rhea could no longer project a placid demeanor. Edelgard reflected on what she knew. Most of her knowledge of the true history of Fódlan had come not from Thales and Solon, from whom she had taken their mad ravings with not a grain but an entire shaker of salt, but from the document that had been passed down through the Hresvelg line from emperor to emperor from Wilhelm I himself. That document had described the conflict between Seiros and Nemesis as a minor dispute that had spiraled out of control (doubtless with the Agarthans egging on one or both sides) to become a continent-spanning war. Whatever means by which Nemesis had come to possess the heart and a fragment of Sothis’ skeleton, though, it could not possibly have been a _minor dispute._

But why would Wilhelm have hidden that? As close as they apparently had been, had Rhea kept the truth even from him?

“I am sorry you cannot see your friends. It is just that… humans cannot be trusted,” Rhea said with a sigh. “I have learned that painful lesson so many times over. I have seen so many of my siblings and their children slaughtered like cattle. The humans they looked after and nurtured with such kindness and attention turned against them so swiftly and so easily… You need to start preparing yourself to be disappointed by them. Again and again, again and again and again…”

Edelgard decided that she couldn’t take anything Rhea told her at face value, either. Whatever sins Nemesis had committed, she couldn’t so readily accept Rhea’s words as the gospel truth, if only because it was Rhea. Perhaps Seteth’s testimony would be more trustworthy, if only slightly so.

“Do you truly think so little of humanity? You don’t value human life at all, then?” she asked Rhea, remembering for a moment the fury that had coursed through her when she had said those words to her in Fhirdiad.

“Edelgard, I am over two thousand years old. I was the last child born to Mother before she entered her great slumber… a slumber that would be without end. I have seen humans come and go, generation after generation, with lives so short they seem to me a race of perpetual children from cradle to grave. It would take a thousand human lives or more to equal the experience of one adult Nabatean. I have seen humans at their best and at their worst, and at their worst they are capable of more than your worst nightmares can fathom. I do not want you to experience the depths of their depravity firsthand, so I simply ask that you trust me in my judgment.”

So Rhea really did see herself as a benevolent tyrant, just like all tyrants; her power and the authority of the church she had built were bulwarks against the worst humanity had to offer. But she had raised herself too far above humanity to understand them and judge the good against the bad. By her own admission humans were too small and insignificant for her to care about them.

“Is that why the Church of Seiros exists, then?” Edelgard asked.

“Yes. For our own protection. For we are but six: myself, Cichol and Cethleann, Macuil and Indech—wherever they may be—and, of course, our newest addition, _you.”_ Rhea managed a melancholic smile. “I built this church so that we would always have a place to hide.”

Edelgard was sickened. All the Church’s prohibitions made sense now in a new way. Their restrictions on literacy among commoners, their stifling of technological and cultural growth and the flow of information, their heavy stranglehold on culture and history. The lies about Nemesis and the Ten Elites. All designed to hide, to obfuscate the truth, not toward the end goal of making humans stupid, weak, and dependent—no, no, _that_ was a mere side effect. Rhea had condemned millions to unnecessary suffering under an unjust aristocracy built on religious dogma, millions of humans whose plight meant nothing to her, for a thousand years just to protect what little remained of her family. It was sickening even as much as it was sympathetic. Surely there had to have been a better way.

“There must be a whole world in which you could hide,” she mused. “Far away from humans.”

“But Fódlan is our home.” Rhea nudged the plate of saghert and cream toward Edelgard. “Here. Perhaps a sweet treat will lighten your mood.”

“I have not even finished dinner yet, and you want me to have dessert?”

“What troubles you so, child? Do you miss your friends that much?”

“Yes. Yes, Seiros. If I can just speak to them…”

“Edelgard. You are becoming a Nabatean, as I am certain Seteth has explained to you. You are going to live for a very long time. Humanity will pass you by. Best to distance yourself from them now and save yourself the heartbreak.”

“You regret falling in love with Wilhelm.” Edelgard leaned forward. “You… _did_ fall in love with him, did you not?”

“So insightful, my child,” Rhea said. “Yes… and the less of him I recall, the stronger my regret. I sometimes feel my only constant friends are the mountains. They have remained unchanged all my life, ever since Mother shaped them and returned life to their sterile peaks.”

“Do you really think I will live that long?”

“Of course. Your quickening is proceeding wonderfully. Soon, your body will be as ours entirely, and then Mother’s essence will begin to manifest within you. Then you will have everything she had—wisdom beyond compare, power without limit, life without end.”

Edelgard sighed. “But Seteth is worried this transformation might fail… that it might kill me.”

“He does not know what he is talking about. I assure you…”

“How do you know? Have you… done this before? Have you done it enough that you know it is safe? Seiros, I want to believe that everything will work out, but…” She sniffled and tried to will tears into her eyes. Usually she wasn’t so skilled at pretending to cry, but right now it was as simple as opening her mind to the pain in her shoulders she had been blocking out and letting it jab burning cold daggers into her bones. “I’m scared.” She was only partly lying.

“Oh. Oh… do not be frightened, my child.” Rhea stood up, circled the table, and helped her up to her feet. “Come with me.”

* * *

Their dinner forgotten, Rhea led Edelgard deep into the monastery, below ground, to a place she didn’t recognize. It was deeper than the catacombs, deeper than the hidden tunnels that comprised the so-called ‘Abyss,’ but not as deep as the Holy Tomb. It was a large, gloomy room that, while not hewn from the same eldritch jade as the tomb, was lit by luminous stone from that place with an eerie greenish tint. Arcane instruments with unfathomable purposes lined long workbenches.

Edelgard began to feel a frenetic hum fill her brain, like the noise from Vual’s radio—something that set her teeth on edge and made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Her tail twitched worriedly, ruffling its black plumage against the floor. Her breath kept catching in her throat. This place, these instruments… they all threatened to be equivalent to the impromptu laboratory the Agarthans had set up in the dungeons beneath the Imperial Palace.

Sensing her distress, Rhea briskly massaged her shoulders. “Have no fear, Edelgard. Nothing can hurt you here. I give you my word.”

Edelgard’s eyes focused on twelve simple black coffins lined up on the floor leading to a pit in the center of the room. Rhea led her past each one, opening their lids as she passed them by. Each coffin held a corpse so well-preserved that it might as well have been sleeping; each of the corpses had hair of varying shades of green and wore featureless white linen gowns, though the light made it hard to discern. The first coffin’s occupant looked like a life-sized porcelain doll: her skin was just as smooth with not even a pore, let alone a single blemish or imperfection, and even her ears were featureless nubs. Each coffin’s occupant, though, looked slightly more human until the last one held a beautiful woman who, Edelgard realized, was the spitting image of Byleth save for the tumbling locks of slightly wavy forest-green hair that framed her face. Each of the twelve corpses had a gaping and bloodless hole in her chest, a yawning chasm where her heart should have been.

“These are all vessels of Sothis,” Rhea explained. “Over the past thousand years, I have tried again and again to create life that would welcome Mother’s spirit. Do not mourn for them—all with the exception of Sitri here, they were mindless beings. They had no thoughts or wills of their own… they were mentally akin to insects. And I took very good care of each of them from their first breaths to their last.”

_Sitri._

Byleth’s mother.

As she suppressed the urge to gag Edelgard wondered what Jeralt would think if he knew that Rhea had hidden the corpse of his beloved wife down here, having stolen her from her intended resting place.

Rhea led her onward to the pit, and in there Edelgard was met with further horrors. More doll-like corpses, all similar to the first of the vessels Rhea had made, filled its bottom. There were about a dozen, all of them sprouting in irregular patches horns, tails, claws and talons; some bearing fins and flippers, others elaborate crests upon their foreheads. Some were hardly changed at all; some were nearly completely inhuman.

“I used those empty vessels to test my methods,” Rhea explained. “Again, have no fear or sorrow, Edelgard. They were capable only of life and nothing more. You can see that the final subject quickened in its entirety, and that was how I know that you _will_ become a Nabatean. And beyond that, so much more…” She put her arm around Edelgard and gently stroked her cheek. “When I retrieve Mother’s heart, all will be made right. If only I had known the future, I would never have given it to to that stillborn thing in the first place, no matter how Sitri had pleaded… I would have rested all my hopes upon _you_ from the beginning.”

Edelgard realized, sickened, that _that stillborn thing_ referred to Byleth.

She stared into the corpse pit. No matter how many times Rhea told her that she had animated these constructs without minds, wills, or souls, she could only look at their blank faces—those who still had human faces at all—and see ghosts of her brothers and sisters, Lysithea’s siblings, all who had died senseless deaths in the pursuit of power… and of course, Byleth. Her pulse raced; her breathing became shallow and her lungs burned needily. She began to reflect once again on the terrible sight of the corpse of Sothis and imagined that thing pulling her toward itself as it had pulled Byleth and the Sword of the Creator, consuming her to become whole again, taking her blood and her heart as a sacrifice to complete itself and grant itself life. Did Rhea expect that outcome, or was she self-deluded to the point where she could only imagine everything working out exactly as it would in her rosiest fantasies where Edelgard would simply cleanly and bloodlessly _become_ Sothis?

“I know that Seteth wants me to put a stop to this,” Rhea mused. “But he does not understand. He was never close to Mother the way I was. He was several generations removed from her; to him, she was as distant as Wilhelm was to you. If it had been Eithlionn I wished to resurrect, he would understand. If he had lost Flayn… someone who meant the world to him… he would understand.”

Edelgard saw tears well up in her green eyes and roll down her cheeks, and her fear subsided just a little, if only so that a flash of indignant anger could take its place for a moment. _Tears?_ Was _she_ of all people weeping for the lives she had created only to destroy?

“Mother was so _good_ at creating life,” Rhea choked out, holding Edelgard closer and tightening her grip. “She did it so _effortlessly._ She bore so many of us. I was just barely old enough to know reason when I saw her restore the plants and animals of this blighted land from memory with just a snap of her fingers. And yet all I can do is _this._ I, the last daughter of Sothis, have only ever made one human with a mind and soul of her own, and she was so sickly and weak… Why, Mother, did you die and leave a useless wretch like me behind to carry out your work in your stead?”

Edelgard was beginning to feel lightheaded. Her breath was no longer coming to her. Her vision began to darken, the one eye of hers that always ached so intensely when she feared for her life cried out, and the tableau of the dead laid out before her seemed to swirl and roil like a boiling pot of water, her failing eyesight making the corpses seem to writhe in agony. Rhea’s voice only grew more and more distant as the world became darker and quieter, and before Edelgard lost consciousness entirely she felt the pain spike and something tear its way out from within her, bursting out of her back and unfurling to terrible lengths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 


End file.
